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Will Firefox Lose Google Funding?
SharkLaser writes "Mozilla's future looks uncertain. Last week Chrome overtook Firefox's position as the second most popular browser, the new versioning scheme is alienating some Firefox users, and now the advertising deal between Mozilla and Google, the one that almost fully funds Mozilla's operations, is coming to an end. One of Firefox's key managers, Mike Shaver, also left the company in September. 'In 2010, 84% of Mozilla's $123 million in revenue came directly from Google. That's roughly $100 million in funds that will vanish or be drastically cut if the deal is either not renewed or is renegotiated on terms that are less favorable to Mozilla. When the original three-year partnership deal was signed in 2008, Chrome was still on the drawing boards. Today, it is Google's most prominent software product, and it is rapidly replacing Firefox as the alternative browser on every platform.' Recently Mozilla has been trying to get closer with Microsoft by making a Firefox version that defaults to Bing. If Google is indeed cutting funding from Mozilla or tries to negotiate less favorable terms, it could mean Mozilla's future funding coming from Microsoft and Bing."
It's because Chrome is the better browser. It shouldn't matter that it comes from a mega company like Google. If a better product comes out, that should be king. Now why people are still using IE is beyond me.
Sad if this happens and Firefox has to beg money from Bing. Whatever happened with the 500k/yr Mozilla CEOs who were paid so much money to diversify the revenue sources? Sad really.
This space for rent.
Considering they have a browser of their own, would it really be beneficial to Microsoft to sign with Firefox?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
IE slowly killed Netscape.. Chrome slowly killed Firefox.
Some geek. Tools -> Options -> General -> Home page
"It's because Chrome is the better browser. It shouldn't matter that it comes from a mega company like Google. If a better product comes out, that should be king. Now why people are still using IE is beyond me." - by gameboyhippo (827141) on Monday December 05, @01:04PM (#38268436)
If that's purely the case as you state it, Opera should have won long ago then as "top most used browser". Opera was technically superior on many grounds:
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1.) Speed (for years & on most all fronts tested/testable)
2.) Built in features natively without having to use addons
3.) Features other webbrowsers or addon makers literally copied from Opera's playbook (and integrated into their own webbrowsers).
---
* Will Mozilla/FireFox die? No, doubt it - too good of a codebase built up for decades to just "die"... it'll live on (if in anything, WaterFox (very fast, I'm impressed in fact by it)).
APK
P.S.=> No, I think it has to do a LOT with who's backing you in this world (not just programs, but that same goes for individuals also (ala "it's not what you know, but who you know", though I think that's speaking TOO much in "absolutes" also)... in the end? It's a mix of both... imo @ least!
... apk
This guy's gunning for Troll of the Year.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Don't you think $123 Million buys a better browser than Firefox... It's pretty good, but it could be so much better. I'm glad it has more competition.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Oracle to the rescue!
How many damn times do people need telling?
For the reverse look at this relationship, "How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox" - http://www.extremetech.com/internet/92558-how-browsers-make-money-or-why-google-needs-firefox
...or you could just permanently change the default search provider back to Google with three clicks. Firefox isn't going to take that ability away; they'd just change the DEFAULT search provider.
I'd rather not use a search engine that literally has to reward users to even get them to use it.
Just pointing out that Microsoft isn't actually losing money when they do that. It's just clever marketing and Microsoft is actually profiting by rewarding users. There are many such reward sites on the internet whose owners also get money by offering rewards to users. The catch is, advertisers want to sell something or offer a service. They pay the publisher (in this case Microsoft) for getting those users. But instead of taking the whole payment to themselves, they reward some percentage of it back to user. In the end, Microsoft actually profits from it and users want to use Bing because they get free/almost-free stuff. Very clever.
You mean version 87459.0 will be the last version of Firefox!?!
Unless Google comes out with a way to manage Chrome , it is the least favorable browser in a business environment specifically due to security issues. FF was once deemed the best thing since sliced bread FF's rapid releases that integrate security updates, is no longer sustainable with out adding more resources to the company to manage it. Most companies still design around IE for its end users since it still has the largest base of users. In the corporate world there no reason not to use IE since there is a large corporation behind it to fix security holes, unlike Google that may or may not fix a security hole based on how they feel that day about their beta software, or just decide to kill it off completely.
Finally Microsoft found a way to kill Firefox: pay it to use Bing!
While Google, as Firefox's sugar daddy and major technical competitor, could put the hurt on FF, I just don't see the logic behind their doing so:
FF still has a pretty significant chunk of marketshare, so being the default search engine is still valuable; plus they are likely a convenient PR antidote to Google's ongoing issues with venturing into being-accused-of-monopoly-abuse territory: they are an independent 3rd party, developing a competing product with competitive marketshare(Hey FCC, look at that, see that robust competition?); but(unlike say Microsoft) they have neither a search product worthy of note or a non HTML5/JS development environment worthy of note(I've seen a few XUL-based tech demos; but that ranks well behind Silverlight, much less Win32, as anything resembling a threat...)
They just seem more valuable alive than dead, to Google. Unlike some of the other competitors, even a sudden surge of unmitigated dominance, with the Gecko slaughtering all before it, would pretty much just require Google to switch from webkit to Gecko and feel absolutely no pain in the areas where it actually makes money. As it is, they have the convenient property of being 'independent and competitive'; but also sharing basically all of Google's goals for web-based applications and the general advancement of web stuff not tied to a specific platform. Why mess with such a convenient 3rd party?
because I don't trust Google. They pulled that stunt with Buzz. Their CEO came right out and announced that their real name policy on Google+ was about making the information of users more valuable to sell. Then there is that incident about censoring information about what really happened in Tianammen Square from the Chinese version of Google.
