The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals. The court has already ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in search, partly thanks to exclusionary deals that make it the default engine on browsers and phones, depriving rivals of places to distribute their search engines and scale up. But while Firefox — whose CFO is testifying as Google presents its defense — competes directly with Chrome, it warns that losing the lucrative default payments from Google could threaten its existence.
Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.
Losing that revenue all at once would mean Mozilla would have to make “significant cuts across the company,” Muhlheim testified, and warned of a “downward spiral” that could happen if the company had to scale back product engineering investments in Firefox, making it less attractive to users. That kind of spiral, he said, could “put Firefox out of business.” That could also mean less money for nonprofit efforts like open source web tools and an assessment of how AI can help fight climate change.
The mozilla foundation needs to be gutted or dissolved. Why do you need so much money? Oh, is it maybe because your fucking execs gobble it all up while the devs scrounge for scraps and the community contributes for free to your projects, you fucking executive pigs?
I hope it crashes and burns. I would bet serious money that the softare projects would not only survive but thrive without them.
If you actually had a look at their actual numbers, they’re a charity you know, they’re public, you’d see that the bulk of money is spent on charity. Mozilla has never been a charity to develop Firefox, Firefox has always been the breadwinner for Mozilla’s charity operations.
I did, i abso-fucking-lutely did look at their numbers.
The 2024 numbers are not fully in, we can take a look at 2023. here is a link for you to follow along - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf
I am skipping the income part, because its clear where they get the vast majority of their money.
[in millions, rounded up] Total revenue: $653
From which expenditures:
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Program staff: $202.4
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Management: $123.4
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Fundraising: $2.4
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Non-salary expenses: $162.2
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Grants and fellowships: $6.4
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Income tax: $14.4
Total expenditure: $511.1
So when you say “the bulk of money is spent on charity”, do you mean salaries? Because from what I can see, that is where the “bulk” is.
The charity part, from the 2023 revenue is 1%.
I was talking about the foundation itself, not foundation+subsidiaries. And yes ever since the writing was on the wall wrt. google funds they’ve been putting more and more money in investments to make sure they can survive, as opposed to grants. Still keeping with the foundation’s mandate, though, e.g. all their VC investments into AI are the polar opposite of what the likes of OpenAI are doing. Kinda sceptical e.g. huggingface will ever turn a profit, much less a significant one, but it’s important to have them.
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Firefox: “But I’m nothing without Google money”
FOSS community: “If you’re nothing without Google money, then you don’t deserve it.”
I stopped using Google as my default search engine year’s ago in favor of duck
Mozilla executives are once again carrying water for Google.
If there is any doubt who they work for, watching them testify in defense of Google’s monopoly should be all you need.
The day the browser comes back to the Mozilla foundation, you’ll realise you don’t fucking need Google.
We the community, are waiting for the moment we can invest on our (currently) only chance to truly fuck with Google.
As a daily Firefox user and someone who generally defends them, they have known this day was coming for a very long time. If they have not been planning for it, that’s their fault.
they got high off of the google supply, so to speak and became stagnant.what they should be working on is a independant browser, or look for more sources of ad revenue, than just goolge.
while they have made a lot of dumb decisions, they are also in an almost impossible situation. every time they try to diversify their income they get hammered hard by the community.
Maybe they wouldn’t have needed to diversify into such predatory markets if their execs weren’t pocketing all the money.
i like how you make this sound like users are the ones at fault for not liking shitty things, how about mozilla tries earning money without making the world worse?
The internet runs on either ads, data harvesting, donations or the goodwill of solo developers. Firefox cannot generate revenue with ads or data and currently gets money from donations via Google and other companies. Are you expecting goodwill?
Personally, I’m fine with Google giving money to Firefox to be the default search. Keeps my browser in business and I just change the search. I don’t see a problem here.
Absolutely. If you’re privacy focussed enough to use Firefox then you can change a default browser in minutes if not seconds.
Which makes you wonder what’s the actual motive here
Financing the continued development of Firefox is the motive.
I am. Why not make it a nonprofit and get the money from donations?
Firefox is a way for them to make money for their charitable projects. Always has been.
They’ve been opening secondary streams of income – also via Firefox, like pocket and stuff, but it’s unclear whether that would even allow them to keep developing Firefox. It certainly would mean that Mozilla doesn’t have any money left over to give to others which is their main purpose of existing.
I think you underestimate the costs of development.
I believe the Firefox development organization could be a lot leaner, and not all of the work has to be directly salaried. There are plenty of huge open source projects that are progressing fine without being run by a single for-profit company. E.g. the Apache ecosystem, the Linux foundation projects, FreeBSD, etc.
I think that if that was feasible a successful project would exist already to develop it. it is not like people does not want it to exist. sure, there are tons of projects making variations of existing browsers but none of them do much besides minor tweaks.
From the top of my head Servo is the closest one and it has a big head start since mozilla developed originally. and that is just an engine, not a full browser.
how
Let me donate directly to Firefox development. Stop giving their terrible executives giant piles of money.
Reduce exec pay to normal levels.
Funnel most of the funds to the Firefox department.Stop acting like a tech start-up and become a worker owned co-op instead.
Allow people to give to firefox directly, like they do with thunderbird.
Sure, why not
'Your honor, we urge you to allow this company to continue breaking the law because our business is insolvent without the revenue we earn from crimes.’
I like Firefox, but if enforcing antitrust collapses Mozilla than so be it. How long has this car been going on? Have they not established any plans for what they’d do if this happened? They derive 75% of their whole company revenue from one source that was likely to be found illegal? They really thought that was a good idea? That’s a hell of a business model. It’s not a judge’s job to save them from that.
Yeah, they really should have allowed us to give to firefox directly a long time ago. Why they don’t is beyond me considering they do with thunderbird.
My thoughts exactly. We all knew this was coming
Sue Google for damage from it’s monopoly. There’s your money right there.
I like the way you think!
Every nation in the world should fund open source technologies with a large chunk of their tax revenue. The fact that this isn’t even close to happening almost everywhere says all we need to know about world governments and their corporatist nature.
This is what I came here to say. This is a sovereignty issue they could solve with a miniscule portion of their defense budgets.
Sure. I mean, I’m not going to stop using it, and people will make forks for eternity, but the average joe might switch… However, the average joe supports Nazis these days, so I don’t really give a shit about what the majority are doing.
How much does Firefox development cost? The Mozilla Foundation itself has a dearth of friends even among hackers. But Firefox is worth preserving. Could we get enough paying supporters to continue development?
If they allowed us to give to firefox directly, maybe. Personally we think it is likely that mozilla badly needs to become a worker owned co-op so that CEOs stop taking so much.
Wouldn’t other search engines be happy to make the same deal? Maybe they wouldn’t pay as much as google but it wouldn’t be as catastrophic as implied.
