Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

ghacks.net

81–90 of 154 posts

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from your comment, it sounds like the only bugs you filed are "YOU CHANGED THIS AND BROKE ME CHANGE THIS BACK NOW" kind of bugs, and probably for things that were consciously and intentionally done. That's not going to go anywhere because, quite frankly, they're not bugs, and most of the bug filers/commenters are unwilling to do anything constructive, like offer to maintain something. My experience has been,…

Well maybe you should not judge from comments then. Reporting bugs and HN discussion is obviously not the same, at all. I know how to make bug reports and have not had bad experience like those on mozilla's bugzilla anywhere else, well maybe on gnome bugzilla and occasionally here and there because over 20 years of reporting bugs you are deemed to have the occasional bad experience. I'm not saying your experience was…

The bug reports you linked elsewhere are not bug reports--note that I make a distinction between bug reports and feature implementation requests. For feature implementation requests, demanding that developers drop everything to implement features is absolutely not constructive (and yes, that does happen). Even for bug reports, shouting at increasingly shrill intervals is not constructive. I'll admit that I did it once when I was younger, and when I was finally pissed off enough to try to fix it myself... I found out that it was far more complex than I had thought.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ, I wish they would not remove the previous interface when introducing a new one and offer the user the freedom to choose the one she prefers. This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox: depriving the user of the freedom to choose and forcing change upon them. This constant interface change is affecting many of the older people for whom I provide technical support. They all relied on class…

> This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox Looking at this page, you seem to have more than one ...

Yes I do, accumulation over time.

Though most of the other I have are mostly affecting only me and my personal life. This one is affecting my professional life in a significant way as I have spent years pushing firefox to my clients cross platforms as a champion and good example of floss, and each of these changes not only impact my credibility with my clients but significantly increase support requests in a limited time period. I'm also deeply unhappy about this particular one because I witness first hand how it impacts the daily life of people have a hard time dealing with computers (older people, handicapped kids or all kind of computer illiterate people) and robs the of their confidence and freedom to use their computer. I have a hard time dealing with these inconsiderate short sighted decisions as if everyone lived in California was breathing tech.

This mozillazine comment sums it up better that I could : "Mozilla devs are making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum." and I cannot agree more with it.

I do have other major gripes but these are only towards mozilla not firefox. I actually thing that mozilla disappearing would be possible of the best thing to happen to firefox, without the arguably stupid decision making at the top firefox could be a top notch browser, or could have been sadly.

It's hard to argue that Mozilla has not mismanaged firefox when the former mozilla CTO says so in a blog post where he also mentions that mozilla head of marketing uses google chrome everyday.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#83

I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla, but I am still grateful for the work they do. It's nice to see that they have such a big resource pool to work with, as they are one of the few groups that I think genuinely cares for it's users. It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

I think quite the opposite that they do not care for their users and blatantly disregard user feedback and users. From experience after having repeatedly told that I'm not significant/worthy enough for a variety of reasons for not using windows, not using gnome, not using pulseaudio, working with older people who have a hard time dealing with computers, having a use for disabling javascript, disabling spying telemetr…

I’m sad you have been downvoted so badly. Whilst I disagree largely, these criticisms are valid.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#84

I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla, but I am still grateful for the work they do. It's nice to see that they have such a big resource pool to work with, as they are one of the few groups that I think genuinely cares for it's users. It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

Chrome needs at least some kind of a fragment of competition to keep them from stagnating. Lord knows neither of the other two (Safari and Edge) are even close enough to threaten.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#85
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice logic but somehow it fails short of explaining why they are paying much more, from several tens of millions to several hundreds of millions, for a service that has lost a lot of steam, from 33% of market share at peak to 6% at the moment. How could that be a sound business transaction ? Then again your saying "one of your customers" as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since…

> as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning. This is not true, Yahoo has been their partner the last few years.

I suppose there is a depressing number of people that don't change shitty browser defaults to the better option.

It's staggering to me how that is a thing, but I routinely see people stung by the same malware attacks over and over, and they don't realize that streaming TV on sketchy sites and watching weird porn on an unsecured browser is like licking a gangrenous wound.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is they should have shown a cash flow statement.

You don't need a cash flow statement to show revenue. And if the cash flow statement is prepared using the indirect method (start with net profit, and adjust non-cash items) it may not even show revenue at all.

You don't, but it works a hell of a lot better than a subset of a balance sheet at a single point in time.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#87

"Mozilla ditched Yahoo recently however in favor of Google, two years before the five year contract would be up for renewal. The terms of the new deal with Google have not been revealed yet, and it remains to be seen whether this new deal will give Mozilla's revenue another boost in 2017." Apparently Firefox 57 when it is installed tries to switch the users default search engine to Google. Whether it asks for user pe…

I'm not privy to the search deal, but my understanding is that this is driven by our internal user research and metrics, which show that a significant number of users have a search engine other than what they prefer or expect. In these cases, users usually choose to directly navigate to their preferred search engine to search, instead of using Firefox access points. That’s a poor user experience, so our focus here is on ensuring users have the defaults they want.

The decision tree is roughly:

1. If the custom engine is one of our default options, keep it.

2. If the custom engine was set by an add-on, keep it.

3. If the custom engine uses HTTPS, prompt the user to actively choose by opening about:searchreset, and do not prompt again after the user has made a choice.

4. If the custom engine uses insecure HTTP, silently reset to the default.

You can open about:searchreset yourself to see what the prompt looks like.

Code at https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a928be5dacc3b544...

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#88

I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla, but I am still grateful for the work they do. It's nice to see that they have such a big resource pool to work with, as they are one of the few groups that I think genuinely cares for it's users. It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

Chrome needs at least some kind of a fragment of competition to keep them from stagnating. Lord knows neither of the other two (Safari and Edge) are even close enough to threaten.

I don't think stagnating is the risk with Chrome; I think Chrome running too far ahead and shipping things with only high-level buy-in from vendors (but no review of detail, or any plan to implement soon) is a much bigger risk.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#89
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning. This is not true, Yahoo has been their partner the last few years.

You're missing part of the picture here. Yahoo has been the default engine in firefox... for the US market. it was still google everywhere else in the world except Russia where they went with yandex. Mozilla got a lot of flak in Europe for not replacing google in the part of the world that mattered the most , where they have the most market share and where there is a good local alternative that actually respect priva…

No, you're still missing most of the picture. Mozilla didn't get paid for Google being the default outside of the US, China and Russia when it made Yahoo the default in the US. Mozilla had a global deal with Google and that expired. Bottomline is, most of Mozilla's 2016 revenue came from Yahoo.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ, I wish they would not remove the previous interface when introducing a new one and offer the user the freedom to choose the one she prefers. This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox: depriving the user of the freedom to choose and forcing change upon them. This constant interface change is affecting many of the older people for whom I provide technical support. They all relied on class…

> This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox Looking at this page, you seem to have more than one ...

Right now there are 81 comments in this thread and bigbugbag has written 18 of them.
Post reply on HN