Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by delusional » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #397

delusional wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like feminist AI conferences in Africa. According to their 2023 form 990 (the 2024 one isn't published yet) those sort of donations are usually on the order of 15k. You don't get much browser for that money.

15k is a sofware developer salary for over a quarter of a year in many parts of the world. That's actually quite a bit of browser.

That line of argument require there to be a line of competent and productive 3rd world developers ready outside the doors of Mozilla HQ. Not just productive developers either, they'd have to be entirely intrinsically motivated and self driven, preferably with projects lined up. They would of course also have to be completely at-will, at risk of being terminated after their quarter year contract. Anything less than that will cost more then the developer salary.

My argument, more directly, is that a developer is not just a salary. You need support staff, office space, capital, and actual work for them to do. You need to hire, manage, and tutor them. Comparing developer salaries to money spent on one-time goodwill activities is ridiculous. Internal billing at enterprise corps usually estimate two times salary for "real cost", but that still assumes you're actually holding that cost against a tangible planned project.

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

#452

Post by wkat4242 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

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…

Why can't you get away from marketing a free product?

But yeah that ratio is totally off. Paying the CEO 7 million also won't help.

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

#453

Post by wkat4242 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #351

alberth wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Again not diminishing Firefox's efforts but it's difficult not to compare with other _leaner_ open-source projects. As an example the Linux foundation [0] had 270M in expenses in 2023. Of which even we aggregate international operations and corporate operations the expenditure is less than 21M in G&A equivalent activities. [0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/lf_annualrepor...

The Linux Foundation is a bunch of corporate suits trying to steer Linux into their business interests. It doesn't have anything to do with the development really.

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

#454

Post by wkat4242 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:29 PM UTC

dralley wrote: post #226

timewizard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Mozilla a non-profit though? Why does mozilla.ai exist? Didn't we like a trust the product more in 2007 than we do now? I mean, yay for scale, but haven't we lost something here?

> Why does mozilla.ai exist? AI threatens both browsers and search engines, is why. Apple, Google and Microsoft all have their own efforts. Mozilla working on local-first AI isn't a bad idea.

I already have this working on firefox. They have an openai integration but I point this to my own server.

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

#455

Post by summerlight » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

ItsBob wrote: post #341

summerlight wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

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

Still you need to spend at least $250K (which direct compensation would be close to $150K) to hire a competent browser dev. And I'm not speaking about SF... Well you can have better cost efficiency outside American metros, but the reality is that experienced browser devs are rare outside those areas.

> I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc.

Not objecting that disruptions can be done with a small focused team. But here we're talking about dealing with massive complexity, not an emerging market. You cannot "redefine" the problem here, the ecosystem is mess and we've got to live with it for a good time...

> 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.

You will be surprised to know how small the core engine parts are to the total code base. You may argue that most of those are not necessary and perhaps half of them are pretty much ad-hoc complexity but the rest have their own reason to exist. And the new browser engine developers typically learn this hard way then decides to fall back to Chromium. I've seen this several times.

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

#456

Post by throwaway48476 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #314

throwaway48476 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Container tabs is the most useful browser feature anywhere. Now if they would just add tab history tracking.

Their current market share is 3%. What do you think it will be once they add tab history tracking, and every other feature under the sun that you think their browser should have?

I use Firefox and I tell everyone in know about ublock.

If chrome is force divested the browser market is going to look very different.

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

#457

Post by vlad-roundabout » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #405

vlad-roundabout wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better than Brave is a "no-name" browser like Ungoogled Chromium made to protect actual privacy, not the interests of some company!

No thinly-modified version of Chromium is going to save us from Google having almost unilateral power over the implementation of web standards, creating a browser monoculture. None of these forks is making substantive changes to the browser engine; it's often just Chromium with a few configuration tweaks and cosmetic enhancements.

I agree a Firefox or WebKit browser would be better, but give me one.

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

#458

Post by ac29 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

> Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers

Chrome, Edge and Safari are all bigger than Firefox. But Firefox not in the top ten results? Unless you are counting different versions of browsers as unique entries, I cant imagine what other 7+ browsers are bigger than Firefox.

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

#459

Post by Hyperboreanal » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 1:36 AM UTC

iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

Firefox wins handily on the following:

- Sidebery (tree style vertical tabs)

- userChrome.css editing

- Stylus and all other manifest v2 extensions that Brave won't be developing custom replacements for

- Better performance with lots of tabs/windows

- Container tabs

Firefox is better for powerusers and those who like customization, Chrome is better for those who don't care about customization and just watch Netflix. Pretty much equivalent to the Android/iOS debate.

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

#460

Post by econ » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 3:38 AM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #437

account42 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good start would be to not delete old history without warning like Firefox does now.

Shame they hide the option to keep history forever in about:config. At least there are some add-ons to help set that. I can understand the default not keeping forever, for privacy, storage, and performance reasons.

If there is one thing users want without knowing it it is the long term accumulation of value.

Writing comments takes only slightly less effort than writing a draft for a book. The Twitter or facebook history, even our comments here quickly lose value. It all vanishes into the hole.

In contrast, i once ran into a geocities page created by a very elderly couple in the US about their vacations. They were old enough to tell the story about how the world changed over time from an appropriately mundane perspective. They probably died before I found the homepage. It was an oddly interesting read. In 100 years it would be truly marvelous.

If the software is there we could probably wrap the proverbial Richard Stallman's browser history into a product worth buying. It would be every bit as funny as it sounds.