
Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal - teraku
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search/
======
greatgib
I just had a look at the financial documents for Mozilla, and I have to say
that, for an organisation that promote transparency, their financial info are
quite opaque, minimally detailed, and secretive.

[https://foundation.mozilla.org/fr/about/public-
records/](https://foundation.mozilla.org/fr/about/public-records/)

Conveniently for them and curiously, they are only publishing the
"consolidated" statements for the Moz Foundation.

But, for example, it looks like that the individual statements for the Mozilla
Corp are never published or disclosed. That is very annoying as it is the main
"entity" of the organization.

There is also no details about the split of costs and revenues associated with
each main projects / services products / groups that are worked on for a given
year.

So, for example, no one can have a clear idea of how much money is spent on
dev, marketing or administration of Firefox versus Pocket versus VPN versus
charities versus fellowships, etc...

If you look at the content of the limited financial documents, you can even
have the impression that the foundation has no interest for the development of
Firefox itself, and that they are just interested by it as a cash cow that
generates (with the search deals) huge funds to give to whatever charities
that Mozilla leaders are interested in.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
This is why I've switched to Chromium Edge on Macos and Windows 10.

With Edge, I'm under no illusions with regard to what I'm getting myself into.

~~~
SturgeonsLaw
Seems like you're jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, no? Mozilla
might be obscuring their financial details, but on balance they are one of the
most ethical entities on the internet.

Google and Microsoft both have the corporate predator instinct in their DNA.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I'm already running Windows on three of the PCs I run, so I'm fucked there
anyway.

------
walterbell
Thunderbird is funded by users. There is currently no way to donate directly
to Firefox separately of Mozilla general fund.

Can initial steps be taken to financially firewall Firefox development from
the rest of Mozilla, as Thunderbird has done successfully? Start by moving the
web standards advocacy brain trust to the separate org. Ask users to
donate/subscribe. Begin the transition now, don't wait for the next
negotiation with Alphabet/Google.

As donations grow, more Firefox teams can move to the independent legal org.

~~~
dleslie
> Can initial steps be taken to financially firewall Firefox development from
> the rest of Mozilla, as Thunderbird has done successfully?

It would have to be a fork with user support. Mozilla doesn't have much
incentive to distance itself from its core product and even less incentive to
provide a means by which their users can dictate what policies and products
their financial support is for.

Mozilla has too many individuals in its organization, including its executive,
who are not so closely tied to Firefox for this idea to succeed.

~~~
prepend
I would definitely donate to a Gozilla fork.

~~~
chrisseaton
I don’t think Gozilla is anything to do with Mozilla is it?

~~~
oblio
> The project took its name, "Mozilla", after the original code name of the
> Netscape Navigator browser — a portmanteau of "Mosaic and Godzilla".

~~~
chrisseaton
Yeah I know that... but what does this have to do with Gozilla? I don’t think
Gozilla has ever been a Mozilla or Netscape product. The names are similar but
they’re unrelated.

~~~
aesh2Xa1
The only relationship between "Godzilla" and "Mozilla" is that portmanteau.

I think the OP's sentiment was that the name "Godzilla," is awesome and it
would elate him to donate for the name alone.

~~~
chrisseaton
I think you’re possibly misreading - they said ‘Gozilla’ not ‘Godzilla’.

Gozilla is proprietary networking software, nothing to do with Mozilla. So
Mozilla can’t fork Gozilla.

Godzilla is a monster character and where Mozilla gets its name.

------
compsciphd
What does mozilla spend money on outside of personal costs?

Mozilla had approximately 1000 employees. If they are grossing 450M a year in
revenue and 50% of their expenses are personal costs, tht means on average
they are spending 225K per employee. for a non profit (even if its a non
profit in the tech field and has to compete with tech firms for employees),
that seems high. i.e. if one would compare them to Series A or B startups in
SV, those would be reasonably high compensation packages (albiet without the
stock option upside, but most stock options aren't worth the paper they are
printed on, even for series A companies perhaps a bit more likelihood with
series B).

