Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects and just focus on delivering a good browser.
Algo the lack of google as financial support means they'll rely more on donations, which would mean that they really need to focus on offering a good browser.
I'll gladly donate to firefox if I would see they are really focusing on it.
If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google's YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don't like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.
Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.
In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.
The root problem doesn't get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is "resolved."
Which would ironically give even more monopoly over how the web is viewed to Google. Chrome and Firefox are just about the only two players in that space right now.
I sincerely hope that is what's going to happen and Mozilla gets severely fucked over for how they have been running their shit. Break their business and rethink from scratch how we run and finance the development of one of the most important pieces of software around. Hint: You're not going to be competitive with big tech by copying their practices, marketing "AI" bullshit and pocket and all that crap. You can't compete with google there, they can always outspend you.
As a Linux user, such a break would also be very timely, now that we have survived the painful surgeries of systemd and wayland. Those problems are mostly fixed, so we need another dysfunctional troublemaker - Firefox it is!
But seriously: The official story is always that google gives Mozilla the money to be the default search engine. But really, they don't need to care. Google needs Firefox so they can pretend they don't have a browser monopoly. For similar reasons, google used to employed 10000s of people who were doing very much non-essential stuff that is entirely irrelevant for their business. They could have fired them all long ago, and massively increased their profitability. But those would have looked obscene and raises regulators' attention. So just hiring a bunch of expensive engineers who build google chat 23.0 and whatever makes them appear more like a "normal" company.
Why does this percentage keep going up? Who keeps inflating the numbers? The first time I heard about this, it was like 64%. Then 77%. Now 81%?! Tomorrow, I'm gonna see a meme stating 97% of Mozilla's income is from Google.
I wonder if German govt. funds Mozilla
something like the sovereign tech fund for gnome
tax money should improve public infrastructure and Firefox is digitally doing that
Others will present themselves. Mozilla have been on a downtrend for years. I've heard of a couple of alternatives, but I don't have the experience with any of them. If anyone knows any good Firefox alternatives, please let us know!
dude, just use librewolf, firefox without any bullshit. done.
edit: okay. no mozilla = no librewolf. funny how the only alternative to google's browser depended on google for its survival. i don't have a solution, and it sounds like no one else does either.
When I heard the news, my first though was a mix of "Oh. oh no..", "yay! no vendor-lock-in", and "OH, NO."
My expectation for the future is that a crowd fundraiser like on Wikipedia (does anyone remember those?) will be on the way for Mozilla... there is no way they can survive a 80% drop in the budget gracefully.
If think of it then there be no competition any more even by a little. If Google Decide to give up on chrome and make there own close Source web engine. Nothing really stopping them as they control the web and search even taking then to count not going make them support the chrome web engine. Firefox just uphill battle even more now as user can't give up ther chrome habits and the forks.