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Google's Shadow Over Firefox

Posted by kdawson on from the first-hit-is-free dept.

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."

35 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. Would it make you feel better... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Would it make you feel better... by Tim+C · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually it would make me feel better if they took Microsoft's cash as well. The more sources of income a company has, the more secure it is. With only one or two big sources, if they lose one they may well be screwed.

      Not saying that the Mozilla Foundation is likely to lose Google's cash any time soon, but that's a general principle - don't put all your eggs in one basket, and all that.

      --
      It's official. Most of you are morons.
  2. Other Revenue Sources? by TFGeditor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Other Revenue Sources? by bunratty · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Search engines.
      For placement of their search engines.
      Read more here.

      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  3. The lesser of two evils by Hemogoblin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Better to be reliant on Google's cash, than not having any cash at all.

  4. Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's because adblocking is built into Opera, doofus.

    Opera doesn't need add-ons to do everything useful. For some reason they figured they might as well integrate them.

  5. Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. by Ajehals · · Score: 4, Informative

    Although if the Firefox code base remains open, and as long as extensions can be written, there is nothing to stop anyone from creating ad-blocking extensions, after all it is something that many people seem to like, moreover if there is (however unlikely it may be) a concerted effort to prevent ad-blocking technology within Firefox there is always the option of creating a fork with those countermeasures removed.

    Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea that the Mozilla Foundation *appears* to be dependent on Google's advertising revenue, and I can see how that *could* impact decision making, but I dont see a whole lot of alternative funding streams, nor a threat that could not be overcome, that is after all why we like open standards and open code, no one person or group truly has 100% control and it is nearly impossible to take something that is free and open and turn it into something proprietary and closed..

  6. NO messing with firefox will be tolerated by unity100 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    im no zealot, but, if any misconduct happens to come in the way of firefox from google, no amount of publicity stunt, good deeds can make it up. heed the words of a developer.

    --
    Read radical news here
    1. Re:NO messing with firefox will be tolerated by FasterthanaWatch · · Score: 5, Funny

      this is how zealots are created. No, Zealots are created by warping them in through a gateway.
  7. Money spent on R&D by unixmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Shouldn't a technology company spend more than $300,000 on Research & Development? There many bugs in Firefox, even some security bugs stay unfixed for years. And equally important memory leak bugs. I think more money could be spend on better timely responses to security bugs and also fix speed/memory problems plaguing Firefox.

    --
    Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
    1. Re:Money spent on R&D by jesser · · Score: 4, Informative

      According to the financial statement, Mozilla spent $11,775,516 on "software development" in 2006. I'm guessing that mostly means salaries and benefits for employees who work on Gecko and Firefox. So the bulk of Mozilla's spending is on developing (specific) open-source software.

      I don't know what the "less than $300,000" thing refers to. Maybe it refers to monetary grants to other open-source projects, or maybe it refers to things like buying laptops for volunteers so they can contribute more effectively.

      --
      The shareholder is always right.
    2. Re:Money spent on R&D by donnacha · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  8. Beyond FUD by savala · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mitchell (Mozilla's "chief lizard wrangler") wrote a fairly large blog post, not only about the numbers as published, but also saying some things on the directions Mozilla is moving.

    Far more interesting reading than the fluff news.com article, let alone the random FUD spouting by the submitter.

  9. What is REALLY bothersome by WindBourne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  10. File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot by bunratty · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently.

    First, the Firefox CPU bug you've been complaining about (Firefox consumers lots of CPU after the computer wakes up from standby or hibernate) was fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.8. 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.

    Second, there is no sign of any "memory gobbling bug" that I can see, just a few little leaks here and there and some memory fragmentation. 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.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
    1. Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot by Allador · · Score: 4, Informative

      Good Lord, its trivial to reproduce the memory leak issue.

      Open up digg.com (without your noscript extension running).

      Open the first 20 or 30 pages in new tabs.

      Close them, repeat.

      Firefox will now be using in excess of 500MB of memory.

      Close firefox and re-open (with the same session), and FireFox will drop to between 100-200MB.

      Let it sit or browse again, watch it inflate memory use again.

      Close all the tabs except one, go to about:blank (or whatever firefox calls it).

      Notice how the memory use doesnt go down?

      These are pretty much textbook definitions of memory leaking, firefox is consuming memory when it needs it, but then not giving the memory back when its done.

      It's quite easy to get FF to grow up to 1GB or so of memory usage, standby and hibernate helps.

      It's trivially reproducible.

      The only way you dont encounter this is if you use very few tabs, and you close and restart firefox often.

    2. Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot by asa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Are you completely uninformed or are you being intentionally untruthful here?

      > Firefox's roots go back a while (2 years?) before that roadmap was
      > written. The original goal was to make a minimal browser, however,

      You're just plain wrong here.

      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.

      > people soon realized that Mozilla never really was bloated. Stripping
      > out the "bloat" from Mozilla ended up with a negligible amount of
      > speed & memory improvements.

