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Mozilla's 2012 Annual Report: 90% of Revenue Came From Google
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today released its annual financial report for 2012, and while revenue is up quite substantially, the organization's reliance on Google continues to grow. In 2011, 85 percent of Mozilla's revenue came from Google. In 2012, the figure increased to 90 percent."
This is just confirmation.
It's because instead of listening to what the users want, they plow ahead with stupid UI-redesigns to make Firefox a slower, buggier Chrome clone. I mean sure, the new UI is spiffy, but they can't fix a nearly ten year old bug with find.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
We are at the tail end of 2013. Isn't this news a little more late than usual?
What's up?
... And we wonder why they backed off the Do Not Track, why plugins are no longer being vetted to ensure they're actually doing what they say, etc. Guys... How much more evidence do you need that Google is evil -- they're sending vans in your neighborhood, taking pictures of your houses, collecting your wifi network names, OTA traffic, embedding realtime tracking into your phones, and the list goes on. We piss ourselves like excited dogs at the prospect of the NSA spying on us (Sorry but you just aren't that interesting), but when Google does ten times that and is whoring out your personal data like it has a crack addiction, we find people saying "Ah, well, it's a convenience, and how else do you expect us to get all these nifty apps if we don't surrender all our privacy and have advertisements shoved down our throats?"
And now they've infected the only major open source software browser out there. And it's just a matter of time before they pull the rug out from under the organization and it implodes. But it's cool... you can always upgrade to Chrome. And as a bonus... it'll happily store every interaction you make with your browser on Google's servers. Isn't that... convenient?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Really, what does Firefox sell? Is the rest donations?
Despite engineers from high traffic websites such as Facebook begging Mozilla to implement it in the hopes of saving bandwidth costs, and despite plenty of success stories for those who implemented it only for Chrome, they still continue do deny the format a chance..
Meanwhile, the internet still lacks a lossy compression image format that supports alpha transparency... Thank you Mozilla!
I somehow just got served beta.slashdot.org by default. Half of the comment pages are taken up by an empty sidebar, and there's a whole #0a0a0a worth of color difference between the comment text and the gray background. Kill it with fire.
Firefox is a sinking ship. It is filled with bugs and slow rendering. The code base is pushing 20 years old!
Time to abandon this ship. The developers are out of ideas and instead of incremental refinements, they're all about adding useless features (PDF viewer, the ENTIRE CONCEPT OF FirefoxOS) and removing useful ones (navigation buttons, menu bars, etc). When your best attempt is a shit copy of Chrome instead of something that offers value from differentiation, its time to give up and move on to something more productive with your life.
Give me a cross-platform Webkit based browser backed by an organization that stands for what Mozilla USED to stand for (when Mozilla was a suite with a DOT ORG and not a DOT COM) and I may be interested. Until then, I have Chrome (well...Chromium on OpenBSD).
Do they just pay for the default homepage to use Google? Does anyone actually leave that there for long after installing Firefox? I always change it. I imagine most Firefox users would switch to Chrome if Firefox croaked, seeing as IE didn't satisfy them in the first place. They would dramatically grow their user base if Firefox died.
As I see it, there are two main problems with this situation:
(1) The obvious - that Google will have undue influence over Mozilla's design decisions. Some will argue that is impossible, etc. Maybe so, but money talks.
(2) The less obvious - that Google will fall on hard times and Mozilla will find themselves high and dry. Some people argue that Bing and other search engines also bid to be default search engine in Firefox so Mozilla could just switch to one of them for a nearly equivalent revenue stream. But the main reason there were other bids is because Google is so dominate. If Google tanks, then the other search engines will be in a stronger position and won't need Mozilla as much as they do today. So the money they are likely to offer will also be reduced.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Another, perhaps more likely possibility, is that Google is worrying about what could happen if they didn't fund Mozilla:
1) a direct competitor like Amazon or Microsoft might step in to take their place
-or-
2) FF could move in a direction of privacy advocacy, and set up defaults that would defeat the tracking and content-pushing policies of big sites like Google and Macromedia
(1) You forgot about Google's diabolical barges.
(2) Google isn't breaking anyone's door down with a well armed friends.
That would explain the Chrome-esque Australis theme that just hit Nightly on Monday. I switched to the Pale Moon fork on Windows, but have yet to find a suitable alternative for Mac.
Mozilla is like a small business with 1 huge client. The client leaves and there goes the business. Regardless of internal politics within Mozilla, Google owns Mozilla, plain and simple.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
What a position to be in: you give away all your products but are well funded by a wealthy patron. Yet the patron gives away a product comparable to your primary product, and gives away a service that provides many of the features of your secondary product.
Wealthy patrons are nothing new, and those who rely on patronage have always been in a precarious position. But rarely have they been in direct competition with their patrons.
What were they going to do? Operate off of donations?