Using the Chrome browser would make me feel like I was using a smartphone equipped with Carrier IQ.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Google-Wir-unterstuetzen-Firefox-weiter-1390401.html (google translate http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnewsticker%2Fmeldung%2FGoogle-Wir-unterstuetzen-Firefox-weiter-1390401.html)
Basically, Google denied all rumors.
For the very reason that Google wouldn't want to give Bing any sort of leg up on their own search engine. I think Mozilla could come out ahead if there happens to be any backroom bidding wars to keep that 3rd place browser out of the other big guy's hands.
Both revenue sources also have their own browser so neither of them is a real long-term solution. Maybe Mozilla needs to think outside the box.
I mean the reason this is a problem at all is that Mozilla is a non profit but still needs to cover operating costs. Since everything they make is free, they need to either monetize customer support (and who has ever heard of that with a browser or email reader) or have ad revenue.
The google deal was just a means to an end, that some fraction of the add revenue from google goes to mozilla because google was firefox default search. The reason its so dangerous for mozilla is because google has such monopolistic power over search they have no one else to turn to to get ad revenue from searching from, hence the inquiries at M$.
But do consider this - Google is paying 100 million a year, but in 2010 they had revune of 29 billion. In exchange, they go from having influence in a quarter of the browser market (Chrome) to half the market (Chrome + FF) and then they have majority influence. I imagine its something they want when pushing WebM video and standards compliance in browsers.
I use Firefox, and have tried Chrome, but as a developer, add on nerd, and moralist I can't give myself to the company whose adds are blocked by a plugin in their own browser. I have compared them, and run them against Sunspider, and the half a milisecond of delay in page loading doesn't make me want to ditch a fully open project for something Google has lordship over. Its the same thing with Android vs Ubuntu on tablets, I want to see Ubuntu succeed because it is an open development process, not just source wise. Google already close sourced Android 3 even though it was blatantly illegal to close source software built on Linux. So I'd rather stick with the open standard. Worst case scenario, I might find a few months to work on FF myself and try to fix some of the slowdowns if I really take issue with them. That's the benefit of open development.
Microsoft paying money to pay a competitor to use a Microsoft product?
Now where have I seen this pattern before?
Microsoft gives for two reasons - they want control (maybe not today, but eventually) or it keeps them looking like a monopolist (like their investment in Apple, to prop them up before Apple overtook them in Market Capitalization.)
Keeping Firefox/Mozilla going is really in Google's best interests for avoiding the Monopoly concern. Better to have a few friends who can defend you from assertions of Mighty Evil Master of Monopoly than none.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If FF switches over to Bing it will hurt its market share.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Free market for the win
And text a little bit contradictory.
It's because Chrome is the better browser. It shouldn't matter that it comes from a mega company like Google. If a better product comes out, that should be king.
In my mind, the ideal functions of a free market are where N competing products vie for marketshare. The 'one browser to rule them all' mentality is, in my opinion, an antithesis to the free market concept. And what's more bizarre is that your post ends with an acknowledgment that IE has enjoyed an abnormally long run incorrectly as the leader. Don't you fear that if Firefox died tomorrow we would be one browser closer to the old system where IE stagnated and just got crappier and crappier with no competition in sight?
Products do die in a free market, I just haven't seen Firefox deserve this and given the barrier of entry into the browser market we should really cherish what we have for options.
I agree that chrome is the better browser -- though not in all categories. As such, I wish to see Firefox remain healthy and would enjoy them to improve upon areas that Chrome has gained on them. Not to 'fragment' the market (we grow closer to actual HTML standards everyday) but instead to keep these guys on their toes, moving forward and trying to win me over. When I saw Arcade Fire's music video in HTML5 on Chrome, that won me over. That was it. I don't want Firefox to die, I want Firefox to pull a similar move.
My work here is dung.
Does anyone know where the money they get from Google goes? Aren't they a non-profit that's freely distributing a community-developed piece of software? If so, why does this cost anything more than a couple million a year? That's what their financial statements from 2009 (latest available from their website) talk about: 10 people and ~ $1.5M in budget. That seems pretty reasonable to me to run a product with as broad a user base as Firefox.
But $100M??? Assuming an average salary of $100K, that's 1000 people. Are there really 1000 people working at Mozilla? If so, what are they doing?
Or are they really spending as much as Nike and Coke on marketing? Do they have a big pile of cash in bank? Can someone help me understand, cause right now I don't see how the math adds up...
If Firefox gets most of its funding from either Google or (potentially) Microsoft doesn't that make them just another software outlet beholden to one very large company? Seems like a long way from the idea of open source software being supported by the donated time of thousands of dedicated volunteers. Am I missing something?
That seems like an awful lot of money for a company that just makes a browser.
#DeleteChrome
Last I checked it still is. Unless you can show how they came to a screeching halt in supporting new web standards.
So they should never have opinions on the value or efficacy of solutions, they should just implement and expend effort implementing dubiously valuable standards that aren't actually standards but rather something dictated by the Webkit engine. Something you would rather attack Mozilla for but give other browsers a pass on.
