Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox’s revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser’s default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla’s ability to keep things “business as usual.”
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company’s actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search “partners completely,” which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google’s money suddenly dried up.
Mozilla corp is trash and deserves to fail. The non-profit Mozilla however, can remain and steward Firefox and friends just fine.
I support the things that the Mozilla Foundation puts on its website, even their manifesto. Even, begrudgingly, the insistence that we must balance the needs of human beings against the needs of corporations.
Even if those things contradict what Mozilla Corporation is doing with their browser.
But the Foundation is just a thin wrapper for the Corporation, so I’m not sure how that would work.
Why would the foundation have members? It’s not a coop, after all. It’s not the Linux Foundation model, either, which is “bunch of companies get together and decide on how to spend their money”. It’s much closer to the Bosch or Zeiss model, “We’re doing business but are owned by noone and instead of handing out dividends we throw money at some charitable stuff” – though Mozilla is way more charitable than either of them.
The board is bound to the Foundation’s statutes, and it can’t just change them. They’re required to steer the foundation such that its actions benefit the free and open web, if you think they’re doing something else, sue them. Or get oversight bureaucrats to investigate or however that works in the US.
The board is the Corporation. Why would they be bound to the Mozilla manifesto? They seem to be destroying its spirit right now.
If “just sue them” is the only way to hold Mozilla accountable, how low they have fallen!
And an executive is suing them. For discrimination.
Open source existed before money. Corporate backers came in because the product was successful, not because they thought it was a sinking ship.
So the proverbial one guy in Nebraska and a few dozen like him can work on Firefox in addition to their day jobs?
They could cut their overpaid clown executive team jfc… these parasites are everywhere, leeching.
FF will survive, it is open source lol
jfc do you have any idea how fast the web evolves? Firefox already struggles to keep up with changing web standards and operating system features. It took them until December 2019 to implement one particular feature Chrome had since 2010 with a vendor prefix and since early 2016 as a fully-released feature. It took them until 4 weeks ago to implement an OS feature that existed since 2019 and which Chrome added that same year, and Edge had by 2022 at the latest.
You cut their budget, they’ll necessarily lose developers. Yes, maybe they can minimise how many developers they lose by becoming more lean, but it’s a fantasy to think that becoming “more lean” could actually prevent them from losing paid developers. And any volunteer developers are also necessarily going to be spending less time and effort on their contributions than a full-time paid employee would.
Cut their budget by 86% and they go from “barely keeping up” to “utterly falling behind”.
Not all software needs to be backed by money. Money helps, of course, and I would support a non-profit financially that is focused purely on browser development. Right now, the only game in town doing that is Ladybird. But honestly, I think building upon a firefox fork makes more sense than starting from scratch.
You’re saying Firefox could exist, and keep up with security updates and website compatibility, without being backed by money? (Or based on a couple of donations?) Any convincing evidence that could make us trust that that’s possible too?
Perhaps it could be state funded? It worked for PBS for a time and it still mostly works for the BBC. Why not a browser? A truly independent steward for the open web is important and it doesn’t seem like Google is capable of that.
Seems like a good idea except for how often these states already force their own spyware and backdoors onto projects. Ideally, the state would fund it, but given their history, I’d prefer costs were covered by user donations as the interests of the users are the only interests I trust. We are the only group that is truly independent of competing interests.
Crowd funding and donations obviously have their own drawbacks. Maybe we can find a work around to avoid the privacy violations of states in the future, but I don’t have a simple answer for how to accomplish this. The way the FOSS community operates is currently the best alternative I’ve seen, but I’m sure it’s not always lucrative for developers. People need to be compensated for their labor and our current systems tend to put development interests at odds with user interests.
