
Firefox: We Don't Need Google's Money Any More - bmelton
http://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-maker-mozilla-we-dont-need-googles-money-anymore/
======
auvrw
> On smartphones, its share of browser usage is virtually nonexistent

that's surprising b/c i've had a good experience with firefox on android: i
particularly like the "send tab to desktop browser" feature, and although i'm
still using adb for debug, newer versions apparently do debugging direct with
desktop browser instances, no adb needed. for all i know, chrome has similar
features as well, so i'll just say that i haven't found firefox mobile
lacking.

i was totally unaware that mozilla was making that much money (or any
significant amount of money) from corporate deals, but that's probably b/c i'm
naieve. proprotionally larger donations will go to wikipedia instead of
mozilla in the future.

~~~
josteink
> > On smartphones, its share of browser usage is virtually nonexistent

> that's surprising

Not really.

Think the desktop. Think MSIE. For a long time it was a horrible browser, but
held its market-share simply by being the default. Because people don't know
they can change browser. Internet is the blue E. Etc.

Now think Android. All phones comes preloaded with Google Chrome, and most
people still don't recognize the idea that a browser is something you choose.
Since Chrome is a reasonably good browser (apart from sending your every
keystroke to the mothership), people have even less incentive to look up
alternate browsers.

And with Chrome being spammed everywhere Google has a piece of internet real
estate (No I will not "upgrade" my Firefox to Chrome. Please stop asking), it
keeps on winning usage on the desktop and thus helps cement its market-share
on Android too. People genuinely ask why Firefox can't sync with their Google-
account, implying that if it can't sync with Google, they don't think it can
sync at all.

Evidently that's how people work these days. I don't get it either.

~~~
rimantas

      > Think MSIE. For a long time it was a horrible browser,
      > but held its market-share simply by being the default.
    

That's not entirely true. IE since about ~4 was the best browser around (I
choose to ignore IE5 for Mac). NN4 was horrible. The problem with IE was that
it stagnated, so when Firefox came out it soon started to kick IEs ass and
only then the "default" part became a problem.

~~~
pcthrowaway
Really? I remember Netscape being hands down better than IE, but that might
have been after Netscape went out of business and before Mozilla formed, so
maybe around when IE4 came out in other words.

~~~
nl
I was a webdev back during the 90's browserwars, and I can confirm that
Netscape 4 was terrible (despite not wanting to admit it), IE4 was better and
IE5 was pretty good.

There was no Netscape 5, and Netscape 6 was an abomination. It wasn't until
Phoenix (the Firefox predecessor) that IE had anything to worry about. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers)

------
Sven7
Kudos to Mozilla!

Mozilla can be more ambitious. Or atleast as bold as they once were, when they
took on Microsoft.

If they can convince Baidu, Yahoo et al to keep them open, independent and
competitive against the likes of Apple, Google or Microsoft, then there is no
reason they can't pull the same thing off to fund an open social network or a
open search engine that can shake things up a little at Google and Facebook.

I am really quite sick of the Google and Facebook ivory towers deciding where
and how things should work. Most of these decisions are based on empire
defense rather than the common good.

They speak the language of the common good, but constantly do things that
benefit them disproportionately.

So what is their purpose at the end of the day, other than "... we are the
rich; we own america. God knows how. but we intend to keep it".

They need saving from themselves. And I am glad Mozilla exists like a Ralph
Nader does to keep things honest.

~~~
iSnow
>an open social network or a open search engine

Please don't! This has been both tried before and it ended in a waste of
resources, money (Diaspora, anyone?) and goodwill.

You can't beat the network effect of a social network with "we are open
source", people don't care that much. You either have a usecase no one else
has thought about, a technical killer feature or you don't try.

With a search engine, the network effect is not as big, but you better deliver
something consistently better than Google right from the start.

Both are not fields ripe for disruption as the web browser game was in the
mid-2000's.

~~~
001sky
Do you have any sense of proportion? FB is worth hundreds of BILLIONs and
somebody wasted $500K or whatever on diaspora...thats not a waste of resources
its a single FTE for at one of these companies today....Or do you have
something else in mind?

~~~
iSnow
I doubt the average FTE at FB costs 500 grant, but whatever. The point is,
Diaspora didn't get that money from google or one of the giants who could care
less. And it is now gone without making a lot of a splash.

But in the end, that's kind of my point - FB is humongous and I hope Mozilla
does not pick a fight there. As much as I despise FB, I'd rather Mozilla
enters the competitions they can win.