They even give a rationale for their refusal:
But apparently rational argument and valid points are meaningless.
In 2010, 84% of Mozilla's $123 million in revenue came directly from Google
Uki, Mozilla loosing funding is bad and all, but what the heck have they been spending 100M+ USD a year on? They must have some money stashed away somewhere ....
I use various desktop PCs, and I want to share my passwords and bookmarks between them... but I am not comfortable with this personal data in the cloud - even on Google's servers. This is exactly the same reason I use Thunderbird and Lightning with my own mail and calendar servers rather than Google Mail/Calendar... even while I'm disappointed with Thunderbird and Lightnig's progress in recent years. I don't want my (potentially sensitive) data lurking in the cloud.
With Firefox, I solved this using XMarks and a personal DAV server on my own hardware accessed over HTTPS.
With Chrome, while XMarks has been ported, it doesn't support personal DAV servers... which is a sticking point for me.
Chrome would probably win me over if it could synchronise bookmarks and passwords against my own server... in spite of my wider concerns about its integration with Google services.
Um, what about Android?
Or, google.com - you know that search engine some people use?
... still have pretty crappy interfaces. Take delicious.com for example, no browser ever thought of tagging, saving, and organizing bookmarks in a database format (which was ingenious IMHO) and allowing other people to search look at/share their bookmarks. When you look at the browser market all you really see is incompetence. There's tonnes of cool firefox plugins and I keep firefox around for them. But it would be amazing if the more useful plugins were incorporated directly into the program. Like taking screenshots of webpages and saving them to a database with tagging (ala delicious). Many of us have tonnes of little clips/bits of information we need from the web but no way to organize it and basic bookmarks is a far cry from what is needed but things like delicious are headed in the right direction.
I find most of my problems with browsers in how to organize and manage the pages/websites/info I want to save. Browsers have really need more intelligent information management features for end users.
Does anyone know how Mozilla managed to spend $123m in 2010? That seems an awful lot to cover improvements to Firefox and Thunderbird that are not especially earth-shattering. My impression is that many other open-source projects generate more innovation with a lot less money.
Evil or not, making a deal with the devil is a bad idea even if he it is called google. Google, even not intended to be acting evil (Don't be evil), is acting evil, as it's cause for funding Mozilla was not to help Mozilla and bring the users a good and free browser, but to bring down the internet explorer's dominance. Anyway if you combine charity with a benefit for yourself, except you feeling good and being altruistic.
And that way Google's actions are evil even if not inteded to be evil, but the cause of the charity is corrupt. And to be frank Mozilla got itself corrupted by the google money, if you ask yourself is Mozilla really worth 100 $M ? A feature less browser (yes some good plugins blablabla) which now accelrates it's version numbers like it want to compensate for falling back in market share. And it seems Mozilla now tries to get hocked on it's next suggar daddy. Mozilla needs a new management and a new perspective, because it lost it's main cause of existence, and even with reaching version 16 on January 1st next year there will no perspective just popping up.
Their biggest problem is that they are about to lose Google funding. It would make sense for Google to pay Firefox to put revenue into their search engine product, except they don't want to because they compete with their web browser product.
So Firefox's problem is that Google has a conflict of interest born of the fact that they have two products in two arenas. However, Mozilla cannot really seek a legal remedy to their problem, because the market has give Google access to far more lawyer man-hours than Mozilla can ever hope to have.
While Google has made a very nice browser, the title of this article is "Will Firefox Lose Google Funding?" So this is a story about free market abuses, not the beauty of the free market system. Indeed, if Google somehow decided to maintain their contract with Mozilla, Google (and all browser makers) would have a greater incentive to make a better browser.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
We all hate firing people and want be everyone's friend at work.
One bad apple such as Asa can surely ruin the whole batch. Talka bout a negative return. If Mozilla had some balls and threaten to fire Asa after Firefox 4.0 if he did the 6 week release or at least re-engineer the browser and add-ons to be designed for agile development like Chrome before making the leap.
You can design a system that can be agile like the flash trading computers at Wall Street where programmers make changes within the hour of a screaming trader without a crash. Chrome is it, but sadly Firefox was not.
The CEO of Mozilla needed to ahve more vision and that included the CIO who left for Facebook who probably kept Firefox stable before he quit. I no longer run Firefox but I hate to see it go. Many schools I worked at k-12 and individuals depend on Firefox because it is Mac and Windows friendly and so much more stable and secure than IE 6.
Lets hope Chrome does not monopolize the web as Google's actions make me nervous and remind me of IE 5 in many ways. Dart, custom Javascript, and their C++ api (forgot name) is very proprietary. I do not like it! Not Chrome per say but rather the proprietary add-ons.
http://saveie6.com/
I am seeing bugs in Chrome that has never been there. Some are pretty severe. So, I have switched back to firefox. Good solid browser.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I hope Google doesn't pull the plug on Firefox - that would result in less choice, and fewer people would be happy with their browsing experiences. The more browsers the merrier, I say.
I really like Firefox, and the last time I tried Chrome I couldn't find any way to customise it to suit my needs. Also, does Chrome, (or will it ever), have an add-on equivalent to Flashblock? (No, the recent addition of similar functionality to NoScript isn't a viable replacement). What about "Long URL please", "FontFinder", "Add 'n' Edit Cookies", "Tab Mix Plus", or "Video Download Helper"?
