Why Firefox's Future Lies In Google's Hands

Barence writes "Firefox has just turned five, and it now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications. Its success has forced rivals to raise their game, and the past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly. Google is the default homepage when Firefox first opens, and the default search engine when users type something into the 'awesome bar.' The deal, which runs until 2011, was worth $66 million to Mozilla in 2007, accounting for 88% of the foundation's revenues that year (the last year for which it had published accounts). But now that Google is a competitor as well as a partner, is it really wise for Mozilla to be so dependent on Google?"

Comments

Lone Wolf

[sopssa]

Mozilla is actually alone in this. Even Opera (while also getting revenue from Google) does lots of its business with other devices like Wii, Mobile Phones, and other non-pc devices. Hell, I was visiting a hotel which had one of those tv's with hotel interfaces. One day it suddenly booted itself for update and when booting up, there was Opera logo on the start.

So only Mozilla is dependent on others.

Re:Lone Wolf

[richlv]

opera has a surprisingly large market share on various embedded devices (as you mentioned) and in included on very large share of mobile devices.

what i found funny in the summary - "past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly".

if anything, firefox has mighe have been closing the feature gap with opera, which had absolute majority of the features first.

disclaimer - opera user for many years here.

Re:Lone Wolf

[sznupi]

Opera is the number one browser (overall, ahead of IE) in Ukraine (and supposedly Belarus, though it's hard to get reliable stats about that country...), in Q2 2010 it should be no.1 in Russia. Also, in a lot of countries of Central Europe, in all those new EU members, it has quite respectable share of between 5 and 10%. In some of them even Opera Mini (j2me) is ahead of Safari.

I guess it's also about many people from those areas not visiting webpages generating stats at which you look.

Re:Lone Wolf

[atfrase]

You need to realize that most of the Firefox community is under 20 years old.

[citation needed]

"Under 30" I *might* give you as an out-of-the-blue ballpark figure, although still totally unsubstantiated; "under 20" is just setting up a straw man to justify the rest of your rant. No wonder you posted AC.

But I understand why you wanted to gloss over that age group of Firefox users -- we remember when Opera cost money. In 2000 they released a free Opera, but it was ad-supported, which I for one would never tolerate in a web browser. It wasn't until 2005 that the free Opera was ad-free, at which point Firefox was already very well established.

Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)

Re:Lone Wolf

[Hal_Porter]

non-pc devices.

I've noticed that too. My mobile phone is always complaining about how black people don't know their place, asking who that 'mulatto' is whenever Obama is on CNN and saying that women should be back home cooking for the husbands.

Oh well, it's an old model I guess.

Re:Lone Wolf

[tjwhaynes]

It's true that Firefox has typically been playing catch up throughout its lifespan. However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside). Process separation, general speed, stability, memory fragmentation, etc.

This meme about Firefox memory fragmentation just won't die! Firefox 3.0.x you could still claim that Firefox was sucking down more and more memory as pages got visited. With 3.5.x, you can kiss that problem pretty much goodbye - Firefox returns more memory back to the system than any competing browser.

And Firefox isn't the largest memory consumer here either - that prize probably goes to Chrome, simply because one-tab-per-process is inevitably a heavier memory requirement.

Firefox stability is still a minor issue. However, it's stable enough that I get about 1 crash every three days, which is well within my tolerance level (14 extensions, 11 plugins). Tools like abrt provide a decent mechanism for informing the necessary bug trackers.

Speed-wise, Firefox devs know they are in a race with Chrome. 3.6.x looks like it will be faster than 3.5.x by a fair margin. Project Electrolysis stands to improve matters further. I'm all for competition - keeps everyone working on the issue.

Give me a plugin sandbox so that Flash trapping doesn't take out the page and I'll be content.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Lone Wolf

[travisco_nabisco]

In 2000 they released a free Opera, but it was ad-supported, which I for one would never tolerate in a web browser.

You do realize that Firefox is ad-supported as well. There is a reason Google it the default search provider, and why the Google toolbar is distributed with Firefox. You may not like a visible ad, but you certainly have bought into an ad supported browser.

Re:Lone Wolf

[JordanL]

I found the claim that Opera was "catching up" in the summary spurious at best. Many of the features that Firefox has were developed first by the Opera team, including tabs.

Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[elrous0]

This issue has been discussed on /. many times before. Mozilla needs a sponsor. Their revenues are the only thing that lets them stand out from most of the rest of the OSS crowd as a truly professional piece of software. Lose those revenues and it will eventually deteriorate into yet another lame piece of poorly-documented, poorly-maintained piece of abandonware on SourceForge. So, what options does Mozilla have? Well, they could stay with Google or they could defect to Yahoo or Bing. But MS is even more of a browser competitor than Google. And Yahoo isn't in a financial position to be sponsoring anyone right now. Sure, you could maybe come up with some other more complicated solutions, but $66 million worth? Not many companies, or even groups of companies, have that kind of money to throw around for a little advertisement. There just aren't a lot of alternatives.