~~~
Sven7
This is a common misguided sense of what "winning" is.

Mozilla's contribution to the web, is not that they have the most popular
browser, but they have a browser with enough users that they get a seat at the
table to influence open standards.

And there is no reason they shouldn't replicate the model and expand that
sphere of influence into other domains. Diaspora failing is not a good enough
reason to bend over to Zuckerberg.

~~~
iSnow
>that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough
users

Well yes, but they arrived at this by having a vision what a good browser is
at a time when browsers were abysmal. They didn't arrive there by just wanting
an open-source browser. Yes, there was a network effect at play too (everyone
"optimized" for MSIE), but they were able to bootstrap their user base with
the tech-savvy who were fed up with the horrible HTML/CSS/JS support browsers
of the time offered.

They did not have that vision with FirefoxOS - they wanted to secure a
foothold in the mobile market, but had no compelling idea on how to gain that
in the face of Apple/Google. Similarly, disliking Zuck is a a really bad
reason to pour energy into yet another open social network.

------
firebones
I don't know nothin' about nothin', but Mozilla's involvement in Rust is a
huge plus that someone is focused on the right things. Don't have to be the
biggest thing in the world to do good for the world, or industry.

~~~
epoch1970
I get a sense that the hype surrounding Rust has fallen away rather quickly
since its 1.0 release around half a year ago. I won't speculate on why that
is, but for a language that was poised to become very popular very quickly,
we've seen remarkably little use of it so far.

The only major Rust projects at this point are Rust and Servo, and both of
them are quite closely tied to each other. There are a handful of libraries,
and lots of small-scale demos or sample code, but that's about it.

We aren't seeing companies across the board rushing to use it. We aren't
seeing more than a handful of significant open source projects using it. We
aren't seeing freelancers use it for their projects. We aren't seeing
researchers use it. We aren't seeing academics adopt it for teaching purposes.

Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did. While Rust
will likely have some future, its impact may be much smaller than many of us
anticipated even just a year ago.

~~~
Gankro
Rust is trying to improve the quality of core infrastructure, not random CRUD
apps. It takes time for large companies to rewrite and migrate these systems,
but it is indeed happening behind closed doors (source: private conversations
with said companies).

It's been less than a year since Rust 1.0.

~~~
gsnedders
This is entirely it—it's trying to displace C and C++, which are far more
entrenched than Java, Go, or Ruby.

------
hardwaresofton
Not sure I like the adversarial title, but it's great that the changes are
going over well. Firefox does a lot to better the entire ecosystem that is the
Web, and I'm super glad they're around.

Also generally my first move when I install FF on a new machine is to switch
out the default search provider so... This doesn't affect me too much

~~~
RodericDay
Just to counterbalance- I really like the adversarial title. I'm not the
biggest fan of Google the company, and Firefox distancing themselves from them
makes me happy.

~~~
392c91e8165b
Just to add even more counterbalance, I consider both Google and Mozilla
enemies of public discourse on the internet.

What I'm referring to is the fact that turning the web into a platform on
which a wide variety of applications can run makes it more complicated and
consequently more failure-prone and more tedious to use the web to publish and
to _read_ text, images and links to other pages of text and images.

I don't in isolation mind the creation of a new application-delivery platform
(and I appreciate the fact that the new application-delivery platform is not
the intellectual property of a single corporation). I just wish there were
some way to tell publishers of text, images and links to other pages of text
and images to switch from the new application-delivery platform to something
else, something whose design is not a compromise between the needs of the
application-delivery platform and the needs of publishers and readers of text,
images and links to other pages of text and images.

Documents work better when they are mere data as opposed to programs requiring
or assuming a complicated execution environment. HTML documents were better
than PostScript and MS-Word documents for this reason -- until JavaScript was
added to HTML, and web pages became programs assuming an execution
environment, and then that execution environment got more and more
complicated.

------
frik
A bad article. Mozilla relies on Yahoo's Search-Engine (Bing) cooperation
(instead of Google) and probably with partnerships like Pocket (will be
removed).

