Dear Mozilla, you're practically drowning in money, so do something with it. Like, have Firefox on Android support creating home screen borderless widgets with any webpage. Oh, but Google isn't going to like it. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, I get it.
Would you mind supplying a source supporting that they’re drowning in money? Developing a browser on the functionality of chrome (especially in terms of security) is crazy imo, especially with a different engine. Sincere question btw, as far as I know they’re “non-profit” but they get a good bit of hate. I love the browser due to the customization/flags it offers while being up to date in terms of security. I haven’t…
Not really. Market share has been in a 12 year(!) non-stop decline: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...
And yet the value of the search partnerships seems relatively stable. Probably because Google wants to avoid regulatory pressure. Google could destroy Mozilla today, but won't. $0.5B is pocket change for Google in comparison to the $20B they wire to Apple for being the default search engine.
Still, getting $0.5B whilst failing and being shielded from market forces that other companies face is a luxury position. Mozilla would be long out of business if it was an actual business. There's also very few NGO-type of organizations with this type of generous funding.
Can this $0.5B be used to recover market share for Firefox? No. It's not an engineering problem. Safari wins because it has no competition on iOS. Chrome wins because it's shipped as a default on Android and Google uses platforms with billions of users to push it (Youtube, Gmail, etc). Mozilla does not have this "browser push" capability. And even if they would have that, they're unlikely to out-engineer the giants. Having your own browser engine is not a competitive advantage, as Microsoft learned.
Hence, Firefox is in a "keeping the lights on" mode whilst Mozilla tries to invest in other things. Such as upping the pay of failing executives, writing activist blogs, puzzling acquisitions that don't make any money (Pocket?), and they're even cocky enough to give away money in the form of grants.
They're used to easy and free money. To be able to constantly fail without much consequence. To be able to work on things with no impact.
I do want to end on a more constructive note. The way I see it, the world lacks a model for funding our digital common goods. W3C, ICANN, Mozilla (Firefox, MDN, the like) but also regulatory bodies (i.e. privacy) can be considered shared infrastructure. In the bigger picture they cost pennies to fund so it's quite pathetic that as a world we can't even organize that.