Slashdot Mirror
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."
If they took Microsoft's cash instead? I'm sure MS would love to have more traffic pointed at their search, regardless of the source.
Okay, I admit ignorance. I have never understood how Mozilla, a purveyor of free-as-in-beer software, makes money, even if only operating capital (as opposed to profit).
What sources other than Google fund Mozilla? And why?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
MoFo publishes everything, they have to. Im not sure im worried about what they do with all the cash. Its their cash. What is GOOD is that they are prooving how can opensource software interact with the new advertising-financed platforms like google.
There is a growing market for google-talking apps out ther, not just the browser. Integrating stuff from google to your collaboration infrastructure comes to mind, to your intranet portals... i dunno, a bunch of stuff could be developed for the google "platform".
I think differently from those that look at SAAS as a potential danger to software/data freedom. Sure, theyll be able to offer a great deal of services that will force you to upload data and then you will only be able to do what they expose in their apis, but thats okay, if you dont want it, then dont use it.
The fact that google has been able to mostly provide open apis so that one can work with them opens a wealth of posibilities like the one mozilla is exploiting. How about gnome integrating google stuff as a first option for several things like the remote gmail drive perhaps-- which we do have, just not "on gnome" as it is, and letting google plaster some advertising somewhere in exchange (and youd be able to opt-in for that if you want it, granma could opt-out if SHE wanted. And then some google money could flow into gnome, or kde, or both.
Good, good thing for the future.
NO SIG
is that they only gave out 300K to opensource? It is FAR less than what they are paying their CEO? Something is WAY wrong. As it is, most of Firefox WAS done as OSS, and the foundation would not exist with it. They should be spending a LOAD of money on OSS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As an outsider, it seems to me that support for Thunderbird and calender (which was always weak) has dried up. Now that I know Mozilla Foundation is driven by Google the killing off of competition with Gmail seems a bit obvious.
Thoughts?
Actually, maybe the problem is the theory that top-notch computing work can be done for free, without paying the people who do it, because they just love the fame. This was a reasonable proposition once upon a time, when programming up a Web browser was an amazing trick and could get you widely recognized, leading perhaps to an interesting (and well-paying) job. But is that true any more? Are top-quality programmers willing to work on Mozilla -- and by "work" I don't mean just program, but also manage the beast, do market research to see what the users want, fix bugs, yadda yadda -- for free, just for the glory of it? I'm thinking maybe not so much any more.
Which means Mozilla could consider a third evil and join the nasty capitalist system by figuring out exactly what value they are providing to their customers, and charging for it. Instead of trying to figure out for which rich aristrocrat (e.g. Google or MS) they want to be the bought mistress.
That seems right to me.
Mozilla Foundation stopped supporting Thunderbird development apparently because the organization got no money for it, and Google wants you to use web mail, so that you will see the ads.
Mozilla Foundation gave no adequate explanation for killing its support of Thunderbird.
That is why I donate to various software projects -- not much, but about as much as I would pay for an OS if I had to buy one -- that gives me more right to have an opinion on what they are doing.
If you (and I mean the general slashdot reader, not the GP) want to have more input on the decision-making process when necessary, participate in the funidng. Any software project will treat you better if you show more commitment than just downloading and using the software, and many sources of funding make the power of any one large donor smaller. Besides, it will be a better use of the slashdot community than just slashdotting websites.
Not to mention that when you have more of a stake, you can request and get things like more transparent reporting on funding and business models.
lwn.net had a story about this a while back. Worth reading at http://lwn.net/Articles/256904/. One of the comments in particular:
I think people should read this article, by Asa Dotzler, a coordinator for several Mozilla projects.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/10/firefox_finance.html
So what would happen if Google pulled out from the Mozilla deal. Would FireFox be as useful as it it now? It seems a bit dangerous to have 90% of your income coming from a single source.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Revenues: $66,840,850
Expenses: $19,776,193
Expenses breakdown:
Program Services: $ 540,384
Software Development: $11,775,516
Sales and Marketing: $ 4,836,238
General & Admin: $ 2,624,055
"Profit" (or, change in net assets, since it's a non-profit): $27,893,735
Damn, it's good to be free. You'd think that the foundation would donate its money to fund other OSS projects, but as software people have discovered, the first priority of a foundation is to ensure the existence (and a lucrative existence at that) of its staff.
You're kidding, right?
Everyone I know using Firefox on the Mac has the same problem. Reproducible? Perhaps the foundation could just buy a Mac for testing.
In the six months since I switched, the system has been rock solid and every other application has been fine, only Firefox needs to be repeatedly restarted due to ballooning memory use.
Right now, after just two hours of light usage since Firefox last slowed my entire system to such a crawl that it had to be restart, one window and three tabs open (Gmail, Google reader, slashdot), Activity Monitor shows Firefox at 322MB real memory, 824MB virtual and growing. I don't actually know how high it goes before becoming completely unusable (haven't bothered looking) but it must be pretty high - I have 4GB of memory installed in this laptop and, usually, no other apps running.
