Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox’s revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser’s default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla’s ability to keep things “business as usual.”
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company’s actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search “partners completely,” which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google’s money suddenly dried up.
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.
Given that they are focusing on initiatives like intrusive adverts and machine learning BS, I’m okay with them cutting that kind of nonsense off; Firefox still doesn’t have a native vertical tab bar.
Firefox still doesn’t have a native vertical tab bar.
At least the extension APIs are powerful enough to have an extension that does a decent job (or even a great job, in the case of extensions like Sidebery), plus there’s a way to hide the regular top tabs. That’s not the case with Chrome - all the Chrome vertical tab extensions feel kinda janky and the regular top tabs are still visible.
You could also use a Firefox fork like Floorp that has native support for tree-style tabs.
Firefox still doesn’t have a native vertical tab bar.
That is only mostly true now. There is an about:config setting you can turn on in FF 129 (released this week) which will let you have native vertical tabs. The implementation is only about half done, but it’s good enough for me to use alongside Sidebery Tabs.
You can track progress on vertical tabs in Bugzilla. They are also working on tab groups, but that work is at an earlier stage.
All in all, I think we’ll see vertical tabs in the next 6 months or so? As a devout Firefox user and resister of the Chromium monopoly, I am really excited.
Why have I never considered vertical tabs before? The screen is way too wide for normal pages, you can fit a bunch more information sideways per tab, and way more tabs vertically than horizontally. You could even double-stack them with all the space available.
This is such an obvious change to make.
This is the way. Mozilla is bloated to fuck as a company. They need to be forced to get back on their main goal: Building a fucking Browser.
No ad deals, no stupid cloud features, just actual browser and privacy features.
There is no fucking way all that money is actually being spent on maintaining core firefox functionality.
Mozilla is bloated to fuck as a company
On one hand, I think people underestimate how difficult it is to build a cross-platform browser in 2024. Just think about all the things that you now do through a web browser that used to require their own separate programs. A browser has to act as the UI for a word processor, a spreadsheet, online games, banking apps, etc. And, it has to work on multiple operating systems with different screen sizes etc. And, this is with constantly evolving web standards. Those web standards are things that Mozilla / Firefox has to participate in too, otherwise Google (the only other browser manufacturer) is going to steer them however it wants and do things like make ad-blocking impossible.
On the other hand, I completely agree that every sign points to Mozilla being ridiculously bloated. Being gifted half a billion dollars per year no matter what you do (as long as it doesn’t displease Google) is going to lead to massive inefficiencies. The CEO’s salary is an obvious red flag. But, it’s a lot more than that. Why did Mozilla buy an advertising company? Why did they buy Pocket? Why are they getting into AI? Why do they sell VPN subscriptions?
Also, what’s up with this weird structure where a non-profit (Mozilla Foundation) owns a for-profit (Mozilla Corporation). How can that not be a conflict of interest? I understand that there are some things that non-profits can’t do. But, why don’t they have two separate companies and have the for-profit one pledge to donate X% of profits or revenues to the non-profit?
It would be a bad thing if the result of the money spigot being turned off is that it was no longer possible to pay people to work on Firefox, resulting in Chrome being the one and only browser. On the other hand, it really does seem like Mozilla needs to be slimmed down and focused on a core mission of making an open source web browser (and hopefully their email client Thunderbird too).
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.
There is already the Ladybird project, which is a fork of the SerenityOS browser. We can say that it is a spiritual successor, although its license is more permissive than the Firefox browser.
Ladybird is in a prime position if they keep up their steady progress, I really hope they succeed.
Once again, note that if you’re the kind of user who shuns Brave because the CEO says stupid stuff every once in a while, you’ll probably not look fondly upon Ladybird’s project lead and main developer being scared of pronouns.
See the issue on github.
If you don’t care about that, it’s an interesting project. Can’t say I approve, though.
Posting this to inform people and let each one decide what to do on their own. Don’t harass anyone, please.
Servo is working on becoming a standalone browser.
I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s entirely correct:
Servo aims to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web rendering engine source - About Servo
I think it’d be better to say they’re working on becoming a modern, easy to use alternative to the likes of Gecko and Blink, the engines powering Firefox and Chrome, respectively.
I saw nothing about plans to become a fully featured web browser, even in the roadmap. Do you have anything else to share that supports the browser idea?
If Mozilla collapses for being too deeply intertwined with Google, I won’t mourn them.
Firefox is open source. We probably need to pass the torch to another maintainer anyway. Mozilla has been betraying their original mission a lot.
Cool. Mozilla is a corrupt, useless org anyway. Not much better than Google.
Mozilla isn’t and org. Mozilla Foundation is an org. And they get a fraction of that money. I don’t know what you’re talking about but you don’t either, it seems.
I use only Firefox / Fennec, but fuck Mozilla. The obscene amounts they paid their CEO for stupid decisions, their shitty Pocket acquisition, regressions such as saving page as pdf simply disappearing on mobile. Let that rotten corporation die, the code is open source, someone will do a Gecko browser.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as someone just forking it. Realistically, a browser is an extremely complex piece of software that requires a lot of organizational effort to maintain, deal with security issues, etc. Pretty much every other piece of software on a similar scale I can think of (the kernel, KDE, Blender, Libreoffice) has some sort of organization behind it with at least some amount of officially paid work. All the major forks of Firefox or chromium follow quite closely to upstream for this reason (which is also why I’m skeptical of Brave’s ability to maintain manifest v2 long term, despite their probably genuine best efforts to do so).
I do wish that Firefox were developed and funded by an organization specifically dedicated to developing it. This could of course happen if Mozilla dies. But that’s going to require someone starting it, which is not at all a small or cheap task.
I could also see a future where Oracle or IBM buys it 😂🤡
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 if this ruling over search engines could spook them with browser development as well considering they nearly have a monopoly with chromium too. Perhaps they’ll release control of it and stop pushing anti-consumer updates like removing your ability to block ads.
Who in the open-source community would pay what it costs to develop Firefox? I hope some organization would, but it’s a huge and expensive project to run.
Great question that I dont have an answer for. Maybe one of the foundations that supports Linux development? This is just my hope though. No idea what it would really take to maintain Firefox at this point. Maybe if it was scaled down or something it’d be ok in the hands of just the open source community as a whole but I’m not well versed in programming or development so i dont know.
I gotta try and be optimistic about this kinda stuff because i forsee a future where Google just ruins more and more of the internet and i hate the thought of that.
Servo is now being looked after by the Linux Foundation in Europe, but is only maintained by volunteers. But another project has arrived that is not based on Chromium, Webkit or Firefox, which may be a hope in this somewhat confusing situation.
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.
Why would Chrome/chromium break away? Isn’t this just about the search engine side of things? There’s no need to dump Chrome if all they need to do is drop themselves as the default search engine.
Don’t worry, we have a possible replacement for Mozilla, meet Ladybird
So who’s going to fund that who can’t fund Mozilla Foundation?