Even if one says its 33%, that's still 150K per average employee expense.
while that wouldn't result in a great SV salary, its would probably be
competitive in most of the world.

just trying to understand where all the money goes?

~~~
jefftk
_> 225K per employee_

That is the cost of these employees to their employer ("fully loaded"). The
fully loaded cost is typically about twice the employee's nominal
compensation, which would be ~$113k. This is about 60% of entry level comp at
a FAANG company and about 35% of mid-career comp. [1]

Mozilla employs a lot of people who are willing to work under market rate to
do a job they believe in, but I doubt they would be able to get and retain the
people they need if they offered substantially less.

[1]
[https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Apple,Amazon...](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Apple,Amazon,Netflix&track=Software%20Engineer)

~~~
gavinray
What the hell, average mid-career software compensation for non-FAANG
companies is ~$350k?!

Are you joking?

~~~
bzbarsky
Parent's comment was explicitly about FAANG companies.

But similar numbers apply to companies that are competing for talent with the
FAANGs.

~~~
jefftk
_> companies that are competing for talent with the FAANGs_

Which I think solidly includes Mozilla.

~~~
bzbarsky
Yes, that is rather the point. ;)

------
jacquesm
Cynical me sees a company that laid off 25% of their workforce _knowing full
well they had another 3 years of funding in the bag_. There is no way those
lay-offs could not have waited until after the Google deal was inked (which
was extremely likely to happen). But of course it is a lot harder to fire
people after stuffing your piggy bank at that level. People might ask some
pointed questions.

~~~
fzzzy
What makes you assume that the google deal will fund the previous burn rate
for another 3 years?

~~~
jacquesm
A rough back of the envelope calculation. I could be off by a bit but
regardless, you don't fire people in a situation like this. It is indecent.
400 to 450 million per year is what the article mentions. 400 million divided
by the former 1000 employees leaves 400K / employee on average. That should be
_plenty_.

~~~
Closi
The worker/company relationship is always transactional: As long as companies
feel a worker generates (a certain proportion) more in value than their salary
they will be retained. A workers value generation depends on both the
effectiveness of that worker and the overall financial situation of the
company (Eg total revenues).

They thought that they didn’t have that ratio right which is why any company
makes layoffs. You might personally think that companies have some sort of
moral obligation to retain as many of their staff as possible, but the law and
economics don’t share those views out of the box.

~~~
jacquesm
It's not the law, it's not economics, it's ethics. I know that's a hard
concept for some.

~~~
Closi
Well ethics isn’t always a straightforward argument - you could argue that
restructures strengthen the long term viability of a business, which can
sometimes retain more jobs in the long term.

Additionally for not-for-profits the redirection of funds directly towards
their ‘mission’ can again be argued as an ethical thing to do (eg for
charities more money can go directly to whatever cause they are supporting) so
ethics is never really a black/white thing.

~~~
jacquesm
Fair enough, but from the point of view of those just laid off it is probably
a pretty clear cut case.

------
Abishek_Muthian
Now, this makes the reason for layoffs and the blame on COVID-19 much more
suspicious. I thought Google had really shrunk the search engine deal, due to
Ad revenue slow down[1] and may be the pandemic reason was indirectly true.

I just hope that the 're-structure' wasn't dictated by the Google itself.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24141592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24141592)

------
thinkingkong
The new browser wars are weird. Google seems to be weaponizing its stack /
fleet of products to make firefox less desireable. Firefox might not have much
leverage when this deal comes up for renewal. Really hope they find a way to
build some sustainable alternative business models during this timeline. I
think thats more of a motivating factor in the recent layoffs + their
incubator-ish strategy.

~~~
m000
Mozilla Corp. need to recognize that running Google Docs better than Chrome is
a battle they can't win. It will always be a catch-up game.

I believe that a viable strategy for them would be to instead focus on making
Firefox better than Chrome on everything else but the Google Stack. If the
Firefox experience is better on all other sites, Chrome will be gradually
marginalized. It will be just a program that you keep open to do "work",
similar to running MS-Office, while Firefox which will be considered the main
web browser. This approach would keep the Google cash (from the default search
engine deal) flowing.