So, SHOULD they break away from Google? Probably. CAN they break away from them (and maintain their quality)? Probably not. So, like a bad marriage of convenience, Mozilla is probably stuck with Google until the day (possibly) comes when Google themselves decide to break it off.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[jmyers]

Where does the money go? It seems to me that $66 million could fund a lot of development for many years. Put that in the bank and you could easily pay the salary of 10 full time programmers and a decent amount of overhead and never spend a dime of principal and never need additional sponsorship and strings that go with it.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[ZorbaTHut]

And the fact that the source is, you know, open. I feel that's kind of a major point.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Sir_Lewk]

FUD.

That's the whole business model of F/OSS, isn't it?

No, that is only one of many possible F/OSS business models. Other common F/OSS business models include dual licensing and paid support. Examples include Redhat, formerly Trolltech (aquired by Nokia), and many others.

isn't viable unless a project has a sugar-daddy like the big Linux distros?

Of the big linux distrobutions, only one (ubuntu) comes to mind as relying on a so called "sugar daddy". Debian is entirely community run, and Fedora is community run, with support from Redhat (an extremely sucessful and profitable F/OSS company).

Time will tell.

Time has already shown the concept to be quite workable.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

Where does the money go? It seems to me that $66 million could fund a lot of development for many years. Put that in the bank and you could easily pay the salary of 10 full time programmers and a decent amount of overhead and never spend a dime of principal and never need additional sponsorship and strings that go with it.

The money goes to salaries of the executives. A cool half million dollars or more for the CEO to be exact. I wonder how productive should they be to justify such salaries? That money can easily go to hire 5 top notch C++ coders for an entire year to hunt down memory leaks and make the code more efficient. The only reason to give such money should be as a bonus if-and-only-if the executives figure out how to reduce their dependence on Google, it's been 5 years and nothing's being done about it.

Disclaimer: I've seen my university students scrounge their last savings money to pay for the Firefox ad in the NYT 4 years ago, so maybe that makes me sick to the stomach to see Mozilla wasting so much money on administration.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[BZ]

> Where does the money go?

See http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-and-2008/ and the documents linked from it for the 2008 data.

> Put that in the bank and you could easily pay the salary of 10 full time programmers

As of end of 2008, there were about 200 people being paid out of the $66 million, according to the link above. That would include programmers, QA, UI designers, marketing, administration, IT staff.

That's somewhat smaller than the number of people Opera, say, employs, at least last time I checked.

For comparison, by the way, FY 2008 revenues for Opera were about $87 million according to http://www.opera.com/media/finance/2009/2Q09.pdf

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[BZ]

In summary, for 2008 and based on http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2008-audited-financial-statement.pdf , something like $17 million taxes, $12 million set aside for future (e.g. if the Google contract doesn't get renewed, say). About $50 million spent, from a total revenue of $80 million or so. That would presumably include salaries+benefits for those 200-ish people, whatever hardware is needed for the developers, the testing infrastructure (see http://atlee.ca/blog/2009/11/02/what-happens-when-you-push/ for example), infrastructure for the various Mozilla web sites (addons.mozilla.org, www.mozilla.org, update servers, etc). Oh, and office space lease, presumably.

How much do you figure it should take to run an organization with about 200 competent (so not necessarily cheap) staff and a fair amount of necessary infrastructure for a year?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[IICV]

1) it isn't any of your business how much they make

Seriously, this sort of attitude is part of what makes America so divided. It isn't any of my business how much someone else makes? Then how am I supposed to make a rational decision about my line of work? All compensation for all positions for all companies should be freely available, so I know that if I sign on as a developer with shop A I'm getting a worse deal than if I signed on with shop B. I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.

2) if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it

You know why they deserve it? Because CEO 1 is on the board of company 2, so he says that CEO 2 should have a ridiculous salary. CEO 2 is on the board of company 1, so he says that CEO 1 should have a ridiculous salary.

3) if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss

No real loss, except for the opportunity cost of all that extra money going into improving the CEO's bankroll instead of into improving the company.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

How productive must the executives be to justify the salaries? Seeing as it was them who negotiated the 66 million to begin with I would say there were quite productive indeed.

I'll never understand people like you that constantly whine about other peoples salaries. 1) it isn't any of your business how much they make, 2) if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it, 3) if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss.

