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Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

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Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#341

Post by ItsBob »

summerlight wrote: post #179
ItsBob wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do some back-of-a-napkin maths here and see if we could... Just for fun of course :D === ANNUAL COSTS === 20 developers at $150k each = $3M Other staff costs, like pensions etc. = $1.5M Someone in charge of overall project = $250k (this doesn't have to be the case. He could easily be a dev on $150k but lets run with it) Infrastructure for testing and whatnot. Lets say Azure (expensive!) = $1M 2 x Marketing peep…

> 20 developers at $150k each = $3M It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which…

$250k is a staggering salary... not everyone lives in San Francisco. Or America for that matter.

The guys I work with are on about £95k and the good ones are very good.

I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc. (oh, and being left alone by interfering management!)

I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.

Anyway, this was all just a bit of fun :)

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#342

Post by amrocha »

alberth wrote: post #156
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #27

Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case. Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]: > Expenses 1. Program 'Software Development' 2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M 2. Management 'General and Administrative' : 2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses. Let's ignore inflation and COL and…

I know your intention is probably well placed but we do though need to factor in revenues: Year Revenue ---- ------- 2007 $75M 2023 $653M I bring this up because G&A of big companies (in general) always outpaces R&D once they hit scale ... and in an ideal situation - your revenues should outpace R&D expense because you're getting economies of scale (which further dilutes the R&D to Other Business Function comparison)…

I agree with up that you have to take revenue into account as well. However, as an NPO Mozilla has no mandate to grow at all costs.

What’s the benefit of having Mozilla be this huge? How does it compare to the risk of shutting down if their revenue dries up, which is looking like a possibility?

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#343

Post by aragilar »

kevingadd wrote: post #139
aragilar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how sync for firefox isn't part of focusing on firefox?

I've seen people argue that Mozilla shouldn't be offering cloud services and should just build a browser that never phones home to any servers at all, whether it's telemetry, automated updates, or profiles. I think all of those are part of shipping a modern browser, personally. Maintaining all those cloud services raises your company's operational costs a lot, you now need people on-call 24/7 to maintain everything,…

Which cloud services? I don't see how automated updates nor sync count as "cloud services" (and I'll note that the sync server used to be open source, so you could pull from the community like Mozilla claims to be part of).

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#344

Post by jhasse »

matsemann wrote: post #315
raincole wrote: post #24

So who are going to fund them? Sorry for being cynical, but this "petition" sounds like telling depressed people to "just be more positive." Sure, just find more revenue streams. Just be sustainable. It's so easy!

And every time they try to get an alternate revenue stream, someone on HN will then shout "just focus on the browser!!". Mozilla can't please the crowd no matter what they do.

They could try just focussing on the browser.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#345

Post by janalsncm »

econ wrote: post #289
afavour wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is my takeaway as well. Folks in this discussion are saying “why can’t Mozilla just focus on making Firefox” and my response would be “because that’s the path to eventual death”. Firefox is, what, 3% of the browser market today? It isn’t because it’s a bad browser. It’s because people are using OSes with tightly integrated browsers they never think to change. Making Firefox faster or adding vertical tabs o…

The thing I think will bring in users is search. Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links. The easy Google money makes it unattractive. It will take some time for enough users to be blown away by how useful this is. I wrote a simple user script one time that subscribes me to all discoverable rss feeds I run into while browsing. It seemed rather random but I was blown…

> Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links

I’ve built something similar myself. It’s quite annoying that the browser only saves like 3 months of history.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#346

Post by bad_user »

autoexec wrote: post #13

> Now is the time for Mozilla to take bold steps to reinforce its identity as a privacy-centric nonprofit Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model was to sell reports about the internet browsing habits of firefox users to advertisers. The problem was never Mozilla's dependence Google. The problem is their dependence on the surveillance of internet users. As far as I know Mo…

> Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model...

I hope you realize that happened in 2006.

Recent developments can only improve the situation, actually, if it makes Mozilla more independent.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#347

Post by Raed667 »

fabrice_d wrote: post #222
Raed667 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how common this sentiment is, but I had a discussions with colleges who will NOT donate unless they can guarantee that their money is going to the development of a chosen product or even more granularity to a chosen feature.

Then they should pool funds to pay consulting companies like Igalia to implement these features.

I think it is more up to Mozilla to put its act together and implement more transparency. So that people start trusting the organization not to waste their donations on executive salaries.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#348

Post by hofrogs »

Hyperboreanal wrote: post #330
matsemann wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as Firefox isn't kicking ass and being used by, say, 20% of web users, I argue that Mozilla shouldn't be doing anything else (...) I have a problem with Mozilla doing events right now Consider it marketing, and think about if the market share would have been even lower if they didn't do outreach. Most people don't select a browser based on technical merits (heck, they don't even consciously choose). Saying…

[flagged]

> nobody wants to ...

If you don't want something, don't think everyone else thinks the same as you. From my observations, if something is being called "woke", that means it's probably a good thing, actually.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#349

Post by JimDabell »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #65
notpushkin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better news are, Mozilla gets around $30 million as investment income ($37M in 2023 [1]). Some people argue that it’s not enough to maintain Firefox but that sounds weird to me. Chromium is not a good alternative: 95% of Chromium commits come from Google. [2] [1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi... [2]: https://chromiumstats.github.io/cr-stats/authors/company_aut...

Chromium is not a good alternative: 95% of Chromium commits come from Google. Or ... Chromium is the perfect alternative ... as long as it remains open source and privacy invasion can be easily stripped out of it. Let Google fund most of the development of a privacy respecting browser (i.e. Brave). And if it doesn't remain open source? Then it's time for a fork --- just like it is now with Firefox. Bottom line: If yo…

Chromium extends Google’s control over the web platform.

Google engineers write specs for new APIs. They get rejected by Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds. Google implements them anyway. Other Chromium-based browsers get these APIs as a result. Then they start popping up on sites showing Safari and Firefox “failing” to implement them. Then web developers ask why Safari and Firefox are so “behind” in implementing “web standards”.

This mechanism is how the web standards process is being subsumed into “whatever Google wants” instead of being a collaborative effort between multiple rendering engines. Google should not be able to unilaterally decide what is and isn’t a web standard.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#350

Post by bad_user »

culi wrote: post #301
rightbyte wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about not involving governments in how Firefox is run. Especially not those keen on backdoors and "Chat control". It could be a stand alone association ruled by its members or a classic free-for-all whatever goes code talks FOSS project.

They don't have to tell them how to run it. But it would be for the benefit of everyone if they could give grants to Mozilla to help them wean off of Google Mozilla has been less and less dependent on Google and is now working on a VPN, MDN Plus, and other revenue streams that are also helping it become more independent. But the truth is that if all Google money suddenly stopped today, there would be no more Mozilla

As a European citizen, why would I want my taxes to fund a browser built by a US entity and still subject to the whims of the current US administration?

Unless you mean that Mozilla should move completely to Europe, sure. But the part about the EU not telling Mozilla what to do is naive. If my taxes pay for it, of course I want the EU to tell Mozilla what to do.

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