I generally don't like bloat, but Chrome is way too spartan for my needs. With Firefox, I gladly suffer a little bloat to get the ultimate in customisability. I have no confidence that Chrome will ever be as flexible.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Well aren't you the pinnacle of rational thought?
This is a perfect example of the hate for Mozilla I see on Slashdot these days, with a dash of anger and irrationality for spice.
Firefox' recent accelerated release cycle and Chrome's ludicrous version (it's out for 3 years now and already at version 15 or something, wtf?) show that frequently updating the entire browser is not a sustainable path into the future. You can't seriously ask from people to update their browser every couple of weeks to a new major version and if Chrome keeps up this pace, they will be at version 30 in 2014 and version 45 in 2017. That doesn't make any sense. Already nobody knows the difference between Chrome 6 and 7 or 11 and 12, let alone people will know the difference between Chrome 38 and 39. It's crazy.
But the corporate browser strategy of a more traditional life cycle doesn't make a lot of sense either. Safari 5 has been out for more than a year now, IE's latest stable release is 8 months old. That's just too much. The web changes rapidly and the only way developers can make use of that progress if browsers are updated frequently. Browsers need to keep up, it's in everybody's best interest.
So what I'm proposing is a new browser that separates updates to the rendering engine and the application itself. Not a lot of people really want frequent updates to the browser application. I think most people are perfectly happy with an address bar on top, some tabs and a space to show the actual web page. The code to produce that doesn't need to change very often. The browser application should provide a solid base framework for displaying web pages and hosting plugins. Nothing fancy, nothing cutting edge and certainly nothing rapidly changing all the time. The added benefit of a stable and slowly progressing browser application, is that plugins get a chance to really thrive. Instead of keeping up with the browser versions, plugin developers can focus on polishing their algorithms and user experience. Updates to the browser application should be released sparsely and users should only be able to update manually, so they can decide for themselves when they want to change their browsing experience and possibly break some of their plugins.
But the rendering engine however, that is where rapid updates are very much welcome. Web standards are constantly evolving and as new features are implemented, they should be released quickly to the world so developers can benefit from them. Javascript interpreters are also continuously improving and there's no reason why anyone should miss out on that. Updates to those kinds of "background" systems should be handed out frequently, because it will make everyones experience better. Ideally, this should be a automatic self updating thing, like how Chrome works, without of course ever breaking the browser application. That way, everybody is exposed to the best techniques the web has to offer all the time.
I would very much welcome a browser with such a philosophy. I wonder if there are projects out there like this.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Sponsorship has always been one way for open source software to operate. Donated time is another, but that's even rarer than sponsored contributions, which is how a lot of Linux is developed.
I finally gave up and switched to Chrome on Windows, and I may end up doing the same on Linux. I just got sick of the crashes and constantly breaking add-ons as a result of their Chrome-envious development model. It's been a shame to see. Firefox was the browser that freed me from IE6 and introduced me to the world of open-source software. Mozilla may have dropped the ball lately, but I salute them for reigniting the browser wars and spurring on next-gen web development. I only hope that if Firefox is doomed then another browser will rise up to take it's place and keep this healthy competition going.
The summary states as a fact that the Mozilla-Google deal is ending, based on a blog post that inferred that the deal was apparently ending based on Mozilla continuing to make the same kind of vague statements about deals with search engine providers that they have for most of the last several years without any specific updates on the Google deal, which is a pretty flimsy basis for the inferrence, but at least that source (unlike TFS) only stated that the deal had "apparently" ended, not stating that it was ending as a fact.
But, Google has since explicitly denied that their agreement with Mozilla has ended. (See, for instance, this CNET article.)
Firefox's new versioning scheme wouldn't be a problem at all if they had a stable API that didn't break a user's extensions on each update. Chrome has managed this, and they follow the same fast-paced version upgrades that Firefox is now doing. Chrome is just doing it right.
To be fair, I think Firefox has improved this quite a bit, because I've experience fewer breaks during upgrades recently.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I think these lock in deals are going to fade away. Google is most happy when users have a choice, much like they get when Chrome is first installed. The reason is that most people given a choice will choose Google. I think the money Google saves not helping Firefox is worth any potential lost business to Bing even if Firefox makes them default. Of course, this will only alienate more Firefox users.
I8-D
It's not evil to stop giving money to someone else. It was very kind of Google that they helped Mozilla to get started. By now, Mozilla should be able to stand on its own legs.
Giving away money doesn't mean you are tied to keep doing it.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Firefox still has the advantage of a vast extension base. I wouldn't want to use a browser without the complete equivalents of:
- Ghostery
- NoScript
- Cookie Monster (fine-grained cookie control)
- DNS Flusher (useful for IP v4/v6 dual-stack testing)
- FlashVideoReplacer
- Greasemonkey
- RefControl
- Tree Style Tab
- Firebug
- Web Developer
Nevertheless, Chromium still has its place on my system, mostly serving as an efficient and therefore battery saving browser for local HTML documentation.
I'm using Firefox now... its pretty good, but it doesn't feel like I'm using a product that gets over $100 million a year in funding. I wonder how much goes into development and how much goes into web hosting.
The "hate", as you refer to it, is because people are p***ed off that things that used to work stop working, that firefox is apparently more devoted to copying Chromes' appearance than to actually fixing bugs, and the whole fast release version schedule thing is just stupid because more bugs get into releases instead of being weeded out.
