So long as they remain open source
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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My problem with this in spite of the dire situation they face if Google is forced to cut funding by anti-trust court rulings (or not even forced but they make paying off Mozilla a moot point so they stop) is that they become an ad company. Ads become tied to their CEO compensation, to the salaries of the people who develop it.
They claim they're making a better kind of ad network, a privacy respecting kind. The problem is the ad industry doesn't want less data, they want more. There are no looming laws that would force the ad industry to adopt a more privacy respecting alternative or die and without that the ad industry is going to shun this and it'll be a failure and then they'll have a failed ad network that they can either discard entirely or adapt to industry standards of privacy invasion and abuse and continue to exist and then they'll make another "hard choices" post about having to do that.
And I can see it now. This experiment will fail and after some pressure from the ad industry and some devil-on-shoulder whispering Mozilla will begrudgingly start to enshittify. Their ad network will become less privacy respecting by tiny little steps, by salami-slicing or boiling the frog, the whole privacy-preserving measurement thing will be thrown out BUT they'll still claim they respect you more than Google and will at first perhaps but that will erode. Maybe they'll just implode at some point after that which given Google is being found a monopoly works just fine for Google and the rest of big tech who want a more centralized, locked down browser company that wants to help implement DRM that can't be circumvented, that wants to help lock down everything on the web to restrict users freedoms to choose what is displayed or if they can save it or record it or copy it to say nothing of blocking ads.
I used to work in a marketing agency, and had a few clients that heavily used advertising data.
I'd go as far as to say that while more data is nice, good data is much better. If Mozilla can somehow produce an advertising platform that is not intrusive, is opt-in, and has a wide enough reach to satisfy advertisers, they're on to a winning strategy. Furthermore, they would need to codify any changes into Mozilla itself to ensure that advertising never gets to intrude on privacy or the browser experience - with the removal of the CEO and entire exec team as the cost for triggering this.
With all that said, I think the threat of doing this is probably a good thing. Mozilla's track record of products is, frankly, piss poor. The thing is, everyone seems to be good at advertising, so there's no reason why if Google leaves they can't just say "fine, we're an advertising company now" and eat their lunch.
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Can one thing please not be full of adverts :( I'll pay for the browser, I just want marketers to fuck off for a while lol
Did I miss something? I don't think the browser is going to be full of ads?
Mozilla actually has (had?) ads in Firefox, right on its default start page.
Right and that has existed long before today. And I can't find anything in this article suggesting that the start page, or anywhere else, is going to be reallocated towards new ads which is what it sounds like the commenter above me was suggesting.
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Realistically, I don't think so either. Pessimistically, I give it until Jan 1st, 2030.
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Does anyone know if this will hit Fennec on Android as well?
I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren't so bad.
I was wrong.
I'll continue using Firefox because it's the least bad option, but I can't advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don't expect it to last long with this orientation.
So it goes.
Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant's grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.
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I could see them trying to take themselves away from Google which wouldn't be a bad thing as that's where most of the money comes from for them ... Unless that's changed recently..
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This breaks my heart.
Mozilla's non-profit status needs to be revoked.
I think at this point they have a nonprofit and a company, the later being used for all their taxable income.
I know; they should not be allowed to do that.
Time to switch to other fork
At this point, I don't see many other options to keep everything going for Firefox. If they somehow lose the go*gle money they use to keep themselves going, they need another revenue source and I severely doubt there are enough Firefox users willing to pay enough to keep it going as it currently does. Don't like it, but I'm gonna at least play devil's advocate.
It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current "donation" option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.
They could try not having an overinflated budget?
Where would you cut?
Are you kidding?
I mean I don't love it, but I'm also not sure what the argument is supposed to be about how this ties to browser market share. Mozilla made $593 million from their most recently released financials. The CEO made $6.9 million. My calculator tells me that's 1.16%.
So is the argument that Mozilla that if they set the CEO salary to $0, used it all on more developers, that would spin up a browser experience that's so improved it would lead to more market share? A 1% change in Mozilla's spending will bring them to 50% market share? 40%? 20%?
What's the cause and effect here? Do we even actually know that that's true, that it even has anything whatsoever to do with development choices at all? I get that the CEO is an easy target but I think assuming that is explaining market share ignores things like Google's dominance of search and ads, and how those piles of cash drive initiatives like Android and Chromebooks, which helps propel Chrome to dominant market share. Those are the drivers of market share. I don't even think people have even tried to begin to think through this argument in real terms, it's just a lot of knee-jerk reaction to news stories disconnected from any specific idea of cause and effect.
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So it looks like the CEO of mozilla is bleeding firefox to pad his salary. Thats disappointing. Are we sure firefox wasn't simply taken over by a private-equity firm?
It's 1.16%. I don't love it but claiming it's bleeding them to death is, I think, not what we're looking at. I think they just recognize their exposure because any given year 80 to 90% of the revenue is coming from their agreement with Google, and they're screwed if they can't diversify their income a bit more.
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