Honestly, are people like you so petty that you must constantly whine that you don't make as much as someone else? Be happy they are making money, they will continue to do so and we'll all benefit as a result. If you really must insist on this socialist idea of spreading the wealth then by all means, move to Cuba and see how productive they are there.

Why are you attempting to make this into a capitalism vs. socialism strawman? The issue at hand is the CEO of a for-profit organization backed by a non-profit organization, and hence pays no taxes whatsoever on the $66 million some of which goes into obscene CEO profits. Meanwhile, countless F/OSS supporters are poring in their precious free time to develop, report bugs and develop extensions.

And it is my business how much they make or what Mozilla does with it's money, because that money comes from Google searches that people like me perform on Firefox. If me and other users of FF suddenly decide to switch to Bing on FF or to Chrome, it's Firefox that stops earning millions and fold up since Google pays per search. There are plenty of other competing browsers nowadays that are faster and leaner anyway. If some of that money that goes into executive pay was used in the previous years to make Firefox faster and leaner(notice the number of 'Firefox is bloated' complaints that pop up everytime in a FF story?) Firefox would stop losing users and revenue.

So if the executives start paying themselves $65 million a year because they signed on the agreement with Google, I should be happy for them for making money? And while I am not a fan of socialism, Cuba is a bad example. From the Wiki:

Cuba also has succeeded in reducing poverty and equalizing the distribution of wealth. According to the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin America, the decile ratio (share of total income for the top 10 percent of wage earners divided by the bottom 10 percent) in Latin America was 45 to 1, while that of Cuba was only 4 to 1. Cuba's income distribution was more than 10 times more equal than the rest of Latin America in the 1980s. Before the Revolution, Cuba's decile ratio was 65 to 1.[4]

Bias Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

"[Firefox] the past two years have seen ... Opera close the features gap significantly." Are we re-writing documented history? Opera is the longest running GUI Web browser, first to use tabs, sessions, customizable skins, ACID 2 & 3 compliant, download management panel, widget support, and a whole host of other features Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google have taken and continue to take from Opera ASA. I suppose when your non-Opera Web browser lacks the security track record Opera possesses, delusive jealousy becomes a factor.

Re:What ?

[rubicelli]

Firefox had one critical feature a year before Opera did: It was free. For years, Opera had been "that browser you had to pay for (or get advertising with)". That kind of stigma stays with you.

Re:Choices? Really?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Seriously, who should be the default search provider, payments or not? If I've got a choice, I'm heading to google, not because of some sort of "I love google" sort of thing, but because they have the best search. If firefox defaults to "Bing!" or "aunt martha's internet search and lemon pies", it won't matter as long as I can set it to Google.

It's the ability to choose that I want to protect, not what the default is.

It would be annoying if they switched to a different default, because that would be one more customization step every time I install Firefox.

Sheldon

It does matter. Sure, you can control your own settings, but the aggregate behavior of the masses who leave their settings at default does have an impact.

1. If the search engine profits from its users, then the default search engine makes a great deal of difference. If traffic goes down, the search engine has less income, and therefore less capital to re-invest into innovation.
2. If the search engine decides to skew its search results, a vast majority of users who don't change their default might not ever see whatever it is that the default search engine doesn't want them to see. Imagine if Google censored search engine results according to the whim of some bad government.
3. If you want to collaborate with anyone else, you'll have to take into account when they do a search, their results page will be different from yours, since you're not using the default.
4. Anytime you're using a computer that is not your own, you're going to have to deal with the default search engine, which isn't your preferred one. Sure, you can just browse to google and search from their homepage, but it's an extra step.

Is there a reason for Google to shaft Mozilla?

[qazwart]

I don't see any reason why Google would try to harm Firefox. Granted Google has a browser called Chrome, but what Google really wants is for people to use Google as their search engine. With Firefox the most popular engine after IE (and Microsoft wouldn't do anything, but make Bing IE's default search engine), I don't see why Google wouldn't simply extend their deal with FIrefox. They certainly wouldn't want Firefox to move over to Yahoo or Bing.

The only thing I can see is Google would use their leverage over Firefox to get Firefox to switch from the Gecko to WebKit. That would give Google a unified JavaScript/Web browser engine to run their applications against.

It's not usually a good thing to have another entity control your future like this, but Firefox really doesn't have a choice now.

Closing the gap on... Opera?!

[Mex]

I'm sorry, but other than the huge advantage that is all the plugins available for Firefox, Opera has always been lightyears ahead of any other browser's features.
http://operawiki.info/OperaInnovations
Tabbed browsing and Zooming into a webpage are only the two that seem most important and were introduced by Opera, but they have always been incredibly innovative, much more so than Firefox. Yet there's not a big developer following, probably because it is not open source like FF, that's Opera's weakest part I guess, but as a browser, I love it.