I just saw a post complaining about the Mozilla layoffs.
I wanted to point out that the vast majority of their income (over 85% in 2022) is from having Google as the default search engine - Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
Expect things to get worse.
Please don’t assume it was just a cruel choice.
Mozilla does not look any reliable for people that loves FOSS, yet our current web seems like it’s either Firefox/Gecko or Chrome/Chromium browsers. I wish people were more aware of emergent projects like Servo or Ladybird - even better if they could donate to them. I’m positive either of them could be a serious competitor to the Chrome hegemony.
You are really underestimating the complexity of the task of building a web engine.
Another problem is that Chrome is already ubiquitous and most of the web sites are simply ignoring the Gecko and only optimise against Chromium.
Don’t get me wrong, I truly wish we had more completion and I hope those projects take off and with time become a viable alternative of Chromium but I am somehow doubtful.
You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.
If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don’t think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don’t do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome’s grasp on the web.
Because let’s face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don’t really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It’s because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they’ve taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).
They need to empower others to build the browser that they can’t. That’s what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.
Building a free (as in beer) engine for others to build great browsers on, is a pretty thankless task. Individuals may take pride in such a task, but for a company that needs to pay their staff, it’s a fruitless endeavor. I assume it’s much harder to earn money, if people are not using your software itself, but the forks that add all the cool stuff.
I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.
But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you’re predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn’t seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it’s only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.
Hold on, why are we talking about this like it’s something that’s not happening? There’s all kinds of forks of Firefox.
The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I’ve seen it done - if you’re familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn’t really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.
With Firefox, it’s practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The “forks” that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.
Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they’ve had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I’ve read, they’re struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it’s pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.
Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don’t have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can’t really implement it… unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.
That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don’t forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.
Webkit is the engine used by Safari (among a few others) and, though I think the project is controlled by Apple, it’s licensed LGPLv2.1 and BSD 2-Clause
According to the wiki, it’s also used in PlayStation, Kindle, Nintendo devices, and the Tizen mobile OS… Additionally, it’s apparently the rendering engine used by the default browsers provided by both the KDE and Gnome projects
Honestly, though, I want to see something that’s not part of the Mosaic or KHTML families be made and gain at least some foothold…I hate having the Internet basically controlled by one or two mega corporations.
I still wish Opera hadn’t abandoned Presto…
Okay, but khtml was part of KDE, so I guess it wasn’t developed by a company that needed to make money from it, was it?
And neither is chrome. Google doesn’t need it to create revenue. They need it to control the channel with which people access their main product - advertising on the web. And for that goal it is beneficial to have it as widespread as possible, even in the form of derivatives.
I suspect that they have ulterior motives
Rather than guessing at the motives of others, let’s remember Hanlon’s razor.
You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.
Okay, that’s an interesting point. I mean, there are forks galore of Firefox so I’m not entirely sure I understand. But certainly chromium-based browsers have been getting more traction.
But wasn’t the original point something about how hard it is to make a browser?
And if I have this right you’re suggesting that it would be achievable for Firefox to make an accessible browser tool kit but they’re not due to ulterior motives?
I’m not sure I understand that, either in terms of motive or just impractical terms what it is you think they’re doing to make it hard to develop.
Honestly, I would be fine with Blink being default if Google would divest it from themselves and make it an independent open source project that they just contribute to instead of control. They have far too much power with that one bit of tech to shape the Internet as we know it, along with a large chunk of computing that happens offline thanks to the growing ubiquity of node.js/Electron
And they’re actively using that control to restrict what we can even do with our own machines right now
Honestly I’ve been saying for some time that Mozilla’s resources would be much better spent making Firefox a soft fork of Chromium. Primarily: use the Blink browser engine and V8 JS engine, with only the changes to those that they deem absolutely necessary, and maintain a privacy-forward Chromium-based browser. Maybe try and enlist the help of Brave, Vivaldi, and other browsers that are currently Chromium but which prefer more privacy than Google offers.
It’s not zero effort, and especially as Google continues to develop Chromium with assumptions like the removal of Manifest V2 it might take some effort to maintain, but it cannot possibly be as much effort as maintaining an entire browser.
Honestly I’ve been saying for some time that Mozilla’s resources would be much better spent making Firefox a soft fork of Chromium
No no nonononono. The moment you do that you become at the mercy if whatever they choose to do, including changes that will sabotage you. There are examples out there such as Novell, who should have made a Linux-based client OS for the Netware architecture. For the longest time prior to a brief period where they had their server GUI (sloppy, inefficient and barely completed as it was) that you literally could not do any GUI-based configurations without a Windows client. How is that not begging for the competition to screw you every chance they get?