But they should also work on alternative sources of income. A Firefox Account
that syncs passwords (Lockwise), bookmarks (Sync) and provides file sharing
capabilities (Firefox Send) is a service worth paying for. But they have to
put some work on properly integrating all these features. And most
importantly, they need to get rid from the lock-in mentality and support all
the services tied to the Firefox Account on competing browsers by
developing/porting the corresponding extensions.

~~~
pchanda
>> I believe that a viable strategy for them would be to instead focus on
making Firefox better than Chrome on everything else but the Google Stack. If
the Firefox experience is better on all other sites, Chrome will be gradually
marginalized.

Quite difficult when every developer I see is testing and verifying their
product on chrome

~~~
the_other
Hi!

I use FF as my primary dev browser. The debugger lets it down and the JSON
viewer in the network tab is annoying... but everything else is excellent. The
CSS layout inspectors are particularly good.

~~~
niij
On the JSON viewer being annoying: is the issue that it shows the information
twice for all fields? That's what drives me crazy. I wonder how hard it would
be for a newcomer to make a fix for this.

------
cashsterling
FWIW... I work at a (~50 person) engineering design and fabrication firm. Our
cost for Sr. scientist level folks is about ~300k USD fully burdened.

At a big pharma company in the bay area... that number was more like ~400k USD
for a principle engineer.

So for Moz: ~286k USD per employee in the bay area is cheap, IMO... and I
imagine their is a big distribution in that number across employee level and
job descriptions.

~~~
manquer
More than half of Mozilla staff are remote , there are very very few companies
outside big tech that can support 1,000 strength office in Bay Area, and it
would be inefficient to do so.

It is true that for some skills Bay Area is the best and perhaps only
available talent pool, even in high tech company like Mozilla that kind of
talent is maybe 10-20 % of their overall workforce , for the rest there is
cheaper and equally good alternatives available

------
gmb2k1
So was it really necessary to lay-off the servo and wasm and security teams?

~~~
mrweasel
Yes, they need the money to build stuff that will provide them with a steady
stream of income from other sources, like online collaborative code editors, a
VPN solution, a new diesel powered truck, a Firefox branded amusement park and
an adult streaming service.

I love you Mozilla, but please stop. Find a way to make money on what you do
best: Firefox.

~~~
TheCraiggers
How? Their three main competitors: Chrome, Edge (if that even counts, being
Chromium based), and Safari are completely free AND installed by default on
their respective operating system(s). "Not being installed by default" is
already a very high hurdle for mainstream acceptance. If you tack on some sort
of cost, I can't see that working well for adoption.

Personally, I think they're on the right track with the VPN service. VPN
services are already something people are used to paying for, and one of the
biggest issues with VPN services are trying to figure out who you can trust
out of all the nameless shell companies out there. Mozilla is a trusted brand.

~~~
gmb2k1
What I don't get about the VPN thing is, that they're just a reseller of
mullvad VPN. So, even if I trust Mozilla, that isn't of any help, if I don't
trust mullvad.

And if I do trust mullvad, why wouldn't I buy access from them directly? The
only reason to get the Mozilla VPN is, to help them to a little commission for
ideological reasons.

~~~
heavyset_go
Mozilla famously signs contracts with firms that secure extra privacy
protections for their customers. It's what they did with CloudFlare and
Comcast.

If I were to use CloudFlare's VPN service of Comcast's DNS, I'd use it through
Mozilla because their contracts stipulate extra protections.

~~~
discordance
Interesting... so Mozilla is kind of acting like a certification and licensing
service for other privacy services

~~~
heavyset_go
That's one way to look at it. The way I see it is that these partnerships
prove that companies don't need to collect and share private data to make a
buck.

------
rbecker
> As a non-profit open-source operation, Mozilla spends as much as it
> receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m

I'd sleep easier if Mozilla saved some cash for a rainy day. Is there really
no way to maintain a browser with less than a quarter _billion_ dollars a
year?

~~~
teraku
In the comments of the article one person mentions that libre offices runs on
a little less than a million a year.

I'd argue that Mozilla has a few more repos that need mending (i.e. Rust,
Servo, MDN, ...) but if you pay an average of 100k$ salary and have like 10
techpeople per team plus some management/community management/project
management you could do a rough estimate of <10 core teams * 15 people *
100k$/year + 5m$ for infrastructure/rent == 20m$>.

Even if you pay your CEO 2,5m$ afterwards, you'd still have loads of money
left.

Not sure where all of it goes. And I'm a bit reluctant to just say "bad
management" in terms of money allocation. Although I do hate this cut in
workforce and feel like it's the worst management decision in tech in recent
history.