I know all of the talk is on Firefox, but Thunderbird is part of Mozilla, too. How does this decision impact that?
I like Firefox, I think it's mostly a good program (never mind it's epic memory leak history). That being said the thing that absolutely killed them in the enterprise was the version stunt they pulled this summer.
They spent years trying to get into the enterprise and then shoot themselves in the foot. Enterprise admins cried foul and explained that would create hell for them logistically. Firefox said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead and ignored them.
I would imagine that the versioning stunt probably cost Firefox a fourth of the enterprise that had either finally accepted them or was finally willing to put them into production. They desperately need someone who works in industry on the inside to explain to them how things are done.
What can I say, this is the result of the wrong focus. Software engineers made decisions about the direction this company went, and drove it into the ground.
It began as a beautiful thing, something that was needed in a world of terrible browsers. Netscape was over-bloated, IE was, well, IE. Firefox took it by storm because it provided what wasn't available. It was fast, slick, and most of all, capable. I remember being one of the first to compile Mozilla on Mac OS X as a mach-o binary, so I've been there and I remember watching it as it grew up, matured, and then began complaining about the neighbors.
These days, it's an enormous pig of an application. The folks running the show at FF continue to drive focus into stupid areas. There have been massive UI shifts that alienate users. The version number thing is just stupid, everyone knows that. Why did they do it? To compete with Chrome -- can you believe that? They thought Chrome's success was because of version numbers?! Oh wait, let's add bing as a default search engine. That ought to help. How about we get some more broken-UI themes while we're at it. Firefox, your browser, your way. How about we move the tabs over here, do this with the menu bar.. that should help us compete with Chrome. Right...
So I hope it dies. And I hope it dies fast, rather than dragging everyone down, kicking and screaming. "Waaa, competitors, we want your money." Good luck with that. Get real, Chrome has shown innovation far above and beyond the old Mozilla codebase. Firefox is practically windows in this sense -- old code, old technology, new "looks", stupid versioning (NT, 98, 2000 ME, XP, V, 7, 8... excuse me if I got it out of order as I really don't use windows any more than is necessary, which is essentially zero). And stupid management.
To the FF developers that wrote good awesome code, please find a project more deserving of your talent, and let this one die. Software has to evolve with the trends and overall fitness of the software to the environment. In this case, it's time to embrace the new species.
Is there a hosts file to block APK spam posts?
Honestly, the idea of a massive hosts file just to do what NoScript does by default seems... silly.
Firefox isn't all that great (showing how not that great the competing and mostly inferior browsers are). What does Firefox do in a year that costs $100M? It seems that a company with $5M in revenue could have done what Firefox has done in the past year, and that includes 3 "major version numbers".
If you gave me $100M I could pay a team that not only wrote an HTML4 browser (and HTTP/FTP/whatever protocol) from scratch, but also HTML5, and probably a JVM, too.
--
make install -not war
Yeah, Google might as well keep giving money to Firefox to avoid the monopolist label (which some places are already starting to level at them; didn't the EU raise some monopoly concerns about Google recently?), in exchange for FF making Google the default search engine. Many users are already abandoning FF for Chrome, so it's not like they need to resort to other means (besides user choice) to get people to use their browser.
Finally, why does Google care if people use their browser anyway? How do they make money off that? It seems to me they make money mainly from people using their search engine, and seeing ads (and clicking on them). If they use Chrome, then obviously the default browser is Google, so they make money that way. But if they use Firefox, and the default browser is still Google (which it probably will be unless Google dumps them and they switch to Bing to get MS money), then they still make their money. The only way Google doesn't make money is when people use IE and use IE's default browser, which is Bing. It seems like anything Google can do to keep people away from Bing will guarantee their profitability, and dumping FF will only succeed in harming their profitability, by pushing more people into IE (if FF dies, some users will switch to Chrome, a few to Opera, and many to IE).
Like what? I'm tired of vagaries used on the attack.
As if the two are mutually exclusive.
Do you have any sort of backup for your claim, or is this just another knee-jerk, irrational reaction with no factual basis?
What does a not-for-profit Free Software organization do with that much money?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Anyone who can read, use the web, and cares probably does, since they publish their audited financial statement on their website.
From the information in the report cited below, they are a non-profit "that exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project", and whose "purpose is to develop open source, standards compliant, free Internet applications that will be useable free of charge to tens of millions of users" and "to develop foundational technologies that will be used by content and software developers to develop standards compliant online content and open source internet software."
The latest financial statement available on their website is the consoldiated report for 2010 on 2009. And it has, for 2010 (2009 in parens) $123M ($104M) in revenue and $87M ($61M) in expenses, $63M ($40M) of which is software development, $12M ($13M) of which is general and administrative expense, $10M ($7M) of which is branding and marketing, and $2M ($1M) of which is program services (all figures rounded to the nearest million.)
I have no idea where you got the $1.5M in 2009 budget from.
First, they don't have $100M in expenses, they have $123M in revenue and only $87M in expenses. Expenses include things besides just personnel costs, and personnel costs themselves include more than just salary (if you estimated personnel costs as twice salary, you'd be a lot closer than if you estimated, as you have, at the salary itself.)
Unless Nike and Coke spend $10M or less per year on marketing, no.
But where can I find hosts file to download? I searched with google but nothing.
They ignore my update settings, hell, all of my settings when they feel it's convenient. They force new revisions upon me because, obviously if I'm using an older version I'm some old bitty and should be forced to upgrade.