Firefox stands on its own and that’s how it needs to be.
They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works. If it changes in a way that breaks things for you, don’t pull that change. At that point, if the change is drastic enough to require it, you can turn that soft fork into a hard fork and hope that Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. join you; something that would significantly hamper Google’s ability to maintain their dominance of the browser engine market. That’s a choice that they simply don’t have today when being based on Firefox and Gecko means using an inferior browser platform.
Yyyyeeeah, all ideally. Things don’t always go ideally. Something will always happen. That’s the truth no matter what, and I’d think it’s best to eliminate externals as much as possible. That’s my position. No actual right or wrong here.
The point is that with open source you can effectively leech off of Google for now, while still retaining the flexibility to nope out and do your own thing at any point you decide.
Considering just how severely behind they are already (as I mentioned in my other comment, they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards or operating system features), I see anything they can do to reduce how much they need to maintain independently as a good thing. In an ideal world where they had all the funding and development power they could want I might say sticking with the completely independent Firefox would be great. But that just isn’t where they’re at today.
You can’t for a number of reasons. As other people have said this catastrophically underestimates the complexity of maintaining a code base for a browser.
they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards
I don’t even think that’s remotely true. My understanding is that it’s on the order of a few months to a year, and it relates to things that are negligible to the average end user. They are edge case things like experimental 3d rendering. The most significant one I can think of is Webp, but they resisted adoption for principled reasons relating to Google’s control over that format and aggressive pushing of it, which is a good thing not a bad thing, and an important example of how rushing to adopt new standards it’s not necessarily just a sign of browser health but also an anti-competitive practice intentionally pushed by companies that have money to throw around for that purpose.
They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works.
That’s how Chromium works.
Anyone can see the source, but it doesn’t mean that anyone’s code makes it into Chromium, because Google picks and chooses. Chromium has a “reviewer pool” of Google developers doing all the picking and choosing. Getting into the reviewer pool takes months to years of building up a contribution history and being vetted by the Google team.
They’re completely at the mercy of how Google integrates things like DRM, or web standards that Google wants to push, like a deeply integrated into the browser and actively maintained with little to no alternative. The engineering overhead of sustaining and increasingly complex fork of Chromium is unsustainable and unless you have the development capability to compete, Google controls the destiny of any chromium browser.
chrome enshitification made me switch back to firefox after 7ish years of using it as my daily driver and likewise was true for netscape.
those two previous experiences tell me that i need to start making preparations to switch away from firefox; but i can’t bring myself to do it because all of the other viable alternatives are chrome based. since google already has begun publicly enshitifying chrome further i think i’ll end up going with just about any other browser project that i can find and i think that these two are the two most likely candidates.
are you aware of any others?
Various websites suck in one browser or the other or simply don’t work in more than one single browser. We’re not that far away from the days when Internet Explorer (IE) was the only thing that loaded a site (often for something work-related… groan)
That said, if you need Chrom(e/ium) and want a non-data-sucking version, I think Ungoogled Chromium is your best bet currently.
For the Firefox side of things, there are already several forks that aim to do things differently/better. Floorp is one I see recommended regularly. There seem to be a larger number of Firefox forks focusing on security/privacy than Google forks, but this is the most well-regarded from my research.
Simultaneous post-enshittification from both Chrome/Chromium and Firefox is probably (hopefully) leading towards more active development/contribution to these (and other) forks!
Its in a very alpha state, but check out Zen browser. Based on Firefox, incredibly fast and customizable. Their github page: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop
Mozilla does not look any reliable
People keep saying this, but why? Because if it’s anything like what people have been saying in these Lemmy threads, good god.
Mozilla CEO is paid 7million a year. I don’t have the number for the rest of the board, but it should be in the same range. I think that when people say this was a cruel choice, they talk about firing people instead of decreasing executive salaries.
Corporate cuts should always start with the greatest fat that does the least work - the ones at the top.
Because if the company has found itself in a place where headcount needs to be reduced, these are the people who led it there and deserve all of the blame for hurting the company to that degree. Plus, you should always start cutting where you get the lowest volume of productive work for the greatest money spent, and that is always at the top.
They have enough cash reserves to last 3 years without any income. But 15% of income is Google free. If Google disappears, they will surely get an income hit, but someone else will gladly pay some price for that position, perhaps half of what Google is paying. People are really blowing this out of proportion.
I think you’re massively downplaying how much of a hit this will be.
Let’s say you make $100k/year. Think about the lifestyle it allows. You’ve just been informed that it’s now going part time, and you’ll only be making $15k/year. How far does that get you?
Now, you’re expecting someone else to pay for that advertising spot, so it won’t be that bad. But who is even eligible? Microsoft’s Bing is the obvious answer, and probably DDG. The rest of the default search engines aren’t even general web searches.