~~~
esrauch
They have somewhere around 750 employees still after the layoffs; it's hard to
understand your comment that that both says they should have 150 employees but
reducing their teams is a bad decision.

------
donkeyd
I've been using FF for a while now and I like the privacy side of it. When I
made the switch, I also tried to ditch Google for DDG, but I haven't been able
to make it work. The results in DDG always seem to be pumped by SEO and are
more often affiliate marketing blogs. Google often manages to bring me the
right results right away.

~~~
mc32
I used to feel that way too but now I feel google is full of results bloat.
The serps are full of idiotic social media results and entertainment results
than original content results (blogs, news sites, commercial, personal sites,
etc). Search has become frustrating everywhere.

~~~
Kelteseth
I switched my SE to DDG on my mobile devices. It is 100% useless when I want
to search for local news/events from my country/city (Southern Germany) and I
always have to fall back to Google. What's quite funny is that last month a
couple of DDG billboards started popping up in my city.

~~~
magicalhippo
Same here for Norway. I can flip the switch for Norwegian results, but it's
sticky, so I have to remember to flip it back when I want to search for
everything else. All in all way to tedious.

~~~
fsflover
Did you try this:
[https://duckduckgo.com/settings](https://duckduckgo.com/settings)?

~~~
magicalhippo
What setting are you referring to? The region one is the same as on the search
result page. I find it's way too powerful for technical searches, obscuring
the stuff I want.

So I keep having to flip it on and off.

~~~
fsflover
You can change the settings on that page and get the link which contains these
setting in the URL. Next time you go to [https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=no-
no](https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=no-no) instead of
[https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

~~~
magicalhippo
Ow, yea ok. Still tedious though.

~~~
fsflover
How is it tedious? Are you always entering duckduckgo.com by hand?

~~~
magicalhippo
No, but it means I can't use the search bar and have to keep in mind if I want
regional or global search. With Google I just use the search bar and get my
results.

~~~
fsflover
I think it must be possible to make the new ddg address for search bar. In
Google it is always user-tailored and local search I guess.

------
surfsvammel
I’m a Firefox user. I don’t use Google search. But I have no problem Mozilla
getting money from Google as long as I can choose to use another search
engine.

------
bogomipz
>"Crucially, the organization vowed to double down and "ship new products
faster and develop new revenue streams" – products like its bookmarking app
Pocket, its virtual social meeting rooms Hubs, and its $4.99-a-month VPN
subscription service.

>“The people who are included in the reduction are both true Mozillians, and
professionals with high degrees of skill and expertise and commitment," CEO
Mitchell Baker said in a memo. "This action is not in any way – not, not, not
– a reflection on personal or professional qualities.”

>Mozilla's Servo team, which was working away on a new browser engine for
Firefox in Rust, was closed down by the cuts. The group working on the Mozilla
Developer Network – the essential bible for web devs and programmers – was hit
hard, too, as were some of its security, policy, and tooling staffers.

How exactly would folks working on things like browsers engines, Security,
policy and tooling not be extremely valuable for working on "products like its
bookmarking app Pocket, its virtual social meeting rooms Hubs, and its
$4.99-a-month VPN subscription service."?

Further the fact that $400-450 million dollars in new funding is announced
days after large layoffs is says a lot about CEO Mitchell Baker's management
and values. This CEO is the one who should be looking for a new job right now.

~~~
StillBored
Teams that instead of fixing their main product, go off and create even larger
products that don't have immediate revenue streams do little to "ship new
products faster" or help the bottom line.

This is going to be down voted, but if I were running a software dev team
charged with producing X and they spent all their time doing Y because they
"need" a new tool I would question their value. Particularly if all the
competitors are kicking our butts, and don't seem to need said tool.

So, rust is great and all, but is mozilla really the org that needs to ground
up create a new langage/ecosystem? Outside of the tiny developer community
using rust, what does it bring to the end users of firefox (you know the other
few billion people on the planet who aren't developers) that couldn't have
been done with just spending the time to fix compiler warnings/errors and
enable some basic code analysis/linter functionality on the existing code
base?

(which yes, I've fixed some bugs in firefox, its a giant mess, every time a
new GCC comes out, firefox needs to have bugs patched just to run).

