Nobody uses Ladybird, at this point it's vaporware. And Thunderbird is still based on Firefox.
The development of Firefox costs around $200 million per year. That's more than what Wikimedia can get from donations, and Wikipedia is a website that everyone uses. And you want to rely on donations from people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
And let's say that it manages to bring those costs down to $100 million per year or less and manages to get it from donations (when pigs will fly) … it still has to compete with a Chrome whose estimated cost goes over $1 billion per year.
If it costs $200 million a year to develop Firefox, then their management team is guilty of gross incompetence.
I am betting this is really paying for the crappy side projects and HUGE pay for the Mozilla Foundation people (just like all the BS spending the Wikimedia foundation does) and has nothing to do with Firefox itself.
Maintaining a fully compliant, secure, cross-platform web browser that competes with the biggest companies on earth absolutely is going to have costs like that.
I think Mozilla Foundation receives something like 5 to 10%. I'm not against the argument that foundations can be bloated and inefficient, but at this point, this anti Mozilla narrative is completely out of control and almost purely speculation driven.
They spent $35 million in 2022 to establish a venture capital fund... they are definitely using a lot more than 10% for BS not related to developing Firefox.
It would have been 5.9% of that year's annual revenue in 2022. It's not even from their annual revenue streams to begin with, it was a one time pull from their $1.2 billion (at the time) of total assets which includes a big pile of investments. Those assets actually grew by more in one year than the entire than the amount put into the VC fund. Also I thought we wanted them to be making side bets to position them for success in the long term?
There's also no cause and effect connection between the VC fund and their market share. It didn't siphon resources away from developers, and there's no such thing as a missing browser feature that would have restored all the market share had they simply not invested in a VC fund.
The 5-10% figure was in reference to 2021 but I think I was overstating that and the Mozilla Foundation actually gets something like 2% annually.
More charitably, it's driven by frustration more than speculation. Browsers are old technology, and some people think that maybe hurling huge amounts of money at stuff like this is unreasonable because projects can/should be "finished" at some point. Forever-development is very often actively harmful, and if it's actually necessary then it might be hiding problems in the wider ecosystem.
It's good that we have alternatives to chrome, but on the other hand the alternatives are not winning, and they prevent any chance of regulation (or having a reasonable discussion about whether chrome sucks, as we see here). There's a strong argument that mozilla IS google's antitrust shield.
Also can we just take a minute to seriously try to imagine the leader of the "Makefile foundation" receiving $2.4M in compensation, and generally burning a lot more money on dead-end "innovations" and then rebranding as "OpenSource.. And Advertising". Make is 20 years older than Mozilla, but does it look like the browser project will be finished or moving in a great direction any time soon while there's big opportunities for grift and graft?
Signed, a grateful but nevertheless annoyed and skeptical firefox user
> Also can we just take a minute to seriously try to imagine the leader of the "Makefile foundation" receiving $2.4M in compensation, and generally burning a lot more money on dead-end "innovations" and then rebranding as "OpenSource.. And Advertising". Make is 20 years older than Mozilla, but does it look like the browser project will be finished or moving in a great direction any time soon while there's big opportunities for grift and graft?
Make is pretty slow which is why `ninja`, funnily enough, was invented to speed up Google Chrome build times.
I’m the cto of the fork foundation where we provide important alternatives to spoons and work hard to serve our community with the kind of necessary innovations that putting modern food into that hole in your face requires.
If you think about it spending a few billion a year on R+D is the least you could expect when modern food is changing at such a rapid pace! And aren’t you glad the whole world isn’t spoons? I decline to discuss personal compensation because I don’t see how that’s relevant to the issues here!
I think it's unfair to call Ladybird vaporware this early. There's nothing suspicious about their development schedule for the scope of the thing they're trying to build.
I agree I don't think it should be in the alternative browser discussion until they do produce something, however.
And also, I think there's a positive to say about Lady Bird here, which is that in the event they succeed, that's as much a narrative about an extraordinarily talented and committed developer, And if they're able to put forward a credible browser, it will be a soaring achievement for them. Not necessarily something I would expect as a kind of default status quo expectation.
I think if you get these alternative from the ground up browsers, you get extremely limited things like Net Surf, noble efforts that I respect, but not going against the billions of dollars Google can throw into modern browser development.
YouTube is a 1st party service for Google, so you can't ad-block their tracking. And you aren't ad-blocking YouTube due to the spying, so don't be disingenuous.
Yes, it really costs that much.
Given Chrome's vast market share, I'm pretty sure its users like it. And you know what? Most users won't mind switching to uBlock Origin Lite, and the elephant in the room is that “manifest v3” also increases security, with Chrome being indeed the most secure browser.
> And you aren't ad-blocking YouTube due to the spying, so don't be disingenuous.
I don't watch YouTube. If all those influencers want to reach me, they should give me a written summary, I don't have time to listen to talking heads for hours.
However, if I ever follow an youtube link, it will be ad blocked because i run firefox with uBlock Origin, for as long as uBlock Origin blocks youtube ads by default.
>Does it? Or that's what the mozilla organization wastes on harebrained initiatives overall?
Yes! They published their 990, and it's mostly software development, but also stuff like legal and compliance and marketing. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but last time I checked, if you really want to make this argument, I think it relates to the CEO pay and the Mozilla Foundation and its advocacy, which are something around the, you know, taken together something like 55 million or so. You can make the argument that administration and operations as well as marketing and legal and compliance are bloated in some sense, but then you'd still have to make the case that there was a viable path to reinvesting that into development in a way that would change the tide when it comes to market share. But I think that is a confused vision of how market share works because the real drivers are Google's dominant position in search and on Android in the ability to push Chrome on Chromebooks.
Back when these narratives about Mosio's mismanagement started, I just assumed that they were highly informed people who knew what they were talking about. And maybe they really were originally, but it seems to have socialized a new generation of commenters into just randomly speculating about things that completely fall apart upon closer examination.
The development of Firefox costs around $200 million per year. That's more than what Wikimedia can get from donations, and Wikipedia is a website that everyone uses. And you want to rely on donations from people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
And let's say that it manages to bring those costs down to $100 million per year or less and manages to get it from donations (when pigs will fly) … it still has to compete with a Chrome whose estimated cost goes over $1 billion per year.