The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox's default search engine

Based on their 2022 report, only half of their expenses were on software development costs - around $220m, and it’s not clear what portion of that was on Firefox vs other projects.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

In terms of revenue: around $100m was from sources other than Google.

Therefore, it seems plausible to me that Firefox development could still be funded with $100m of annual revenue. At a smaller level no doubt, but still in existence nonetheless.

I have written this elsewhere many times and I know it's extremely unpopular with FOSS crowd but truth needs to be told in here once again:

Everyday I use Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 10/11/Servers.

I'm an "IT guy" and have installed Firefox on literally hundreds of computers over a decade. I also install and setup extensions like uBlock Origin (with few comprehensive ad & malware blocking lists) , Dark Reader, Auto Delete Cookies, Crypto blocking and many more... but I have given up on Firefox 2016 onwards.

You could give Mozilla 10 billion per year just to develop Firefox but Mozilla can and will decide that they wanna spend only 1 or 10 percent of that money on actual Firefox development.

They will spend most of their money on anything but Firefox.

I mean I love world-peace, and cancer and aids free world too but with the money Mozilla get in a year, none of that gonna happen.

Mozilla couldn't stop Russia attack on Ukraine; neither were able to solve Israel Palestinian conflict nor hunger and migration from African countries to Europe...

Then what are they spending money on?

What they could have done successfully is to spend all the money they made from Firefox towards Firefox development alone. But this is the thing Mozilla do not want to do and are open about it.

Now I don't want Mozilla to stop developing Firefox either but because Firefox needs money from Google, Google must be allowed their monopoly on search... is utterly insane thinking.

If Mozilla cannot survive without Google monopoly, so be it.

I would say some open source/ Linux foundations/ Linux distros needs to fork Firefox and let Mozilla die peacefully.

It’s strange how the Internet has been flooded by this news. Like leave Google alone or Firefox gets it. Very strategic use of the media might I say.

Mozilla gotta do something.

And based on their actions on recent years, that something is probably going to be: 1) firing more developers, and 2) increasing the compensation of their CEO.

While I do want competition in the web space, its a good thing that Google could get told to stop doing stuff like this.

I dont want Mozilla to die of course but companies need to be held responsible for all the shit they pull. I'd imagine if Mozilla wasnt able to maintain firefox anymore it would fall to the open source community like they said in the article and I'd probably still use it.

No one company should own the internet.

I wonder how much of their income actually goes towards development. At a glance, it seems a great deal of unnecessary administrative bloat has been added to Mozilla.

I honestly don't see why a browser company needs to be so large (>700 employees).

Not that I want people to lose their jobs, it just seems unnecessary.

Good, Baker can go find an other x millions salary elsewhere because it's necessary for her family (as she said in an interview), and Firefox can become a community project again that still pays salary to actual developers but without the expensive bullshitting C-suite.

On the other hand, might also be good for Firefox to not be 86% funded by the maker of its top rival (Chrome).

if you only do a monthly donation of $5 a month that's still $60 a year and i urge you do do it. i have a recurring donation for firefox, thunderbird, and wikipedia because i believe they're essential to the internet.

I would stand behind the idea of splitting Google in it's seperate branches with no shared assets. Basically Google search becomes is seperate corporation, Google AI, Google Webservices, Google Ad Services, YouTube. etc.. This will hopefully undo some of the webs enshitification since now the essentially most powerful company on the web has to actually offer good product for profit instead of compensating bad product with more profitable one.

Everybody forgets that if chrome and chromium breaks away from Google because of this ruling, it's going to have the same issues as Firefox, if not worse because it's an arguably worse product. The ruling has been pronounced, but what will happen because of it is yet to be defined.

It's a threat to the Mozilla CORPORATION, not the Mozilla Foundation nor the browser.

Nothing to be really scared about. Move along.

If were going to go after them for a monopoly, shouldn't it be for chromium? At least with search there are actual viable alternatives that don't get 86% of their money from a direct competitor...

I needed, I would pay $5 per month in perpetuity for access to Firefox. Fuck google

Almost hoping this somehow causes browser support to fracture again.

It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.

Also because I'm tired of google dictating the www by being a monopoly. It's 2024 and jpegxl is being treated as ransomware as if enabling a god damn image format is too hard for web browsers. HTTP3/QUIC was 100% google's invention that they just threw onto the web because no one else is developing this standard anymore. Manifest v3 is an explicit attempt to limit user control over web content. They even cornered the market along with Microsoft using gmail.

So Mozilla will find other forms of funding. That’s how this works.

quite a good chunk of that goes to their ceo anyway.

Tax/fine Google more and give the profits to competitors like Mozilla (as long as those competitors use the funds for Firefox)

I can very much imagine this being a short to medium term issue (and still an existential threat to Mozilla), but hopefully, this improves the situation to the point that there is no future company like google who artificially maintains control over browsers and search engines, rendering competitors dependent on these massive contracts? I mean, this is what got them there, right?

Even if Mozilla survives it'll need to cut off some spendings.

#BreakThemUp

This isn't a new threat. This was always a threat.

The things that give google money are the reasons why we don't want to use google. The things that firefox does to get money are basically just giving google the thing that makes them money.

I would pay money to keep Firefox foss for other people who can't afford to do so.

Don't worry, we have a possible replacement for Mozilla, meet Ladybird

Cool. Mozilla is a corrupt, useless org anyway. Not much better than Google.

situational irony

I hope some governments and EU see the need of a foss browser engine alternative from a non-profit and stuff some Money there

Chrome is the existential threat to FireFox.

Chrome is... Also Google.

Break up Google, make chrome competitive, and then we'll stop seeing advertisers own the web standards and implement things like AVIF and ManifestV3, and instead embrace open solutions that favor users.

The JPEG XL vs AVIF thing still makes me mad.

$510MM out of $593MM?!? WTF Mozilla?

I guess they read the room and this is why they started delving into the ad business

Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots

Is this llamafile?

The thing about LLMs is that no one knows how to write the ultra low level optimizations/runtimes, so they port others (llamafile largely borrows from llama.cpp AFAIK, albeit with some major contributions from their own devs).

Performance is insanely critical because they're so darn hard to run, and new models/features come out weekly which no sane dev can keep up with without massive critical mass (like HF Transformers, mainly, with llama.cpp barely keeping up with some major jank).

So... I'm not sure what Mozilla is thinking here. They don't have many of those kind of devs, they don't have a GPU farm, they're not even contributing to promising webassembly projects like mlc-llm. They're just one of a bazillion companies that was ordered to get into AI with no real purpose or advantage. And while Gemma 2B may be the "first" model that's kinda OK on average PCs, we're still a long way away from easy mass local deployment.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I'm a local LLM tinkerer, and I've never touched or even looked at anything from Mozilla. The community would have if anything of theirs was super useful.

Will this make ladybird our only hope overnight?

Fuck.

ngl they can still get funding from donations but it only makes a little bit of their revenue