      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. Then top developers (this was Dave Hyatt, the creator of XUL, and Joe, Ben, and Blake, the most experienced XUL programmers on the earth at that time) writing much cleaner XUL with sane CSS rules and avoiding the known slow XUL features, were able to get the new browser so far ahead of the Suite performance and usability that the Mozilla leadership agreed it would be a better path forward than the Suite.

      From the 0.1 release (the first public release of the browser that would become Firefox) notes:

      Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features. A few of the features new to this release include:

      • Speed, Speed, and Speed
        Phoenix was designed with performance as a primary goal. The XUL experts built a browser that starts in nearly half the time of Mozilla and its commercial derivatives. New windows also snap into existence almost twice as fast as Mozilla and commercial derivatives.

      (emphasis mine.)

      And that was the first release before we'd even grabbed all the low hanging performance fruit. Speed and size continued to improve with every single point release while we built great new features like complete settings and data migration, extension management, customizable toolbars, web form auto-complete, and more. The browser was more featureful, faster, and smaller than the Suite.

      > Then parts of the UI code were rewritten to provide features that
      > people always wanted in Mozilla (such as customizable toolbars).

      Yep, we gave users a set of features that people wouldn't or couldn't implement in the Suite. We listened to the users, which had outgrown the Suite's user base in size and involvement long before we shipped 1.0, and built the browser that we believed they would love using enough to spread to their IE using friends, families, and co-workers.

      > In the end, Firefox ended up being a little slower and a little more
      > memory hungry than Mozilla. Hence they made up the "right set of
      > features" line.

      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?

      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 t

    3. Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot by asa · · Score: 4, Informative

      The browser speed test you cite is bogus. Firefox, during all of my time being involved with its development and release, has always been faster at start-up, new window, and pageload, than the Suite, (with the possible exception of startup with the suite with the preloader on (turbo mode) Even then, on the hardware I had during the development of every pre-1.0 release of Firefox, Firefox bead Suite in turbo mode on a first start after reboot).

      The original phoenix work came from Blake, me, Joe, Dave, Bryner, Pch, and a couple of others later on and the motivation was not to create a minimalist browser. I was there. I was a part of it from the first checkin to mozilla/browser and the goal was not to create a minimalist browser, it was to create a good browser. Viewer.exe was a minimalist browser but it was not a good browser. Chimera, the cocoa Mac browser, something we modeled some of the early m/b work on (but, in our case, using XUL) was not a minimalist browser. Ben's short-lived c# Manticore browser that pre-dated Firefox, was not intended to be a minimalist browser either, though it didn't get much past that.

      Yes, it was called m/b for about three months of early active development. The people were the same as when we named it Phoenix and the goals were the same.

      And that bullshit about telling users not to download Mozilla is just that, bullshit. You're remembering pre Mozilla 1.0 days. I was responsible for those pages and when I shipped 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7,and all of the dot releases in between, all of them messaged the Suite as a strong and community supported end-user offering. Claiming otherwise is simply lying.

      I was there. I was responsible for every single Suite release going back to M17 and all the way up to the 1.7 release. I was responsible for every Firefox release from the first binary of m/b posted at my blog all the way up until Firefox 1.5. I shipped those products and wrote much of the user-facing content on release pages. Don't come in here and tell me I'm re-writing history unless you're going to cite some one or some documentation from someone more authority than me.

      - A

  11. Damn you, FF... by Aminion · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ... why don't you grow your own monies like everyone else!!

    Seriously, people: capital is good, that's how you pay for stuff and people, and fund projects. And it's not like Google is bribing the Firefox Foundation, the money comes from search engine integration in Firefox. Also, I can't recall Firefox being involved in any shady business where they have sided with Google against Microsoft. Furthermore, The Firefox Foundation did negotiate with Yahoo before sealing the deal with Google, so they clearly have other options than just Google. Who knows, when the contract with Google expires in 2008, maybe even MS will try to make a deal with The Firefox Foundation.

    From the summary:

    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.
    Nowhere is this fear expresses besides in the summary. Less editorializing, please.
  12. Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. by Poromenos1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You are modded flamebait, but I'm not sure I disagree. The GP says that nothing in Opera blocks Google ads, but all you need to do is add *.googlesyndication.com/* to the blocker and they're gone for good. If anything, it's the GP who's wrong..

    --
    Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
  13. The Bigger Point by kaos07 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't think the main issue is Google supporting Firefox, as people have already commented it's generally a plus to have a steady stream of income. The real issue here is in regards to the CEO's pay. Half a million dollars compared to $300,000 for R&D? Something's skewed there.

    1. Re:The Bigger Point by maxume · · Score: 5, Informative

      They spent around $19 million in 2006. Some big chunk of that was paying people to work on Firefox. The $300,000 was money given to *outside* projects.

      It's really hard to say if the CEOs pay was worth it. Really, really hard. If the foundation knew it wasn't, I bet they would find a different CEO. Apparently, they have less than perfect information yet still find the arrangement acceptable.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  14. Google wanted Thunderbird killed? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Google wanted Thunderbird killed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you use IMap with gmail, you're still handing your data over to google.

