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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#361

Post by mattacular »

mrtksn wrote: post #46
herobird wrote: post #17

It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.

The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come. Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and…

> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken,

Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#362

Post by bambax »

austhrow743 wrote: post #36
dom96 wrote: post #6

Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?

Their Google dependency is their existential problem. They're limited by what they can do with "making Firefox better" while effectively being a client state. An off the books Google department. Doomed to forever being a worse funded Chrome because they can't do too much to anger their patron. By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point whe…

Yeah but is this entirely true though? It seems Google pays FF just for existing, to protect them from antitrust litigation (or what's left of it); so Google can't really stop paying FF and can't try to kill it, as its death would be extremely counter productive. FF may be freer than it thinks.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#363

Post by [deleted] »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #308
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #42

Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left wi…

> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon. > They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would st…

[deleted]

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#364

Post by esperent »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #308
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #42

Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left wi…

> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon. > They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would st…

40% of Firefox users use addons.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#366

Post by vanviegen »

arnaudsm wrote: post #328

There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y? The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture. If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20G…

> There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#367

Post by clippyplz »

g947o wrote: post #330
PurpleRamen wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon. > They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would st…

> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon. Source?

I looked up "firefox addon usage" and this was the second result https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

> over 40% of Firefox users have at least 1 installed add-on

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#368

Post by DesiLurker »

throwfaraway135 wrote: post #253

Mozilla CEO compensations 2018: $2,458,350 2020: Over $3 million 2021: $5,591,406. 2022: $6,903,089. 2023: ~$7m Mozilla declined to detail the CEO's salaries for 2024+

they are open source company, how can they decline to state? this is absurd, even regular companies do it.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#369

Post by mattbee »

herobird wrote: post #17

It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.

And users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#370

Post by tziki »

lxgr wrote: post #41

>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M US…

"Uncharitable interpretation" is putting it mildly. I don't know the context for the quote but imagine being the CEO. You might give one hour interview outlining the tradeoffs you need to do to keep things running, and a random blogger takes a 5 second clip, makes an absurd interpretation and ends up on hackernews.
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