That is with the most recent FF, 2.0.0.9 - there is, absolutely, a problem; perhaps if the foundation were not in such a rosy financial situation they would have an incentive to fix problems that affect a significantly large minority of their users.
I got up to 272 MB after opening up 20 pages in 20 tabs, and after closing all tabs but one memory usage went back down to 131 MB. I opened up 30 different pages in 30 tabs and memory use went up to 205 MB, and after closing all tabs but one memory use went back down to 136 MB. It seems like memory use is going down after closing tabs to me. You may want to discuss the matter further in the Firefox Bugs forum on MozillaZine to see if anyone else can see the problem. Like I said, I have not been able to reproduce any memory problem described to me in over a year. I should note that I'm using the latest nightly build of Firefox 3 on Windows.
Yes, of course, you're removing all the cached content and all the memory fragmentation. It's like completely clearing every single cache and completely defragging memory. Of course memory dropped. That's not necessarily a memory leak. It's memory use caused by fragmentation and caching. If it were a memory leak, memory use would keep rising without limit, or a memory leak detector would report a leak.What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
i'm waiting for someone to write a very-very-slim wrapper around webkit.dll (see webkit.org) to get us an open, native, fast, compact browser for windows. it's almost feature-complete, but for some reason the only attempts at wrapping it have been ridiculously bloated (win32 safari) or really ridiculously bloated (some swift browser that relied on .net).
Are you completely uninformed or are you being intentionally untruthful here?
Asa, I normally agree with you on most things, but I think you're being untruthful here.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
The original goal, that I helped define in early 2002, was to make a browser that could actually compete with IE and gain market share where the feature bloated and designed by committee Mozilla Application Suite had failed. We didn't skimp on features and included many features, bringing it up and beyond parity with IE, that the suite never had.
That sure wasn't the goal I saw. The original Phoenix work came from mainly Blake Ross complaining that he didn't agree with the committee designing the Suite. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think there were a few other names involved, but Blake is the one I remember being most vocal at the time. He stripped the browser down to not much more than a url entry box and the back, forward, reload, and stop buttons. Every single feature he hesitated on adding back in due to size and/or speed concerns. To the point that "offline mode" was an extension, even though the only part of that functionality actually in the extension was the UI for it. Perhaps you disagree with my choice of words in calling it minimalist before, but he sure was trying to keep it to a very small feature set.
Horseshit. We cut launch time and new window time in half in just a few months. We cut the download size by almost 300%. Simply removing the other app XUL overlays was a huge performance win all by itself.
And at this time period, you were just getting to the point of putting things like the history functionality back in. When you cut out 90% of the functionality, of course it's going to be smaller and faster. I also remember the days when the Gecko engine was going by it's original Raptor codename. It was extremely small and fast back then - but it also wasn't very usable, so you couldn't compare it to anything.
Again, this is just bullshit. Go back and read the Phoenix 0.1 release notes. "Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Shall I repeat it. "a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Where in that statement of purpose do you read that the goal was to make a minimalist browser?
I did go back. And apparently I found the confusion. I forgot that it Phoenix wasn't the first name. I'm remembering back to the days when it was known as mozilla/browser. That was around for a while before it got the Phoenix name.
When we shipped Firefox 1.0, the Windows version clocked in at a 4.7MB download compared to the Suite's 13MB download. Firefox 1.0's startup time on low to medium end systems was half that of the Suite and a noticeable improvement even on the fastest systems. Firefox 1.0's memory usage at startup was about 10% better than the Suites, mostly thanks to a smaller overall UI footprint (they both used the same Gecko rendering engine which makes up about 90% of the overall program size).
Let's be fair. I just dug around the mozilla.org ftp and checked the installers. The largest Suite release was under 12 MB, with most releases being under 11 MB. Second, the default download on the web site was usually the net installer, which was a 250 KB download. If you did the browser only install, it was about a 6 MB download. And you probably also know that the Firefox installer uses 7zip while the Suite installer used zip. Firefox installers built with zip were around 6 MB, making it similar in size to the Suite's browser.
Also, I'm sure you've seen the (several year old now) browser speed tests that showed FireFox to be slower than Mozilla at just about everything.
But, in the end, the proof is in the pudding. There are about 130 to 140 million Firefox users today, coming up on our third m
If I said "Just use Internet Explorer, and all the pages will show up correctly," I'd be modded down "-1 Troll" before the page finished submitting.
Yet when somebody says something similar but recommends Firefox, they're "+4 Informative".
Firefox sucks. It leaks memory like a sieve, it's a memory hog, it's slow, it requires tons of plugins to do mundane stuff that's built into every other browser, and it's less standards compliant than Konqueror, Opera, and Safari. At this point in time, you can be sure that if somebody isn't using Firefox, it's because they've realized it sucks and they don't want to. So shut up already. You're not going to make anybody switch, and you're bothering people.
And don't get me started on how creepy it is to voluntarily let some other group of people control what content you see.
Hardly comparable. With television, someone decides what content to show you, and you make a decision if you want to watch it. With the auto-updating ad-block filtersets, someone decides what content you never get to see, and you don't get to review what you never get to see or make any meaningful decisions.