Do you really think that either of them are going to pay any significant amount to be the default? Especially when most people are going to change it back to Google anyway, since these are automatically people willing to change to a different browser?
Sure, they might be willing to pay something. But it won’t be anything close to what they had before.
Both Bing and Yahoo have outbid Google in certain countries in the past. There’s a new wave of AI powered startups with tons of venture capital. I could imagine them making sizable bids.
But I get what you mean. The main difference to your scenario is: search money will definitely not totally disappear, Mozilla has huge savings, and they can just finally pivot and focus on making a real premium offer that people would want to pay for.
Do you really think that either of them are going to pay any significant amount to be the default?
I can see Bing doing it. And Google is so far gone that it would probably be an improvement
Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
People are quick to assume this, and there’s a very good chance that they’re right, but I don’t think we should take it as a given. It’s always possible that there could be some sort of court decision that allows Google to keep funding Mozilla after the “breakup” is complete.
In any case, we don’t yet know what the outcome of the antitrust case will be, so I think it might be best to avoid making statements of certainty like this until we see how things really shake out.
We should definitely take the possibility of this happening very seriously though.
Found the one sane comment in this entire thread.
Google may or may not stop paying Mozilla as part of the antitrust scrutiny. I have no idea if there’s actual reporting to this effect, or any form of legal analysis suggesting this is the most plausible outcome. If anything, antitrust scrutiny might lead to this funding being more secure and more robust.
So this might not happen, but this whole threads carrying on like it’s a fait accompli.
Taking funding from your biggest competitor is a weird business choice.
Where should they be “taking” funding instead?
That’s the Mozilla paradox right there. A company like theirs cannot survive on the market without breaking their own ideals.
Mozilla should approach proton to try and get accuired. I would love to see Firefox and Thunderbird become part of the proton landscape.
Well all it’ll do is make Proton lose more money.
They are not positive ?
I think they are but Mozilla is not profitable and will be an expense source. Idk if it’ll make Proton negative but it definitely won’t improve their business.
mozilla is not profitable because of how much they pay their CEO.
its the same situation as reddit.
Everyone seems to have missed or ignored the pun. 😄 I liked it.
Thanks for pointing it out 😂
ideally donations like lots of other FOSS projects
Serious question, is there actually a FOSS project out there at the scale of something like Firefox that survives on only donations?
No because people choose diss cause it’s free. I mean they might say other things but then the vast majority do not donate to anything. People are cheap and that’s why we are where we are with all the ads.
Feels kind of weird, if thats the case how did Linux come as far as it is today?
Corporate support of development, and I’m not just talking about Redhat and SUSE. Hell, Microsoft is a major contributor to the kernel.
VLC I would say
VLC also has a company behind it: https://videolabs.io/
Not the same scale but Signal has a rather new approach for a messaging client. Completely free and funded by user donations - at least that’s the direction they’re trying to head as their initial seed funding starts running low. I’ve doubled my donations for Signal because I’d like to help prove that its a working model and I encourage everyone who uses it to donate, even if it’s just once. I’d love to see Firefox head in that direction where funding goes directly to the browser’s development. If I donate to Firefox today it might go to one of their dozen or so other pet projects that are unrelated to the browser. I think their side projects are great and glad they were able to do them while they had the cash, but funding is clearly drying up and they need a whole restructure to keep the browser alive.
Not the same scale but Signal has a rather new approach for a messaging client. Completely free and funded by user donations - at least that’s the direction they’re trying to head
You do realise they’re trying to become the crypto WeChat? Shit app with horrible management.
You do realise they’re trying to become the crypto WeChat?
Any evidence to support this claim?
Because I’m aware Signal introduced a beta crypto wallet 7 years ago, which was originally only available in select countries, and has had minimal resources allocated to its continued development since. They make zero mention of crypto/payment on their website, and best of all, the crypto wallet isn’t even enabled by default.
Shit app with horrible management.
And here you expose your personal emotional trauma by lashing at at the most inconsequential “nothing”: the development of a privacy preserving crypto wallet, “feature complete” half a decade ago, and disabled by default in a privacy preserving messenger.
Signal is the best free, open source, E2EE messenger that doesn’t leak metadata and has decent UX. Best of all, its completely free to use. Simplex is a good contender, but the UX is still lacking.
I don’t know. Crowdfunding? How does Thunderbird keep it self afloat? Maybe better integration of the community as in more say in what will be developed depending on how much money you donate etc.
That’s exactly the worst way to prioritize. Money should not be influence. That always works out worse in every example in the history of everything.
But thats exactly how they work currently? Google is the default search engine in firefox.