And of course, if that somehow fails to work, they have to nag me day and night until they finally get around to forcing an update clandestinely.
Seems like a perfect fit for the classic MS ecosystem.
I didn't know that not funding your competition was "evil" now.
The standard for "evil" sure has declined.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I wonder if I missed a comment on the fact that Chrome pushes itself up by including itself in the installation of a lot of other software, sometimes even without an option to not install it, as I recently found out with F-Secure. Maybe that although I uninstalled immediately, I'm still counted as a user and maybe a default user. For these actions alone it should be severely punished by an uninstall by all who read this, regardless of the quality.
1. Spot competitor
2. Give competitor money
3. Competitor invests money in feature creep
4. Withdraw funding
5. Competitor dies since it cannot find the resources to maintain the feature creep
6. $profit!
0x or or snor perron?!
Now settle down there, tiger. Don't make me get an orderly and make it "nightie-night" time.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
As opposed to, say, Google paying a competitor to use its product? That's exactly what gets done with Firefox right now. Search engines get money from the little search bar.
Very good swearing. All that swearing must mean that your point is valid.
So in 2009 when it was clear that Google was building its own non-Gecko browser, why didn't the Mozilla Foundation start squirreling a lot of that money into an endowment to help pay for operations when Google inevitably pulled the plug?
Instead, they went full steam ahead, attempting to copy the Chrome look without copying the Chrome feel, and while ignoring a boatload of issues that have been problems in Firefox for years.
I'm so glad I can change the "theme" of my browser with just a mouseover. But is that really a substitute for better SSL certificate handling (a la Persepctives) or security improvements (a la HTTPS Everywhere and NoScript) or HTML5 compatibility (support for H.264)? No. No it isn't. What does that say about a browser when the best features are addons that come from outside the team that was being paid to develop it?
The management at Mozilla has a lot to answer for, pissing away nearly half a billion dollars of support. With a record like Firefox's, why should anyone donate personal or corporate funds to them in the future?
Additionally, Google and Mozilla have pretty much the same goals for the future direction of the web. Both want an open HTML5-based set of web standards, without any patent obstruction. Having two seats speaking essentially the same voice in the relevant circles (W3C, WHATWG, ...) makes a huge difference, and I'm sure Google is quite happy to invest a bit of change to keep Firefox around.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
'somewhat quirky' is a rational argument and valid point to not support a standard??
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
I have received the news of Firefox leaning toward Bing as a betrayal of the worst kind.
I have to admit it I LOVE Google too, and hate Microsoft as much as the slashdotter next to me...
BUT, Defacto monopolies are bad. Google might just be the biggest threat to freedom today.
It's that what we learned from IE? (big is bad)
MS had marked dominance and fired the IE team, effectively stopping the development.
If there're no competitors to Google Search, do you think Google will continue developing and improving it's search engine. Let's face it the free market works when no company have extreme dominance.
As much as I hate to say it, maybe we should be cheering for Microsoft Bing in this case.
Keep in mind there's no free software search engine out there, that can stand up to Google or Microsoft Bing. So a reasonable division of market share, which implies competition, is all we can hope for.
Does anybody else remember when Mozilla was an OSS project and not a company? When it was just a bunch of volunteers replacing all the source code that used to be Netscape Communicator? Look how many other projects survive just fine without corporate backing. What has happened?
Are you sure it's lower than average? If so I pitty your janitors. There must be knuckle blood streaks all across your floors!
Depending on the specific quirks of one particular "somewhat quirky" implementation to define the standard is a very good reason not to support it. It's not like it'd cost them anything in the immediate term - they're bundling SQLite anyway for their own purposes - but it's something that could easily bite them in the long term if SQLite ever becomes obsolete or changes its behaviour in any way.
Mozilla's future funding coming from Microsoft and Bing
Since Firefox wasn't getting bad enough...
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
and opinions are available)
More to the point, if Firefox did switch to Bing, I presume a fair number of users would just switch it to back to google. Should Firefox fall, I'd suspect a large proportion of users would just simply switch to Chrome.
You might be Open Source, but when that much money comes from just one source, you're over a barrel as much as any other company. No money, worse product, less people, less money. If Mozilla had any sense, they'd get their arse in gear and make their product 'stickier'.
You may be uncomfortable with the dominance of Google search, but this does not make it a monopoly. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a convicted monopolist, who has used its monopoly on the OS to destroy Netscape and push its own browser. Microsoft and Google are two different beasts altogether, with ethical acumen at opposite ends, and trying to present them as equivalent with as weak an argument as "big is bad" (your words) is simplistic and negates everything we know about those two companies.
People have adopted Firefox with that in mind and going to Bing is simply a betrayal of trust on the part of Firefox, a suicidal betrayal of trust, I should add, make no mistake about it. I find it abject, after the support that Google has shown to the Firefox team, that they should turn around and threaten to use Bing. This is why I am saying that the board should wake up before the irreparable happens and let Dotzler offer his head over a mistake of such a magnitude, BEFORE the end of the negotiation of the Google deal. I mean, WTF is going on on the Firefox board!!!
Call me tinfoil hat, but I am decidedly opting out of services and features which are google enabled or supported. I used FF until it became unstable and then decided to give Opera a fair shake. In the last week it has proved every bit as agile and functional as Chrome/FF and does have the requisite adblock. Its been quite a few years since Ive loaded up Opera and I am very impressed with the browser. My only reservations are some of the libraries which are google-written and licensed. Still, very good browser and ecosystem. Give it another look if you havent passed by recently.