Aside from you ignoring the giant white elephant in the room, which is that Google is increasingly encompassing or influencing every aspect of the internet it possibly can, which is NOT HEALTHY...Why not operate off donations? They're not a for-profit corporation, they don't have investors or shareholders, etc.
There was ZERO need for growing Mozilla into the monster it is today with a finger in everything. What the fuck is Mozilla doing promoting a surfing competition? Why the fuck is Mozilla making an OS and trying to sell cell phones?(Did all the OpenMoko failures start squatting at Mozilla HQ or something?) Why does the Mozilla website design change every month?
While I'm ranting: nobody was clamoring for the moron-ization of Firefox's controls (some privacy-related, like the stripping-out of the ability to expire history+cache+cookie data older than a certain time period. Want to only keep the last 7 days of history? Too fuckin' bad! Gee, who has an interest in that? Advertisers like GOOGLE) or the butchering of Thunderbird at the hands of some 20-year old self-proclaimed UX expert.
About the only thing I see Mozilla doing well these days is pissing people off with every application update, something Google excels at, as well.
And by the way, get off my lawn.
Please help metamoderate.
So, 85% to 90% in one year. Must be reporting revenues using Firefox/Google version numbers.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It may not be a popular opinion, but Google have way too much influence over the Internet/WWW. I have known for ages that Firefox rely on Google, but this latest news is actually unnerving somewhat, because it seems that short of IE, no browser ships without traces of Google embedded. This, too, is disturbing. Your opinion may vary, and that's OK...
I find it interesting that Google effectively sponsors competition to their Chrome browser. I wonder if it's to keep pressure up against Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Their expenses for branding and marketing were almost $30,000,000.
This. This is the problem right here. Why does an open-source project need to spend thirty million dollars promoting a "brand" most people are already fully aware of? Firefox already has a healthy enough market share; there's no NEED for it to have more.
And why does it cost $150M/year to work on a browser, email client, and some dev tools? They have 650 or so employees - assuming every single one was a developer, they're spending $230,000 on each one.
If it truly costs $150M/year to work on the "products" Mozilla produces, that's absurdly inefficient.
Please help metamoderate.
Seriously, it would be to their benefit to invest this into companies so that they can pull dividends over a long period of time. And it should ones that are OSS friendly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I almost wish the Google contribution were 0% so they'd stop adding god damned useless "features" to what should be elegant and simple: A browser and an email package.
I don't want built-in PDF readers and video codecs and all that other crap their shovelling into it lately. If I want that functionality I'll install it. Don't shove it down my throat!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
22 employees get an average of $188,000, 3000 volunteers get zero.
https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2012_Mozilla_Form_990-Public_Disclosure.pdf
> They also support -- and highly recommend -- a plugin
> that lets you see ALL the "3rd parties" who are tracking you
Which plugin is that? And is it free software?
Thanks,
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
What's with the stupid version 25 "Find" (text) bar? Somebody took some GUI LSD and fucked it up, making up some roundabout Flux-Capacitor-like excuse.
Mozilla's CTO, Brendan Eich, gets $652,194.
This is an organization that takes years to fix bugs and has a huge legacy code base they can barely manage. (There's still a lot of Netscape stuff in there.)
Its called Lightbeam.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/
Yes, its free, for certain definitions of free.
Most of the contributions are not financial in an open-source project. So if you focus on money only, you can only get irrelevant results.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
> Its called Lightbeam.
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/ [mozilla.org]
> Yes, its free, for certain definitions of free.
I can't find a licence statement. Some source files say it's under Mozilla Public Licence v2.0, which means those files are free software, but other files don't have any licence info at all. Maybe the author just forgot, but if there's no licence then they're not free by any sense of the word. I'll look for an email address to contact them.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
So that's why Firefox on Android sucks so bad... they know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.
Google owns Mozilla, plain and simple.
Yes, and no...
Thing flip side of the coin is that as long as Firefox has any significant share of the market, Google can't take the risk of dropping Mozilla.
Sure if Mozilla did a deal with bing, many users would change back or drop Firefox in favor of Chrome to get Google.
The keyword here is many, that could be anywhere from all Firefox users to none. But Google can't take that risk, not when they already have a good business.
20% marked share (hence, extra data) might just be what bing needs to take off.
Not paying Mozilla is a huge risk for Google, and a risk without significant rewards.
You know as well as I do that there is no way they would get enough donations. If they switched to that it's a virtual guarantee that Mozilla would be gone within a year.
You say that like it would be a bad thing.
I like because I own my email mail, instead of borrowing it from someone. As a user Thunderbird, I am saddened that development energy for great program is being has diminished. Perhaps popmail conflicts with Google's wants and needs.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
but if there's no licence then they're not free by any sense of the word.
Except for the most common usage of the word, which is to say free as in beer.
At $311 million in revenue, if Firefox was a charity, it would be the 27th largest charity in the US, between the USO and Catholic Relief Services, according to Forbes. By the way, BOTH Microsoft and Google want to keep it alive because of anti-trust fears, although most of the search traffic goes to Google.