Mozilla's work on Firefox, Rust and Servo is great. Thunderbird and a real
multi-process browser could get a bit more love. The later probably can only
be achieved with a Servo based engine (probably not not with Gecko and its
XCOM, XUL legacy code - the current multi process work uses just two processes
(sandbox plugins) and doesn't scale - opening hundreds tabs won't spawn dozens
of processes as we know from IE and Chrome (with all its downsides but even
more upsides (stability, usability, UI latency)). Firefox with Firebug and all
its plugins is the best web development browser, Chrome with its ever changing
DevTools (UI changes) comes second (for me).

Mozilla's browser is very important for the open Web.

~~~
kibwen

      > probably with partnerships like Pocket
    

Mozilla has repeatedly stated that they're not receiving any money from
bundling Pocket, and I see no reason why they would lie about this considering
that they're actively seeking to diversify revenue sources. And even if you
think Mozilla is lying, there's no way that Pocket is putting up the hundreds
of millions of dollars necessary to make their hypothethical contribution to
Mozilla's coffers anything more than a rounding error.

~~~
frik
I haven't read every news. I never mentioned that someone is lying!? Nor do I
think that way. I just know it from Firefox, it appeared suddenly. And I had
to search on Google how to get rid of this unwanted service and disable it on
all family computers. I had to change settings in the hidden "about:config" \-
not even an UI setting was available. Why would they integrate a closed third
party service to an open source browser is beyond me. It seems the responsible
person had no idea what he decided and is out of touch with the product and
its community.

~~~
whyever
I never understood why they didn't just make it an add-on.

~~~
Excavator
Pocket¹, and also Hello are being migrated to extensions now.

1:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694)

------
tmalsburg2
Looking at Firefox' dwindling market share and Chrome's spectacular success,
Google is probably thinking: "We don't need Mozilla's browser any more."

~~~
fpgeek
That would be foolish.

Firefox is the only major browser not controlled by one of Google's major
competitors. Even without a deal for the search engine default, there are all
sorts of reasons that is valuable to Google (collaboration on web standards,
an insurance policy for browser design mistakes, not all Firefox users would
switch to Chrome and so on).

~~~
PeCaN
Also keeping Firefox around is basically insurance against (some) antitrust
lawsuits (not just for Google, for whatever browser maker sponsors them).

------
dimdimdim
Firefox created the revolution of "better browsers"! Google was smart enough
to have market their own browser by having themselves be the default search on
it. Once you land on Google, the "install Chrome for a better experience"
slowly had people move to it.

~~~
afsina
>the "install Chrome for a better experience" slowly had people move to it.

No, people moved to Chrome because it was a much better product.

~~~
josteink
To some people, that may be.

Either way, there's no denying that Google literally spammed Chrome
everywhere, and often with misleading or dishonest text.

"Your browser is outdated. Upgrade it now (to Chrome) for a better
experience", "Make youtube faster with Chrome" etc etc.

It was literally impossible to go anywhere on the web, without the top of
every second screen you visited saying "Upgrade to Chrome". It was massive and
it was dishonest.

Ofcourse moms and dads everywhere jumped on this, like they jump on the "free
scans" and "you have a virus" messages without ever considering if Chrome was
a different browser or there being any technical merit to the claims about
being better. Google used the exact same strategy as malware authors.

They even bundled it as a drive-by install with other popular software (like
Flash). Update flash and suddenly your default browser is Chrome, which
conveniently imported all your Firefox data and now reports all of that to
Google, one keystroke at a time.

It's _hard_ not to call this spyware.

Plain and simple: Chrome's marketshare is based on being evil and nothing
else.

These days Chrome may feel like a better product, because Google keeps making
their pages for Chrome and nothing else, using proprietary Google only
extensions.

And that reminds me of a story I've heard before... Something about there
E's..?

~~~
afsina
A spyware? Come on. To my experience it was the clear advantage on the design,
security and speed (launch and JS speed). It was way ahead of Firefox or IE. I
often asked people why they use Chrome they say it feels faster and not
cluttered. Sure commercials helped but IMO, it was the word of mouth made it
that popular.

~~~
josteink
Again: When you bundle it as a unwanted drive-by install and steal users'
data, it's hard to not call something spyware.

~~~
afsina
>'steal users data'

Please. Aren't we all tired of this?

~~~
josteink
If you download and install App A because you want App A, but unasked App B
also gets installed as a paid-for drive-by installation which sets itself as
your new default browser, which upon first launch (because its now default)
imports all your data, history, bookmarks and passwords from your actual
preferred browser and then proceeds to send all this data to App B's vendor
without making it clear to you what just happened...