At the moment, "mozilla.org" is very slow or sometimes not responding at all. "addons.mozilla.org" is returning "Service Unavailable - The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." if you try to do anything that involves the database.
Chrome is so bad at scrolling that Google's on image search is almost impossible to scroll in chrome.
But in firefox... its smooth.
Why is that? Because chrome is terrible at gpu acceleration and scrolling. There are some flags you can turn on in the hidden options to improve this, but its cant handle google image search well.
And all images will have the incorrect color/gamma etc when viewed in chrome because chrome simply does not have color management.
Firefox is faster, renders images correctly, AND you can actually use google image search with it :)
If Firefox disappears from the scene it will be a sad day for the www. I suspect that Google doesn't want to see this happen yet its continual development priorities with Chrome and it's nefarious agenda are clearly at odds with Mozilla's direction for Firefox. Google will probably just throw Mozilla a bone and say "here, work with this amount of $xxx and don't infringe on our browser's functionality". Conceivably, Firefox could become a second tier browser for Google that helps to ensure their dominance in the browsing domain.
Heise (German only) just reported that Google officially denied the rumors they were about to drop Firefox.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
So, off goes linux, on goes FreeBSD.
+1 Funny! Spit my coffee all over the keyboard!
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
I wonder if Mozilla is trying to get as much done as possible before the risk of losing funding and being forced to fire paid evelopers and slow back down.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
They don't care what I say. I can reason it out in a blog article, or kind email with backup data, or cuss at the fuckers.
They have already made up their mind what they want to do, and fuck everybody else.
Only a swift kick in the ass/wallet, will wake them up to the reality that people think their management and resulting direction of software are shit.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I never post as AC, so can disclaim responsibility for any of the other "attacks" - but I notice that you have learned not to use all capitals, and appear to have taken the time to answer me properly, so apologise for my flippant quip, You must admit that you come across as one who likes to blow his own trumpet, though, so don't be surprised when people come along and wind you up.
I'm pretty sure that Outlook etc, don't have Noscript, but they do (last time I had to deal with them at least) have options to not display unwanted content.
Mind you, the topic is Firefox, so I'm not sure what that or your other two points have to do with the price of fish - NoScript does in fact block everything apart from what I choose to allow through, and allows finer-grained control than a simple black-holing of particular hosts / domains.
Keep well, and don't worry about the naysayers - it's just your style that attracts the occasional jibe ;-)
I use chrome more than FF, but I do miss the Google Toolbar available in FF (and IE). You would think Google could find a way to include the Google toolbar in it own browser.!.?
Also I do have more compatibility problems with web pages in Chrome than FF.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I fail to see how Mozilla and Google are competitors. For one, Google doesn't offer a stand-alone email client, they just use the browser. Another obvious note is Google Summer of Code regularly funds things that they have internal projects on, i.e. pidgin vs. gtalk. It's easy to assume that Google is a software company behaving like a software company since that's what we've seen before. But Google is a services company that deals in software that uses those services. A car analogy: Google built a highway that is so smooth that you don't have to care what tires you're using -- Google's radials or Mozilla's -- because Google just wants to collect the tolls.
The advantage of Google having Chrome is that people that haven't heard of Mozilla and are wary of software they don't have to pay for can see a big professional name that is occasionally on TV. In addition, it allows in-house projects to be tested on an in-house platform to prevent snafus on release.
I often find ads being served from the same hosts that serve other content i want. Hosts file can't block that.
It is nice that you have discovered a "hidden" feature in your OS, but hosts file is not the answer to all life's problems.
This could probably benefit Microsoft in term of search engine and advertising market. I think Microsoft could probably think of having Firefox as replacement to IE since with the low market of IE.
I still prefer Firefox over Chrome for many reasons, though I think the primary reason is Pentadactyl.
Hell is other people - Jean-Paul Sartre
APK your entire life is like a great big troll against planet earth, so claiming others are trolling is arguably one of the greatest events of hypocrisy the universe has ever known.
Now I know you'll tell me that I'm the problem and you're right because PC Magazine said so in 2001 but I'm not too bothered. Winding you up could be a national sport and that's because it's so easy. People do it because they probably even feel a sense of duty in it, they probably think if they wind you up then at least you're busy copying and pasting a reply to them rather than harassing someone else.
You know, sometimes the best solution is to simply shut the fuck up. I don't expect you to get that though because What PC says you're awesome.
Is that a tear I see?
Mozilla's sites are still badly broken. See status here.
Chrome is good but in some ways still a joke. e.g. It still doesn't support resuming downloads. That's right. And the devs just make excuses, while they make important stuff work--you know, stuff like WebGL, or YetAnotherJavaScriptEngine, or ruining the preferences dialogs. They have their priorities messed up.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Adblock plus in google chrome works fine for me -- but I don't think most people make decisions based on adblocking extensions, so this is not a reason for market dominance.
I know that Google and MS are worlds apart in terms of ethics. But no matter how good Google promises to be, having a single point of search/failure/innovation/you-name-it for the internet is not great. I doubt Firefox changes to Bing, but I understand why they are testing the waters, and why someone at Mozilla could think that maybe Google shouldn't be their default engine.
The best solution would obviously be an entirely free software search engine, but I'm not familiar with one, so looking at commercial alternatives to Google makes sense.
