The only ones who will embrace it are the advertisers…
You’re forgetting about the people in the office building that sit around the big table. They embrace it too.
She went on to work at eBay for 13 years, followed by PayPal, Skype, and Airbnb. source
why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ☞
“Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.”
Advertising will not improve unless we address the underlying data sharing issues, and solve for the economic incentives that rely on that data.
thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising
We can’t just ignore online advertising — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years. - MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA source
if we stay with that metaphor of “We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it”, it’s not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he’s “staring straight in the eyes” :/
i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad
She’s not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.
Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last “free” browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?
Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?
There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don’t neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.
This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.
She’s not particularly wrong,
yes, and that’s the saddest part
Ladybird is not usable yet, but it’s an independent browser and engine that accepts donations
repo - https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
youtube channel with monthly updates - https://www.youtube.com/@LadybirdBrowser/videos
So is NetSurf, and has been for most of this century already. I mean, it’s great to see people even caring about independent browsers, but NetSurf surely needs much more love (and more developers). :-)
Squidward on the floor saying “Future, future”
But actually hexbear does need a future Squidward. We’ve got others but we need future
This Squidward also matches it well.
Well, Thunderbird gives me hope.
Same! Check the telemetry line in about:config that still has a value in it though (I forget what it is, just that it had one)
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?
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.
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.
The CEO is for a good reason an easy target: Show me another company where this level of incompetence is rewarded with steady salary increases?!? (I am afraid you’ll be able to. ;-))
Given your calculation is correct, you are correct that paying the CEO nothing would not make a big difference for Mozillas income. Although it would hopefully open the road for a better CEO.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all. If all is a function of the environment and the tides of the market, we can easily replace her with ChatGPT and have the same results w/o wasting money.
At the end of the day, we are exactly where we have been literally a decade ago: Finding a sustainable business model for Mozilla/Firefox. Once more: This core problem of Mozilla/Firefox has been well known for over a decade by now, and again the CEOs only answer is advertisement. Why do we pay money for the bullshit every first semester MBA student would come up with a brainstorming within the first 3 minutes.
Mozilla survives thanks to Google and their (rightful) fears of being outed as a monopoly.
The discussion is always if Mozilla could survive on donations. I do not now if they could. I still think there are a lot of actors with an interest of an independent browser, even whole governments. What I know for sure is, I won’t donate to Mozilla as long as incompetent CEOs are payed.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all.
That’s my argument? I don’t recall supporting the CEO pay. Pretty sure I said I don’t like it. And just to be clear, I am finding it hard to justify that much for a CEO. So that’s not turning my argument against me, because that was never my argument.
What it would really look like to, as you say, “turn my argument against me” would be something that speaks to Google’s search monopoly, ads monopoly, and hundredfold advantage in revenue, and why, in light of those facts, they would imply that Mozilla should have more market share. Like if I forgot to carry a two somewhere in my math, or why they are actually proof of a synergy that Mozilla is benefiting from that I’m not accounting for. Those would be examples of turning the arg against me, and I’m happy to hear it if there is one.
Not sure if it s a language issue (non native speaker), but seems we have the same goals.
So sorry, if I misunderstood your position/point!
My point is mostly, that it seems every browser is mostly US controlled directly or transitively, and it should be in the interest of every other country/nation to have a free, open source, not US controlled browser on the market… but given the sad reality in my country, I’ll probably be long dead before corruption/lobby-ism and sheer stupidity of the the government will come to this conclusion. :-(
Any where more substantial to address the shortfall expected without Google default money?
I don’t know a thing about their budget, so I’m not qualified to make any comments about how good or bad they are doing at managing it or make any comments.
Not good
Does anyone know if this will hit Fennec on Android as well?
rockbottom: NOBODY wants to see the ads you throw in our faces. doesnt matter that, as you claim, those ad views pay you for your content. there is no good way to make those ads palatable.
69% of the world population doesn’t use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.
Not only are we technical folks (only 5% of the population not their target audience, it seems most people don’t care enough about ads to ever try to stop them… at all.
So 31% uses ad blocking.
That’s about 1/3. Pretty impressive actually.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google ad monopoly case?
It’s probably at least a factor, yeah. They’ve been trying to reduce dependence on Google for a long time, which was always a smash hit with the community (not), but if there’s a very concrete scenario where will stop paying, then the urgency ramps up quickly.
Thanks but
We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
We need an alternative before that
Maybe this pushes the development a little bit. Would be a good opportunity to ask for funding and other means of help.
Talk is cheap, get contributing! Donate, translate or code. That way we’ll have a proper way out of Mozilla sooner
Done! I contributed $10 a few days ago. Hope to give some more after my next payment.
Great to know! I donated 6 $ and I’m waiting for them to open the browser to translations
Now imagine if they had something to advertise which people actually want!
I honestly never expected the final death blow for Firefox to come from Mozilla.
Eh, they’ve been speedrunning this for years, this is just the most efficient way to get to the end goal of complete ruin.
I have a few alternative ideas, but I honestly don’t think they’re interested in hearing them.
Maybe they’ve been infiltrated by bad actors from Google, parading around as pro-privacy frauds.
I hope so. I hope there could be a future where Mozilla is purged of these people and returned to being just a browser. Not everything has to be a “platform” with a business model for MBA’s to feast on.
Mozilla’s PPA was developed in collaboration with Facebook. While we don’t usually think of that company as advertisement centric, they are, just moreso within their own walled garden of a social network.
parading around as pro-privacy frauds.
Here’s a frighteningly accurate prediction from The Register, written back in January:
…Baker notes: “We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating … This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way.”
Surely not slurping telemetry?
According to the report, the “Mozilla way” is all about privacy, encryption, and keeping customer data safe. Hopefully, it will also be about innovation rather than scattering AI fairy dust over its product line.
Is this a response to the fact that they may not get paid for having Google as their default search engine? If so, I worry about a bunch of Linux distributions. It’s ironic that a company’s toxic virtual monopoly was paying for so much open software.
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.
I don’t see how eating their lunch would happen. Something like 85-90% of Mozilla’s income every year is from their Google search partnership. Google does some sort of revenue sharing thing where a portion of the value of search ads clicked through Firefox goes back to Mozilla, but the payment for search partnership itself, well, if that goes away, there’s no lunch to eat, metaphorically. There’s nothing to replace it with. Maybe Bing takes it’s place but I’m not sure that would happen.
I think the elephant in the room here is that Mozilla has 0.2% of the revenue that Google has, but is sustaining market share orders of magnitude higher than that. But unfortunately, at this point there’s a growing echo chamber of extremely low effort comments assuming that if you could just run back the clock, and not focus on “distractions” like their VPN or Mozilla.social, or the Mr. Robot Easter egg, that they would have overtaken Chrome in market share.
Like it was this easily achievable thing that just slipped through their fingers, rather than an inevitable consequence of Google’s disproportionate finances and monopoly power.
It’s probably more on the lines of Google losing advertising share to every other company (Meta, Amazon, Unity, Microsoft) that has gotten into the ad business in recent years - all with minimal experience in ads, but either data, infrastructure, or visitors to sell. Mozilla definitely will have the infrastructure and visitors, even if opt-in.
I don’t agree that they’ll overtake Google, or could have overtaken Chrome with their product tie-ins/offerings. Google is a beast, whereas the average person probably couldn’t tell you who makes Firefox (or maybe even what Firefox is).
I would say you’re basically right. I think Mozilla can try to grab a slice of the pie, the Q is if it’s enough, and fast enough, to replace revenue from the search partnership.
Technically correct: literally no one does fit the criteria for not everyone.