~~~
bogomipz
My larger point was why If you have talented developers and hundreds of
millions of dollars in new funding can't you simply give those developers the
option to stay with the company and refocus their efforts on the new areas in
which you seek to grow the business? It doesn't seem like that was even a
consideration.

Also there were also far more than just Rust folks affected by this layoff.

------
wwwwwwwww
Mozilla just exists so that Google can lie about there "existing competition"
on the browser market.

~~~
missedthecue
Edge, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and new upstarts like Brave seems like a
reasonably competitive market to me.

~~~
stu2b50
Maybe numerically, but Chrome alone has 70% marketshare. When you consider
that edge runs off of the Chrome engine, Google controls like >80% of how the
world sees the web essentially.

If Chrome adds a new feature, everyone else must adapt as well.

~~~
missedthecue
For the average user, Chrome is just the best browser. There is nothing wrong
with 70% of consumers liking them more than other browsers because the
switching cost is free and there are plenty of alternatives.

~~~
gruez
On desktop, maybe. But on mobile? Firefox for Android (or fenix), or any other
ad-blocking browser (eg. brave) is unequivocally better.

~~~
missedthecue
Perhaps. People spend less time on the web then when on desktops though. While
on mobile they're prefer native apps.

By the way, Chrome's market share has been trending down for a while. Only at
58% now.

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/272697/market-share-
desk...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272697/market-share-desktop-
internet-browser-usa/)

------
chmln
This is practically the end of Mozilla, a sad result of horrendous
mismanagement. Instead of pouring all its resources to make a superior browser
and thus attract more money by having bigger market share, they just
stagnated. They bought pocket and gutted Servo for virtual reality. They
invested in superficial political activism and paid exorbitant amount of money
to execs.

Firefox is inferior in all regards except privacy. People will claim it's just
as fast as others, but even if it wasn't obviously false it wouldn't be
enough. It should be undoubtedly better in all regards. With all the money of
Mozilla they could've built a better, faster browser but they just didn't want
to badly enough. And that's the tragedy.

------
dzamo_norton
To someone who doesn't know better this looks a bit like: "We really like
funding you but we don't like this project of yours that looks like it will
eventually produce a fast browser without memory bugs and into which we cannot
seamlessly introduce data collection, etc. If you can... make that go away
then we'll just sign this cheque."

------
PaulHoule
Was dispersing the MDN and Rust teams part of the deal?

~~~
threatofrain
Google may want Mozilla around for anti-trust defense, but it's not like
Google's particularly interested in how tightly Mozilla runs the ship.

~~~
buran77
On PCs Chrome has ~70% market share with Firefox being a distant second with
<8%. On mobile Firefox's market share is a negligible 0.7% compared to
Google's 64%. If Google wants Firefox to stick around it's certainly not
because it would give them any plausible defense in an antitrust lawsuit.

~~~
PaulHoule
If it gets any more lopsided than it is, Google will be in trouble.

------
fritex
Kind of a, each update for Mozilla Developer version f*cks up the working
version before. More and more I have to change the settings "about:config".

I am really thinking to switch from Mozilla Developer and Google search engine
to something else.

Any recommendations?

------
The_rationalist
How much % loss of revenue for the new deal?

~~~
compsciphd
article says

"However, our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year
between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held
earlier this year."

so 400-450 million just from google.

per google, in 2018, their entire revenue was only 450 million.

[https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=moz...](https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=mozilla+revenue)

so if they are making more than 50 million from the rest of their country
deals, it doesn't seem like revenue would have dropped that much

~~~
freshsqueeze
Revenue had never dropped for Mozilla. COVID had zero affect on their revenue
stream as they lied in their layoff post. They get all their money from Google
ad money to $500M a year guaranteed, with $500M in the bank, and $500M/yr
upcoming. The layoffs were just to secure the execs' lifetime pensions.

------
0xUser
"mega-millions", so... "trillions" ?

~~~
ffpip
No. kilo-billions

~~~
DrBazza
Microquintillions, surely?

------
cameron_b
So what browser are you switching to?