Now they'll be forced to trim the fat in the budget. They can start by firing anyone who even thinks about trying to muck with the UI.
Hi Oaktree, forget to take your meda AGAIN huh? well you know they say they won't work unless you take them every day! I hate to break the news to ya pal but I wouldn't know how to code in Delphi if you stuck a gun to my head, the last time i personally coded was when words like PEEK and POKE were still considered cutting edge programming skills.
Oh and I think its fricking hilarious that you think APK is me considering me and him still can't agree on shit as i STILL think a recursive DNS server is a better route than a HOSTS file. But once in a while he points me to one of your posts for shits and giggle so I can laugh and fart in your general direction.
Give it up dude, your OS is a corpse, its disco stu, its going on the cart whether it feels happy or not. hell even Asus that started the netbook craze with Linux won't even touch the shit anymore and you know why? because it sucks, its unstable, linus keeps going Goatse on the kernel, and finally too many frankly batshit users like you will take a cock slapping from the developers and come back and ask for more. if it were a company it would have been chapter 11 by now. MSFT sells more copies in a week than you get users in a year just because THEY LISTEN TO THE CUSTOMER while your kind jerks off to a bash script and wonders why the public can't see how "leet" a 70s terminal throwback is. Give it the fuck up and stay down, it isn't even enjoyable kicking you around anymore. Its like kicking a retard, it isn't even entertainment.
Now you be sure to rush to log out so you can write 'die you fat fucker" again like i give a flying fuck. I'm up to my ass in work, so much so that my GF who is coming down to rock my world (ever had one? Sex is great, especially with a girl that loves to play...of course you wouldn't know about that) is gonna be surprised with a brand new custom built quad by yours truly, sweet little machine if i do say so myself, the kids got more games than they can count (ever try them...no that's right all you have is tux racer...sorry) and even after buying everyone a nice Xmas this PC guy had enough left to talk Santa into bringing him a Thuban.
So please take your meds, eat some fiber, quit using dead OSes, and try getting laid occasionally. And allow me to say my crazy paranoid loser friend "I wish you a merry Thuban and a happy six coreee!". Man its so nice to be me, i just wake up in the morning smiling, of course the money and great sex might have something to do with it, but who am i to complain? But if you want to know who APK is he sure as hell ain't me, look up his history on CNet as he lurked there for years. From what i understand he's a programmer that has made a decent amount on the shareware, whereas the closest i got to writing a program with a GUI was a VB frontend to a DB back 10 years ago. I wouldn't exactly call that programming and I sure as hell didn't try selling it.
so guess again nutjob, who knows....maybe i'm in your area, maybe even on your street, do you know the guy behind you at the bank? might want to keep an eye on him, I'll be sure to smile at you to let you know its me...boo!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Hey Pete, i hope you enjoyed my laughing at old crazy oak, I did so enjoy farting in his general direction. The fact that he thinks you and i are the same person and hiding in some warroom in Redmond plotting the fall of FOSS is funny as shit, hell he's funnier than twitter! especially since you and I agreed to disagree (and i STILL think a recursive DNS is the better way, but different strokes) and are as different as a jet and a sub.
Anyway i'm sorry i couldn't get nastier on him but.....i'm just so damned happy! its hard to work up a good rant when you got a great little GF whose favorite pasttime is yours truly, made enough scratch in just the past week that after getting everybody's Xmas I not only got enough to surprise my sweetie with a kick ass custom quad core (built by yours truly of course) when she comes back from her family visit but I had Santa bring me a brand new Thuban and a kick ass Zalman supercooler so I should be able to hit crazy speeds!
so in conclusion just let me say Pete don't forget to enjoy the holiday, laugh at the dumbasses while enjoying all the bounty you have. and let me end with my new happy Xmas song! "We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban, We Wish you a Merry Thuban and a happy six corrrreeee!" yeee haaa!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What those links describe is basically a "who watches the watchers?" problem and i think i've got that licked friend, i have the firewall set up so that me and ONLY me has access to the DNS and the server itself uses 3 different root zones and caches the links I use ONLY if they match. so basically to poison the DNS well they'd have to poison 3 root zones at the same time and if they do that? Well pretty much ALL DNS is royally fucked and nobody is gonna be going anywhere.
But having lots of clients out in the sticks you quickly learn DNS is one of those things if you just don't do it yourself it just doesn't get done right. I usually have to set up 3 different DNS zones for clients just to deal with the shitty TTL and dropped packets at some of these SMBs, when all you have is AT&T in the area you learn to deal with such things. If I had the time to write custom HOSTS files for each client? hell it would probably work great, but I don't buddy, my ass is so damned swamped I'm a good week behind and that is with me getting MAYBE 6 hours worth of sleep a day, now I just got a call that my GF coming back with her BFF from visiting their old HS buddies hit a patch of ice and rolled the car so as soon as i can get these two "gotta have it today ZOMFG!" business laptops picked up I gotta shut down and head out for a 5 hour trip to her relatives. Thank God all she got was bruised and banged up but according to her dad the thing rolled 5 times down an embankment and could have been MUCH worse.
So my next post will likely be from her bedside as I wait on her to wake up from the pain meds. be careful out there APK as it really only takes a second for your life to completely change bro, if she wouldn't have been wearing her seat belt I could be leaving to go to her funeral right now. be safe friend, life can throw some hellish curves.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.