cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/46655413
The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”
That’ll certainly make it easier to pay the CEO.
Their question is: how much would you pay for not using a Chromium based browser?
People switching to the browser and zapping all ads, demanding open source and vitriol for any kind of monetization. How can they survive? They would have to become a subsidized utility, which not even the Internet as a whole has achieved.
I get not wanting to use a google, microsoft or crypto laden browser, but I would be willing to use a well supported browser that used chromium as the page rendering engine. It seems to be extremely difficult to get another engine to be competitive in the marketplace. Maybe the resources would be better spent putting the chromium engine inside a different container. I’m sure there would be drawbacks, but I think there would be compatibility benefits too.
used chromium as the page rendering engine.
I believe WebKit is Chromium’s rendering engine, as is Gecko for Firefox.
Opera used to have their own but now they’re just rebranded Chromium.
There was a poll a while back on mastodon and the majority answered they’d be ok with 5$/year to support Firefox.
The kind of people you find on Mastodon following Firefox news are not the same as the average person. They are a bubble.
A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.
A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.
…people or dollars? ‘Cos i don’t think “hundreds of millions” of people are chippin’ in, it’s Google that’s financing “hundreds of millions” of dollars…
But yeah, that target audience is a bubble, normies don’t care.
Dollars.
Google is giving hundreds of millions because they fear regulators getting involved.
A handful of people who follow Mozilla on Mastodon saying they’re willing to pay up to a meagre $5 per year won’t do anything.
I wouldn’t mind paying money for a good browser. I paid for Opera back in the day, and browsers are significantly more complex (and cost several orders of magnitude more to develop) now compared to back then.
God bean counters ruin everything good related to tech
wouldn’t it be nice if the profit motive wasn’t the only driving force of the economy?
Everytime I see comments regarding Mozilla’'s financials,I have the same effing question: How does a company like brave or opera maintain their browser ?? AFAIK both don’t have the level of community backing that Mozilla does nor do they have any (again AFAIK) agreement with a company like google for default search engine placement
BTW, about Opera - the newest events with OpenAI and other stuff and Winamp devs not being prosecuted for GPL violations all lead me to one thought.
Are leaked Presto sources really-really illegal to use?
They use chromium.
Firefox does not.
The grand majority of software engineering effort goes into the browser development that they never have to work on for the most part.
Brave just tries to scam their users for money.
Like when they added “donate to the content creator” links on YouTube and such, then didn’t actually give the money to the content creators.
Alongside what the other guy said, Opera definitely does have search engine deals, idk about brave since they launched their own. But brave has their own private advertising system
Brave and Opera are both forks of Chromium that incorporate upstream changes. Firefox is an entire browser.
Fair enough. Didn’t think that maintaining the engine is what Mozilla spends majority of it’s Firefox budget on
The grand majority of Mozilla’s spending is for engineers.
those are just rebranded chrome(ium). all browsers except firefox and safari are rebranded chromium or firefox. edit: there are some other projects but none are mature.
Apple also maintains their own browser engine, but that’s Apple.
yes, safari is apple.
Ah, I guess I read over the first bit to where you mentioned the rebrands, which didn’t include Safari.
To still add some useful information: all browsers on iOS are rebranded Safari, because Apple only permits their own browser engine.
(The EU ruling may change this, however)
Did the CEO take a pay cut?
does a bear shit in your mouth?
Depends… will it generate shareholder value?
Only if it wants too
Okay I’ll learn how to make better coffee
Damn bro, you didn’t have to roast yourself that hard
Come on over, I’ll put on a pot of
bear shitcoffee and see if you disagreeRoast the bean counters instead.
Are you going to tell him “no?”
Only if he stops.
Why the heck did Mozilla need 120 employees for anyway? I hate that Firefox is updated so often because I always get Firefox Update Fatigue. I hope that fewer employees means fewer Firefox updates.
Just turn the updates off. Might want to remove the seatbelts from your car too, so annoying having to put them on and take them off every time you need to drive somewhere.
Doesn’t work. Firefox keeps nagging me to update every freaking time I open the browser. Now if they let me turn the nagging off it wouldn’t be so bad.
I want an update once per quarter, not once per week. Only more often than that if there is a critical security fix.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/desktop-esr/
Here you go brother. Hope this helps.
How does that help with unwanted update nagging?
You will get one update per year, and “only more often that that if there is a critical security fix”.
There’s no winning. Some people use the regular version and complain about the updates, while others use the ESR release and complain that sites that use cutting-edge features don’t work properly.
The solution to updates is to use Linux, since then it’ll update through your distro’s package manager along with your other software.
Chrome does this just fine on windows. It just updates in the background so the only thing you need to do is (re)open chrome and it’s done. Firefox doesn’t, and waits until you try to launch it to update. On my laptop where I use FF infrequently makes it’s startup time about 30 seconds basically every time I open it.
Well this is a unique take. But don’t worry, there’s a Firefox for you, too. Try the ESR, or Extended Support Release, it
receives major updates on average every 52 weeks with minor updates such as crash fixes, security fixes and policy updates as needed, but at least every four weeks.
lol what?
This is not even about Firefox, you griefer.
Gee, I can’t imagine why they chose to drop this bomb today.
It’s like they wanted it to be drowned in other news.
It’s Mozilla. No one is going to see this anyway.
I’m seeing it
Why, what else happened today?
Tap for spoiler
/s
I brought it up with my family, my tech friends and coworkers and half the them just blankly stared at like I didn’t know what was happening. Both are important, one more than the other though.
GODDAMMIT MOZILLA. YOU ARE MAKING ADVOCATING FOR BETTER INTERNET HARD
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s much Mozilla can do other than cut costs with it seeming like the Google funding will be getting severely hampered.
They can’t get money from thin air.
