Google funds probably 95% of Mozilla. Hundreds of millions a year.
very convenient. 95% of mozilla funds their CEO pay.
Their CEO makes like $7 to $10 million. Google pays Mozilla over $400 million/year.
Google pays them hundreds of millions annually. That’s not the kind of money you find lying around or can quickly make by spinning up another branded service like a VPN.
Their only realistic hope for getting that kind of money is another search provider and the only ones who are big enough and might pay that I can think of off the top of my head would be:
Bing (Microsoft) who’d probably pay less,
Yandex (people would whine they’re Russian even though they’re a multinational and admittedly their market in the west is pretty weak so their incentive to pay for something like this low unless they’re trying to expand, again they’d likely pay less),
I don’t think there is a third. There are lots of other search engines but few that can afford to casually toss away a few hundred million a year to be set as default on a browser with less than 5% market share. If a third existed it would probably be some Chinese search company trying to break into the western market and again people would whine about their character for geopolitical reasons and accuse Mozilla of being bought by them.
Apple could also afford to do this but they themselves take Google’s money to set Google as a default search engine in safari and are too interested in bundling software with hardware to ever offer something to everyone like that.
They should try and trim costs it’s true. Start with CEO pay (though at 7 million it’s only a small piece of the costs that need to be cut to be safe should they lose this money) and work on through. The problem I think is Mozilla doesn’t consider Firefox the end all, be all of their mission and that’s unfortunate because at this point it’s the only thing they do of any worth. We think of Mozilla as Firefox but they think of Firefox as just another big project that if it gets cut isn’t the end, the CEO will still have their job, there will still be busy-working pretending to be an advocacy body and soliciting money for that despite the fact that Firefox existing is the only reason anyone still cares what they have to say as they’re part of the web development consortium.
There’s no quick and easy way out from their relationship with Google. The government could force a quick divorce but that would lead to Firefox imploding. Assuming that doesn’t happen it’ll be a long, slow slog of a process and I don’t see any easy solutions. They’ve tried branded VPN, they’ve tried things like pocket and fakespot. They don’t have any services they can offer the corporate world which is unfortunate as many companies sustain free public offerings off of charging corporations fees.
Be sure and tell them how they’ll replace the funds while you’re at it.
How did Mozilla function before the Google deal?
Good question. That was over twenty years ago when Internet Explorer was “king”. Firefox was smaller. The internet, and it’s users were less sophisticated. The competition was lethargic. So I don’t know how to make a comparison.
What do you think?
Finding a cheaper CEO would probably do it.
Mozilla made about $480 million from Google in 2022. The CEO made about $7 million that year.
I keep telling myself to donate to them, but I still haven’t.
Most of your money goes to CEO salary and not towards developing Firefox.
I’ve donated in November after I switched back to Firefox as my main browser. I read about the search deal dependency and wanted to contribute to what Mozilla called “reclaim the internet”. Feel something akin to ‘buyer’s remorse’ when I now read how little goes to development of Firefox/Gecko (the only multi-platform alternative engine for rendering the internet) and how much goes into CEO salaries.
Your donation money does not go towards the salary of the Mozilla Corporation CEO. But yes, it does not go to Firefox development either. The Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, needs to have enough money independent of donations, because the devs’ livelihoods depend on that. Well, and the donation money isn’t nearly enough to cover those costs anyways.
So, the Mozilla Foundation (which owns the Mozilla Corporation and which you donate to) uses the donation money instead for political activism, for community work (which may lead to more contributors to Firefox) and sometimes they award some of that money to other open-source projects, which are also vital for an open web, but which are not visible enough to collect donations.
CEO salary is paid mostly from default search engine deals. But the same holds true for Firefox development, so you’re right that the money doesn’t go towards developing Firefox.
What’s weird to me is that Mozilla Foundation can probably sustain Firefox development from it’s investment income alone (e.g. $37.5M in 2023): https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3/_2023/_990/_Mozilla/Foundation/-/_Full/Filing/-/_Nonprofit/Explorer/-/_ProPublica.pdf
It might be possible to build Firefox for less than the IIRC ~$500M that’s currently budgeted, but $37.5M seems optimistic.
We don’t need to build Firefox though. Keeping up with the web standards and general maintenance does require a lot of work, but the base is there already.
Also, with a $100k salary, $37.5M/yr is 375 developers. If we allow EU devs where 50k€ would be a reasonable salary, that’s 690 developers now.
I understand there’s also admin work and a lot of marketing (which Firefox so desperately needs), and altogether it’s a stretch, but I believe that it is possible to pull it off.
50k would be reasonable because the company then pays a big percentage to social security both for pensions and health service. I’m around that number currently, but if I account the amount the company pays to the government, not the money they withhold from be for taxes the money THEY pay to get for my salary, I would be around 75k easily. This is something a lot of people don’t understand when comparing US vs EU salaries, then go to the US and get taxed plus made to pay insurance and shit until they end up with less disposable income than me.
Please remove the shitty EU salary interpolation. Thanks.
Mozilla today also has that base, but it still has about 1000 employees IIRC. It also pays more than $100k, even for EU devs, and of course also has to pay taxes and what not on top of that. And don’t forget the infrastructure, for running builds, distributing the software, running Firefox Sync, etc., which does not come cheap.