How is that not stealing? How is that different from what we usually call
spyware?

There is nothing legitimate about how Chrome has hijacked a multitude of
users' PCs and their data. There's no way to defend this behaviour.

~~~
yuhong
"proceeds to send all this data to App B's vendor"

Proof?

~~~
josteink
It's called "sync" and you can bet everyone who has a Gmail account who gets
asked to "log into Google" when Chrome is opened (as their new default
browser) will enter their username and password without giving a second
thought to it or realizing what they just authorized.

That's ofcourse if they even noticed that their browser now looks slightly
different at all.

Voila. Data stolen. Or are you going to argue that this represents completely
concentfull and legitimately syncing?

~~~
yuhong
It is entirely optional, and don't fit normal definitions of "spyware".

~~~
josteink
You mistakenly assume this feature which by default requests your google login
for _sync_ will be understood by users as this, when they open their browser
and see "Log into google". Much more likely is that your casual user will
think they're logging into Gmail.

This is a dark UX anti-pattern, using the same technique as a regular scammer
or phishing site.

Google is absolutely, horrifyingly into evil territory here.

~~~
yuhong
I think what Win8.1 does with pushing you to use MS accounts during OOBE is a
much worse dark pattern than this.

~~~
Excavator
"I think hanging someone is worse than just giving them poison."

I don't particularly care about this spyware debate but I can't see how
something bad being better than something else bad bears any relevance unless
we are talking about choosing between two bad options.

------
DiabloD3
Hopefully this means they can achieve market share parity now. I'm seriously
considering switching from Chrome to Firefox due to how badly it behaves on my
Ivy Bridge era MBPr.

~~~
PebblesHD
On a MacBook I've found its almost impossible to beat Safari, it works
amazingly well and doesn't annihilate my battery life. Personal choice though,
I'm not committed to any specific browser and all do certain things better
than the rest.

~~~
TwoBit
Safari does seem to be the battery life king. I wonder how it manages to do
that. Could be related to why it's a slower performer than Firefox and Chrome.

~~~
whyever
I think Apple invested a lot of resources in making software battery-friendly.
I'm not sure this has happened yet for Firefox or Chrome.

~~~
gsnedders
So did MS, which is why IE often does better than others on Windows.

------
Grue3
But then they remove great features like Tab Groups because it's "too
expensive to maintain them". I would actually pay them to maintain this
feature indefinitely, I'm sure others will as well.

~~~
joonoro
This is the first I've heard about Tab Groups being removed and that makes me
sad. However the comments in the bug tracker [0] make it sound like it isn't
about the money. They also have a migration plan for existing users to back up
their data and move on to an extension [1].

[0]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222550](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222550)

[1] [https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-
Groups](https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups)

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-
groups/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/)

------
balladeer
I see some comments treating this news as if it is a win for something like
privacy advocacy. Here's what it is and that too in the very first lines:

> The organization once banked on the millions that Google paid for search
> traffic from the Firefox browser.

Then, there is this:

> Now it relies on Yahoo, Baidu and others, and it expects revenue to grow.

and this:

> is confident new search-engine deals will bring in even more money

------
bobajeff
I wonder what they'd do if Yahoo decides not to renew their deal with them.
Would they go back to Google or go to Bing? What if no search provider thinks
they are worth the amount they are getting with their current deals?

~~~
zobzu
then they get no money. as long as they have market share people will pay no
matter what.

when they dont, they're dead.

------
iSnow
It pains me to say, but I'd rather Mozilla used all their man-power to fix the
god-awful performance of desktop Firefox.

Granted, I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time.
But I fail to understand why that leads to such a dramatic slow-down after
having the browser open for a day or two. If I type text, it will appear with
a delay of up to 20s - on a 16GB computer where a lot of RAM is free. And with
only uBlock.

Something in the core of Firefox is completely rotten.

~~~
polymatter
perhaps its flash? I keep having the same problem and I suspect flash

~~~
realusername
Definitely flash, especially on Linux, just moving it to 'click to play' is
making the browser much much faster.

~~~
FreeFull
I think it's 'click to play' by default now.

------
forrestthewoods
They're still completely dependent on money from _someone_ for default search
status.

------
1024core
> In 2014, that deal accounted for most of the nonprofit organization's $330
> million in revenue, according to financial results just now released for
> that year

Wow, that's a lot of cash. What are the top expenditures of Mozilla?

