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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."
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.
... 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?
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".
You obviously do not use, nor rely on, extensions. Extensions for Chrome/Chromium pale in comparison to what extensions for Firefox can do.
Want tabs on the side? Good luck with Chrome. Good luck with alternate Webkit browsers with not enough marketshare to attract extensions.
Simple things like holding control (and optionally shift!) to select cell values or entire columns in a table are what set Firefox apart from other browsers.
Safari also sucks, by default.
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 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.
Google doesn't write a check to Firefox out of kindness. They get a cut of ad impressions from search referrals, just like any site that links their search to Google.
It's a big check because every time you search Google with Firefox then click an ad that results in a sale Mozilla gets a referral credit. The higher ad rates are the more money they get for click through. This is why Mozilla's Firefox revenue continues to grow, ad revenue (due to ad prices increasing) is going up and the part Google shares with referrals is a fixed percentage of that increasing price. When internet ad prices fell Mozilla's revenue from referrals went down, when they go up the amount goes up.
Because they are getting the money from the referral program there is no direct money and little to no influence. You could get the same referral money if you could write software that people used to search Google with. If anything Google is more beholden to Mozilla because of the amount of traffic Mozilla kicks towards Google. For example, if Mozilla were to switch the default search in Firefox to Bing Google would lose a significant number of searches and ad impressions. This is one of the reasons Google built the Chrome browser, they didn't want to be so dependent on Mozilla and every user using Chrome means a smaller Cut to Mozilla and more money Google retains.
Yes, Mozilla needs the money, but changing the default to Bing would harm Google more than Mozilla and ultimately keeping that default setting on Google is far more important to Google which basically limits or even eliminates Google's influence over Mozilla.
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.
Because it breaks the fucking web. So much so that Google have hacked people's installations of Safari to disable it.
Out of the goodness of their heart. It obviously has nothing to do with 3rd party cookies being used for tracking and generating ad revenue.
No, you don't need 3rd party cookies. The benign use of those is almost non-existing, and the only "breakage" are sites that deliberately won't work unless they can track you. If you're fine with that, there's a Chrome for you.
How about:
- TabKit (tabs on the side, how does anyone browse without this?!!)
- FoxyProxy
- NoScript (it's not the same on Chrome)
- Redirector
- Screen Capture Elite
- HTML Validator
- Refcontrol (blocks/fakes referrer header)
- Better Privacy (flash cookie blocker/sanitizer)
The list goes on...
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.
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.)