This is more of a symptom the cause is the monopolization of the internet largely by Google
On mobile, search Google for “election” and then try to zoom in on any state.
CEO first please. He’s not worth it
Getting rid of the advocacy part. That’s…not good.
So what does that mean in layman’s terms? They’re not going to have as much of a voice to sway heads about things like open internet, the flaws of copyright, the problems with privacy and surveillance.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the US Department of Justice is going to succeed in their antitrust efforts against Google. Currently, Mozilla gets something like 85% of their funding from Google for being the default search engine in Firefox. That may be deemed anticompetitive behavior by a judge, at which point Mozilla will be left with very little funding compared to their current situation.
I’d bet these actions are in anticipation of that happening.
Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.
There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.
WTF. They had $1b banked a few days ago. This is a bit reactionary perhaps?
well you see. all the cool kids are laying off staff and Mozilla wants to hang out at their pool next summer.
They’re likely preparing for their funding from Google to be cut. Having a lot of money in the bank doesn’t matter if your income is lower than expenses, since you’ll run out of money eventually.
Expecting millions to be cut is still extreme when you have a fucking billion in the bank.
They get around $500 million per year from Google, so $1 billion is just two years worth of that. 86% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from that Google deal.
I suspect their financial position has changed. Perhaps Google’s being found as a monopoly has made them decide not to help fund Mozilla’s efforts as substantially.
Ashley Boyd lead the advocacy team, here’s the kind of stuff they were doing:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-welcomes-ashley-boyd-vp-of-advocacy/
In fall of 2016, Mozilla fought for common-sense copyright reform in the EU, creating public education media that engaged over one million citizens and sending hundreds of rebellious selfies to EU Parliament. Earlier in 2016, Mozilla launched a public education campaign around encryption and emerged as a staunch ally of Apple in the company’s clash with the FBI. Mozilla has also fought for mass surveillance reform, net neutrality and data retention reform.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/05/mozilla-foundation-lays-off-30-staff-drops-advocacy-division/
“The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” read the statement shared with TechCrunch.
Reading between the lines, I’d keep an eye on them collecting your data and consider one of the privacy-focused forks.
Hundreds of selfies? Let’s go ahead and strike that vein bullshit from the record.
consider one of the privacy-focused forks
The Foundation is not linked to Firefox.
If by not linked you mean wholly owned by…
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/organizations/
The Mozilla Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, works with the community to develop software that advances Mozilla’s principles. This includes the Firefox browser, which is well recognized as a market leader in security, privacy and language localization. These features make the Internet safer and more accessible.
Wait they still had employees?
Regardless, don’t use chrome.
If Mozilla does become defunct, it does raise the question of whether Chrome would be considered a Google monopoly, and therefore subject to antitrust legislation.
I can’t imagine any governments would look kindly upon internet access being guarded behind a single company’s product.
Google should be subject to antitrust legislation regardless.
Their position as a monopoly is what enables this.
The firefox browser could exist without quite a lot Mozilla does. A large chunk of its cash isn’t spent on the browser.
There is a new browser based on WebKit (safari), called Orion that looks promising. However, it’s only on macOS and iOS at this point. Hopefully Linux and Android will be a consideration at some point.
Chrome’s engine was originally forked from WebKit. That makes them too similar (even years later) for WebKit to count as a real alternative.
The point is to leave a google controlled ecosystem… which means it counts as a valid alternative. What would you suggest besides chromium and gecko?
w3m
Haha. So I really do wish that all websites had a text version, or like markdown. Can you imagine how damn speedy things would be? Every website would have the same layout. As much as I appreciate good web design, there’s a lot of bad UI choices out there.
I strongly disagree with this. In practice, supporting chrome does not imply supporting safari and vice versa. In particular, Safari is much, much slower about adopting new web technologies. Google basically implements support for anything they can think up, Apple waits for it become a ratified standard and then implements it only if they want to. Their JavaScript implementations are also completely different.
deleted by creator
There’s also a new browser based on Firefox/Gecko called Zen. There’s way too many browsers based on Webkit or Blink.
Zen has less frequent security updates. But yes zen is a good gecko alternative.
zen integrates every upstream change a few hours after release, it is built as a set of patch on top of firefox just to make that easy
Hmm. Well, I’ll have to give it a go. Thanks.
Splitting Chrome from Google wouldn’t make Chrome not a monopoly, though, right?
The split might leave a monopoly still, if it’s the only major browser.
It would be a lot easier to compete with though, since Google couldn’t treat it as a loss leader that still bring them in search revenue by default.
They could try to employ some kind of Apple defense, like, you wouldn’t hit Apple for having monopoly on iOS. As long as it’s not the only solution on the market. And for web, most of time, you could access the same resources and get similar experience by downloading… the apps… wait, they have a monopoly on that, too. Well, they are completely screwed in that case.
I can’t imagine any governments would look kindly upon internet access being guarded behind a single company’s product.
laughs in 2001
I’ll just use Safari
With privacy extensions…
We’ll go back to gopher if we have to, it’s time for burning chrome.
Also, Ladybird is looking very promising, so in a few years we should have a true fourth browser engine.
lynx ftw
Let’s just separate GOOG from Chrome / Chromium and Google Search completely. So that the direction of the most used browser, most used search engine and the biggest advertiser don’t circle jerk each other.
I’ve moved to Vivaldi recently and it’s been refreshingly not-suck.
That’s good. Are you happy with the built-in privacy, or do you find extensions are needed?
I’d still argue it’s chromium.
If this Firefox trend continues, then we won’t really have a choice in the matter anymore.
You’d sacrifice your privacy because of layoffs?
No, because there won’t be anything but Chrome.
WebKit based browsers don’t support google!
And websites don’t support Webkit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Like which ones?
