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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."
... 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
What a stupid comment. Everyone has to have revenue of some kind. What were they going to do? Operate off of donations? They provide a class browser for free. Next best free alternative? Chrome browser. Guess who makes that?
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
"They sold out a long time ago"
In what way? They're the only major "independent" browser. They're the browser that has led the field in personal privacy, security, and blocking trackers. They're the ones who put out a mobile phone OS that doesn't try to lock you in to one company's services.
I'd like to know how you think any of that is "selling out".
Because it breaks the fucking web. So much so that Google have hacked people's installations of Safari to disable it.
Mozilla are the only ones actively trying to solve that problem, and yet the only thing your kind can see and say is "they haven't fixed it yet!" If you feel that god damn strongly about it, because part of the solution.
It's easy to wag fingers at the smallest guy in the ring for not doing all the work, but it doesn't make you right. It makes you sound like a boorish oaf who can't be bothered to use RequestPolicy and would rather someone else solve the problem for them YESTERDAY, conveniently without even paying them for the work.
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.
Look, if you're unwilling to actually read the Bugzilla and forum threads about this, don't get on your high horse. Any user who WANTS third party cookies off can easily do so. This is about the users who don't realize they want third party cookies off, and Mozilla has to step far more lightly with them because it DOES break the web. Lots of sites will break if you don't also see their ads or allow their trackers to work. And that's just advertising. Lots of other sites use third-party cookies not for ad-tracking, and they can break too.
I'll repeat what I said above - disabling 3rd party cookies does not break the web. The fact is, those sites you mention intentionally break the web, then tell you that if you want to see the web, you have to enable their cookies. The web is there, with or without the cookies. Holding the web hostage, and telling users that they aren't permitted to see the web unless you can track them is evil. I don't do 3rd party cookies. Occasionally, some weird thing happens, and I can't see what I thought I wanted to see. I say, "Big deal - I didn't need that anyway!" I go on, and find the content that I was looking for through some other provider.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Because it breaks the fucking web. So much so that Google have hacked people's installations of Safari to disable it."
It does absolutely nothing of the sort. It breaks some companies' business models on the web. Those are not even remotely the same things.
If those companies disappeared tomorrow, the web would remain. Hell, it might even be a better place.
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.