Mozilla pleads with Uncle Sam to not turn off that sweet, sweet Google search money Mozilla, which in 2023 received about 75 percent of its revenue from royalties paid by Google and other search providers for search engine usage in Firefox, worries that the US Justice Department's proposed ban on the very same Google Search payments would be rather harmful. American federal prosecutors last week filed their …
Expensive?
But Mozilla started as a not for profit, made a browser engine, and the Servo that they mentioned has enough money, and other, smaller projects like Dillo and Palemoon continues on.. as was mentioned, Opera did it for some years, and Microsoft as well.
Perhaps only because they're trying to optimize certain things to excess, make it cater to unnecessary business demands, and not make something that just renders HTML (and CSS). Potentially even using node.js or similar for javascript -- a project that already exists. (Yes, yes, Node comes from Chrome's browser engine, and . . .)
Perhaps the competition of *more* _smaller_ browsers will be better overall for the open web, if not better for singular corporate interests. (Or for-profit paychecks from non-profits, for that matter.)
Perhaps it's the market dominance and anti-trust that lead to other browsers, such as Opera and IE, not working out in the end.
Admitted, it *seems* more painful to rip the leech off - but likely (foresight is hard..) things will be overall better in time to come. Like a prisoner being released, and not having a system to manage their life any more - how do they even start to manage their own, now?
The other smaller projects you're talking about nearly universally take an existing thing, sometimes the modern version, and build around it. That takes less money because the expensive stuff is already being done by the deep-pocketed. Often, that works out fine enough, the same reason why there's dozens of distros that wrap around Debian or Ubuntu to provide a preconfiguration, only a few distros at Debian's level that assemble all the components, and even fewer kernels.
Nobody's stopping someone from making a new browser engine from scratch, but few people are trying. Those that try generally don't have a lot of success because a lot of browser users want a little more than just rendering HTML and CSS. If Firefox died, I'd expect that plenty of people would continue to work around the codebase, but it would decay with few people working on boring but necessary maintenance. That would more likely be a slow loss of function rather than an immediate death. However, a lot of nontechnical people who find one thing that doesn't work, install Chrome and it does work, and don't find Chrome to be broken will continue to use Chrome.
"Turns out, maintaining a browser is expensive, something that's very hard to fund when you're a not-for-profit "
It's really not, if you look at the expense sheets of Mozilla. What costs them the most is not "maintaining the browser", but all the executive pays. Like Mozilla's CEO made $7 million already back in 2022, and the compensation most likely went up several millions since. And Mozilla has like two dozen second line executives who also make around half to a million, at least.
The maintanence and development of the Firefox browser most likely could have been secured for a decade from just one year of revenue Mozilla got from Google (which were around half a billion or more each year), if they only wouldn't have it all spent on executive pays, again, every single year.
OK, so you list maybe 30 million for executive pay, out of 500 million from Google. That leaves $470 million. You claim to have looked at expense sheets? And somehow concluded that 30 is near 100% of 500? The executives are quite likely overpaid, but obviously that's not where ALL the Google gravy goes.
"OK, so you list maybe 30 million for executive pay, out of 500 million from Google. That leaves $470 million. You claim to have looked at expense sheets? And somehow concluded that 30 is near 100% of 500? "
No, that's _your_ conclusion, because you obviously failed math class and can't argue what I actually wrote, so, you made up your own straw man.
The good news is though that you - or someone you know an actually knows numbers - can look at Mozilla's financial reports, and realize that what I wrote (and which is not what _you_ wrote above) is true: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/
You can also check for ex. Opera's financial report for comparison: https://investor.opera.com/news-releases/news-release-details/opera-reports-third-quarter-2024-results-acceleration-beyond/ and realize, that they just do fine and can actually add more new features to their browser than does Mozilla, despite having only 1/4th of the yearly revenue, and about the same market share.
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