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Google's Shadow Over Firefox
eldavojohn writes "The Mozilla Foundation's chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google's cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash."
Google has influenced Opera, also. Note that none of the add-ons for Opera allow blocking of ads.
If an organization accepts money from advertising, it will be corrupted by advertising.
Eventually the Google influence may mean that Firefox no longer has add-ons that block ads.
Someone with no technical knowledge cannot run a technically oriented company. A CEO cannot be the leader of something she or he doesn't understand.
Winifred Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla is an extremely socially uncomfortable lawyer with no technical knowledge who became CEO when no one thought there was an opportunity. Now that Mozilla Foundation is making millions from making Google the default browser, Winifred can afford to hire people to make herself look good.
There are many, many quirks in Firefox, not just Thunderbird, that should be fixed, but no technically oriented manager to organize that. For example, the CPU hogging bug has been there for at least 5 years. Winifred has insufficient control over those who work for her, because she doesn't understand what they do. The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently. See Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.
Don't let ignorant managers destroy your programming efforts. Find some way to have them removed.
Google are just supporting Moz, because they don't want the web controlled by MS.
"If you're still having any problems with the latest release of Firefox, let developers know by filing a proper bug report, including steps to reproduce the problem."
Yes, I am still having problems with the CPU hogging bug in Firefox 2.0.0.9, very severe problems. With all previous versions, hibernation was possible. Now computers running many windows and tabs of Firefox 2.0.0.9 never return from hibernation.
In commercial product development with no adequate supervision, the programmers only fix the easy bugs. Why work harder? I suppose that is their rationale.
A CEO who has no technical knowledge cannot run a technically oriented company.
"Yeah, if he actually filed usable bugs, they'd get fixed..."
No, when you file bug reports, you get 20 different kinds of abuse, unless the bug is extremely easy to find: Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs .
There are actually 22 Top Excuses, but I haven't had time to update the list.