  15. Money for Google well Spent by RobBebop · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With operating revenues in the billions, Google is getting a huge benefit for a very small outlay with the money flowing into the Mozilla Foundation. These days, it is less common to have a hotlink lingering around for your search engine of choice because they are so ubiquitous that they are expected to just "be there".

    And if you run Firefox, the default search engine at the top corner of the screen is none-other-than Google. It is a beautiful interface that has been embraced by users (me and you), the vendor (Google), and the merchant (Mozilla). A rare win-win-win for all. You and I get easy access to search online for anything with the click of a button. Google gets a way to funnel us into their site so they can show us their advertisements. Mozilla gets money to pay their engineers to improve a world class software application.

    Given this information, it is silly to think that Google would terminate their beneficial relationship with Mozilla because it would significantly hurt them where it matters most (getting users to their site).

    --
    Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
  16. Bullshit! by MCSEBear · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is no way that the head of an open source project should be taking half a mil in compensation. Donate the freaking money to other open source projects that have done important work for the open source community.

    I'm sure the Samba and Apache crews can use a little of the love. Hell, the people who created Adblock are the reason I use Firefox... Give them some of the damn cash! Which other open source projects do you think have done the community a lot of good and deserve some of the bank?

    1. Re:Bullshit! by acm · · Score: 4, Insightful
      There is no way that the head of an open source project should be taking half a mil in compensation.

      It kinda pisses me off that a couple years ago as a starving college student I donated money to the Mozilla Foundation. If I knew their CEO would one day be raking in that kind of cash I would have donated to a more worthy cause. Not that there aren't other non-profit directors raking it in (I'm looking at you, Red Cross).

  17. Conflict of interest between Firefox/Google by cortana · · Score: 4, Interesting

    lwn.net had a story about this a while back. Worth reading at http://lwn.net/Articles/256904/. One of the comments in particular:

    Actually, I really think he has a point. Not only does Google have enough employees working on Firefox to ram through whatever change they desire, they also control enough members of the self-appointed WHAT-WG "HTML 5" group to do whatever they want there as well. So an idea can be "standardized" instantly solely by Google employees, then implemented, reviewed, super-reviewed, and committed entirely by Google employees.

    This is not theoretical, it already happened with the "ping" attribute in HTML 5, which benefits nobody except advertising companies (read: Google).

  18. Firefox & Google Money by MTO_B. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  19. Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. by kennygraham · · Score: 5, Informative

    Or use firefox and get the filterset-g extension, and it takes care of everything for you, including automatic updates to the ad server list. Blocks ads, flash or not. And doesn't block the flash that you want.

  20. Re:they're not limited to two evils by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    Top notch programming can be done for free, but for large products that is the exception rather than the rule, even for open source applications. Most of the people who think large open source projects are done primarily by unpaid developers as a hobby, simply don't have any real experience in OSS development.

    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.

    Most open source projects that work really well are capitalist endeavors. The difference is that the users of the software are also the developers, instead of having developers sell the software to users after marking up the price. Mozilla provides a functional and useful Web browser, with better security than IE. The company I work for has done a very small amount of work on Firefox, because we use Firefox and wanted a feature for our own use. We're users and developers. Other companies that have standardized on it hire developers to program and contribute some feature to the project. We do this because it makes our business money by improving our tools. I guess my main point is that most OSS projects are driven by capitalism, just with the "programming as a service" instead of "code as a product" model of capitalism.

  21. Mozilla.org financials, 2006 by mveloso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  22. Filterset.G is deprecated with Adblock Plus by amake · · Score: 5, Informative

    From Adblock Plus FAQs:

    ...it is recommended not to use Filterset.G with Adblock Plus. There are several reasons for this: ...

    In short, the Filterset.G extension duplicates functionality already in the Adblock Plus extension, it's slow, and it's harder to use. The filter subscriptions supplied by Adblock Plus are the recommended alternative.

  23. Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. by drsquare · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is flash you want?
    How else are you going to access youporn, pornotube, redtube, pornhub etc?
  24. Re:Sold out by asa · · Score: 4, Informative

    We built the search feature into Mozilla in 1999. Google has been an option in that feature since its inception. That was 5 years before there was any revenue associated with it. We made Google the default in 2002 or 2003 to replace the silly "Netscape" default which was simply a Netscape branded Google. This was years before there was any revenue associated with it.

    We made these decisions because it was the right thing for users, not because it was a revenue opportunity. If we ever have to decide between doing what's right for users and a revenue opportunity, we'll put the users first every time. The nice thing about the current situation is that it's both the right thing for users and a revenue opportunity.

    And this is just about the "defaults" in Firefox. If you don't like Google, switch it to Yahoo. If you don't like Yahoo, you can add any one of more than 13,000 additional search services to the Firefox search toolbar with just a click or two at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

    - A