So it’s the default. Big deal. You can change that when you start the app first time. If that gets them funding that’s not a horrible price to pay. Also, that’s not money getting influence exactly, that’s a transaction. “We will pay $x to get this status.” Not the same at all as “I donated lots of money therefore I get to say how you develop the software.”
I haven’t seen the contract between google and firefox.
Maybe “how you develop the software” is a bit far-fetched, I was more thinking about decide where to put efforts into e.g.: continue developing Firefox’s core mechanic of being a privacy oriented webbrowser instead of… whatever they are doing with the funding they get.
Yeah basically what I meant.
Aint it grand that a monopoly power got abused, got checked and our beloved FF is the victim of corpo parasites?
Not even sure what funding model would work for something as critical as web engine but if we don’t figure it out, we will be sucking sundars dick going forward?
Disgusting… Clearly some edge lord using and shilling it, ain’t enough
Clearly some edge lord…
I see what you did there
Mozilla could have allowed people the option to subscribe for a modest fee in addition to giving it away for free, to diversify their income and be less dependent on Google, but they have not been trying that hard to develop other revenue streams.
corpo parasites at the top were paid off to gut it from within… signal is going the same route imho
What’s signal doing now?
To be clear this is tin foil… But the vibe is the same.
Mainly, they get decent budget and staff but they are not pushing the product forward. They don’t care about mass reach or usability, they cover this with claiming that their core audience is a journalist living under an oppressive regime when their user is tech nerd in the west.
Either way there better solutions for that kind. It just doesn’t feel like they competing here.
Kinda like Firefox stop pushing the edge.
Signal does a decent job of encouraging people to make one-time or ongoing donations to the service. I’ve supported them multiple times because they gave me a prompt to do so.
I don’t recall Firefox ever asking for a donation or subscription.
have you bought their vpn service? ;)
That’s something! But it doesn’t raise any money from people with other VPN providers or who don’t want to buy a VPN service.
Rip, time to find new income sources
worse? If this means that they refocus on things that matter then I consider this better.
That depends on management, however it definitely could benefit the company.
I think the biggest issue is that a bunch of people are, probably unexpectedly, out of a job.
What things that matter have insufficient engineering resources at the moment?
Firefox is understaffed, servo was canned, deepspeech was canned, firefox reality was canned, firefox for android TVs was canned, send was canned, the upstream project which the translate feature is based on (bergamot) has been extremely inactive and many more.
each one of these projects was/is “important” in some way, and while there are alternatives now or have been picked up by various third parties, each one had a lot of untapped potential, and lets take a look at the projects alternatives or forks current state.
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servo: was picked up by igalia, and is massively far behind, It still has a lot of potential, and progress is quick for what it is, but this is a real embeddable alternative to chrome. Not viable yet, and likely wont be for another year or two.
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Deepspeech: Coqui is dead, existing speech to text stuff is all either proprietary or extremely low quality. Only recently have we seen some progress due to speech to speech AI (AI voice replication). Still largely unusable. Some promising projects have cropped up but none are viable yet.
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Firefox reality: Wolvic took over, it’s in the process of being ported to chromium.
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Firefox for android TV: No alternatives even exist, you have TVBro and Vitabrowser are all just barely usable. and they rely on webview, a geckoview browser https://github.com/threethan/LightningBrowser which isn’t really usable.
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Send: This is the one fork that is actually flourishing. This is really a nifty service at least.
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I think one thing you guys should keep in the back pocket, is that Mozilla jobs are the outlier. The average Open Source Developer salary is very close to the US Federal poverty line. They’re paid mostly in comped passes to conventions. Most of the “averages” you see are compiled from data from companies like Mozilla. OSS devs are typically make around $30k in pure cash, even for ones working on large projects. The only OSS devs that make between the $95k and $150k (25th and 75th percentiles) you’ll see online are ones that work for Mozilla, or Intel, or whoever.
What makes this possible is MIT licensing models that corpos shilled in the 2000’s and 2010’s that directly benefit corperate engineering costs, but don’t contribute back nearly the value they extract. If the majority was GPL + copyright assignment, there would be income streams for leveraging OSS projects in closed source applications via licensing deals.
But the genie is out of the bottle on most of these things. See how Amazon is effectively forking an destroying existing OSS models via AWS provisioning of things like redis and elasticache.
The measley non Google portion of revenue is 81m dollar. If you pay a top dev 200k, you could pay 100 top devs 20m and still have 60m to play with.
This is even before considering a Bing/Yahoo/Ecosia deal.
Mozilla will be fine, but they’ll likely need to be leaner. Lay offs will likely play a part in that. Just got to hope they size and structure it right.
Why keep people on a payroll if you can get volunteers, for free!?