~~~
bzbarsky
[https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...](https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf) page 6 says that the $318 million
in expenses in 2014 broke down like so:

$40 million "branding and marketing" $38 million "general and administrative"
$10 million depreciation $13 million "program services" (whatever that is)
$213 million "software development"

Note that this is not counting income taxes (another $2.5 million) as an
expense, because this is basically the "how much taxable profit is there?"
calculation.

Nate that
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation)
claims Mozilla has "1000+" employees; if that claim is true I would expect
$200+ million just for salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, office space, etc
(obviously depending on where the employees are located).

------
krick
So, let's make DuckDuckGo default in Europe then?

~~~
dotch
Mozilla cares about good user experience more than money and sometimes even
more than self interest and principles. Unfortunately the quality of
DuckDuckGo's search results for non-english-speaking countries are nowhere
close to google's, which is why google is still the default there.

~~~
krick
Actually, I kinda am from non-english speaking country myself and use a couple
more languages that are not English. Funny enough, Google localization is one
thing that made me switch to DuckDuckGo. Somehow, Google thinks if my IP is
from Latvia — it has to speak Latvian to me (which I'm admittedly a bit less
comfortable with than English), if it's from Netherlands — it has to speak
Dutch (which I don't speak at all). And (aside from manually adding bizzare
GET-arguments into url) it doesn't even allow me to chose language myself. One
evening it asked me to confirm some user-agreement in Latvian before I'm
allowed to continue using search, I got annoyed and said "That's enough".

Yes, in some languages Google search is sometimes superior, but the difference
isn't huge and I always can type "!g something" into DuckDuckGo if I need to
(and I don't have to confirm any user agreements in that case).

In fact, what still makes me use Google search sometimes isn't localization or
some clever heuristic features like flight search, but "search by image"
feature. I don't know any other engine that would do that nearly as good as
Google. TinEye is left far behind, unfortunately.

~~~
sveme
That Google feature pisses me off massively as well. Let's call it premature
personalization. I'm in Germany, yet sometimes I'd actually like to visit
news.google.co.uk or .com. Yet it seems to sometimes redirect me to the German
news.google or the one I had previously open. On one of my laptops it even
redirects me to the Italian one, yet I don't think I ever visited that one.
Maybe, just maybe, google could stop thinking it is so much smarter than its
users?

By the way, DuckDuckGo now has country/language localization as well, though
it does not seem to be the default.

------
zmmmmm
I feel like Mozilla ought to be banking / investing a large slice of their
revenue and aiming to live off the profits. They need to turn themselves into
a self funded foundation that truly needs money from no one. They definitely
shouldn't get used to rivers of gold flowing in, especially as their market
share keeps falling.

------
ddingus
Good, I hope. Long time Firefox fan here.

------
joeblau
While this might be true, I don't think this needed to be said out loud.
Statements like this always have a way of turning into "famous last words"
sometime down the line.

------
atmosx
<OT>

I like how the article references twitter quotes:

    
    
      <span data-popup="twitter">"We're going where the users are going,"<span class="icon-small-twitterBlue"></span></span>

</span>

</OT>

------
Patronus_Charm
Firefox is my second favorite browser behind Safari. I am actually glad they
got that albatross off their back.

------
bitmapbrother
>Firefox: We Don't Need Google's Money Any More

So you're just reliant on Yahoo/Bing money now.

~~~
wpietri
Sure, they're reliant on _money_. But since they have multiple options, then
they're no longer reliant on _Google_ money. It's a big step forward for them.

------
richardboegli
Well if Firefox doesn't want it, I might go and ask for some :P

------
justinator
Is it just me, or is CNET breaking the back button?

------
z3t4
So who types in URL's or use bookmarks!?

------
AC__
I love Firefox, their addon api is pretty fucking sweet. I've made 2 super
simple addons, one to kill a paywall on my local guardian site and a second
just last night to easily set lightblue background with black text using a
context-menu button, literally took 10 minutes. Can't beat Mozilla
documentation.

~~~
Redoubts
Then why are there 20 chrome extensions for HackerNews, but none for FF?

~~~
Excavator
None?

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/tag/hacker%20news](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/tag/hacker%20news)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/tag/hackernews](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/tag/hackernews)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-
su...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-suite/)

Or do you mean "none" is some other way?

