Mozilla's 2013 Report: Revenue Up 1% To $314M; 90% From Google

An anonymous reader writes Mozilla has released its annual financial report for 2013, and the numbers hint as to why the organization signed a five-year deal with Yahoo, announced by the duo on November 19. Revenue increased just 1 percent, and the organization's reliance on Google stayed flat at 90 percent. The total revenue for the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiaries in 2011 was $163 million, and it increased 90.2 percent to $311 million for 2012. Yet that growth all but disappeared last year, as the total revenue moved up less than 1 percent (0.995 percent to be more precise) to $311 million in 2013. 85 percent of Mozilla's revenue came from Google in 2011, and that figure increased to 90 percent in 2012. While the 90 percent number remained for 2013, it's still a massive proportion and shows Mozilla last year could not figure out a way to differentiate where its money comes from.

Comments

Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't even realize they were making money...

Re:Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is a non-profit. They have a lot of expenses, so obviously revenue is important.

Re:Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a lot of false expenses. Firefox is an open source project, there is no reason why Mozilla should be making 314 million...oh wait, they sold out.

Re: Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are bigger, more complex and faster developing open source projects out there. Mozilla is squandering the money they have. It should be shows around to a range of open source projects. That sort of money could free dozens of major and important projects from their corporate sponsors' agendas.

It's absurd that a web browser gets $300m while a rewrite of OpenSSL is starved of resources.

$1m a year could be given to a team to do a full professional security audit of Tor.

There are more deserving projects than Mozilla of these funds, and the arbitrary position of the browser as a revenue earner puts them in a position of repository which they are neglecting.

With great funds comes great responsibility.

Re: Damn!

[arglebargle_xiv]

Mozilla is squandering the money they have. It should be shows around to a range of open source projects. That sort of money could free dozens of major and important projects from their corporate sponsors' agendas.

That was my reaction as well. If Chromefox and a bunch of money-wasting vanity wank ("Firefox OS") is all we're getting for $300M, Google should be asking for their money back.

Re: Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is paying them to be the default search engine, not donating money to a cause.

Re:Damn!

[kthreadd]

You know how much bandwidth each Firefox update require?

Re:Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait... big open source projects don't need lots of money to be built? And since when can all the other things Mozilla does can be conveniently brushed aside as "false expenses?" What a distorted view.

Re: Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Was.

Re:Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shill moar, Firefox is over.

Re: Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only mobile OS where Firefox is even allowed to run is Android; the others won't let them, and that includes Chromebooks. And they're not allowed to be bundled with any Android devices. And almost nobody changes the default browser on their devices anyway. And if that wasn't bad enough, the desktop is dying. Everyone is moving to mobiles devices like phones and tablets and other cheapo stuff like Chromebooks. So what makes FirefoxOS a "vanity project"? If all they wanted to do was have a disused and marginalized browser on mobile devices, they just had to keep focusing on their desktop versions like everyone wants them to.

Also, Google must be really happy with what they got from Mozilla. They made a lot of money from search revenue, and Mozilla didn't start making a mobile OS until far after they could have. That gave Google the window of opportunity they needed to make Android the juggernaut it is. Mozilla also didn't fight to stop Google from making the world's most advanced tracking network, so again: huge net gains. But to be fair, Firefox users didn't care either until it was too late, so Google should be happy with them too.

Re:Damn!

[davydagger]

what the fuck are you talking about, someone only "sells out" if they give up their principles.

Of course capitalist rhetoric on the matter, is that principles don't really exist, and the only non-subjective value worth having is a massive pile of money, and or a submissive sex partner(s). They find the very notion of ethics disgusting.

As far as expenses go, they release a top tier competative browser that competes with commerical alternatives. Having full time developers, especially quality talent on such a critical open source component is critical.

So is the infrastructure needed to keep firefox going.(bandwith ain't free dude), Unless your looking at Moz's financial records, and actually understand how to run a non-profit, please shut the fuck up.

At least in my eyes, Mozilla is really successful without selling out. Unless you can provide how they comprosed their values.

Re:Damn!

[Boltronics]

Supporting DRM in HTML5, for a start.
http://thehackernews.com/2014/...

Re:Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

There were lots of people who wanted them to "sell out" in this case, all long-time Firefox users. In addition, they only "sold out" after failing to effect change, to their own detriment, by being the only ones who stood up to Google and others to try to make the online norm a properly free video codec and no DRM on videos. It seems that some people would much rather than kept pissing in the wind until they were completely irrelevant, and want to pin all the blame on them for not throwing themselves on their sword for a lost cause.

Re:Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source is about being reliant upon the community for development, not running a multi-million dollar company with a fancy building in silicon valley. Mozilla is a for profit corporation, which goes against the spirit of open source.

How's this going to work

[Virtucon]

With 90% of their revenue coming from Google yet they just signed a 5 year deal with Yahoo how is this going to work out? Diversity in revenue streams is good and also getting off the Google teat is really good but I can't help but think that they just cut their own throat.

Re:How's this going to work

[bill_mcgonigle]

With 90% of their revenue coming from Google yet they just signed a 5 year deal with Yahoo how is this going to work out?

I guess we'll see, but Yahoo is probably guaranteeing at least as much revenue as Google, for the opportunity to be the default search engine.

So that gives MoFo five years to have FirefoxOS take over the smartphone market.

Bwaahahahah.

I'm sorry, that was wrong.

Re:How's this going to work

[dsginter]

If *anyone* made a browser that containerized the ad-world (like google, facebook and yahoo), that browser would become the only browser that people used. Hence Mozilla's revenue. Online advertising is one entrepreneur away from complete death.

Re:How's this going to work

[BarbaraHudson]

No, Yahoo is not guaranteeing them as much revenue.

Google only renewed the previous agreement because their own browser hadn't made enough market penetration.

Google is on most smartphones sold today, and that's where the growth is. Chrome has enough penetration now that they can, for all intents, ignore firefox. Yahoo knew this, and probably offered them $150 million a year (Google may even have declined to make an offer of renewal - after all, it's no big deal changing your default search engine, and nobody's saying "Just Yahoo it" or "Just Bing it."

Re:How's this going to work

[CrankyFool]

This is a profoundly incorrect assertion. Maybe, sure, techgeeks and other people who are allergic to this kind of stuff would use it, but everyone else? No way. And would you really use a browser that blocked gmail? Do you really think everyone else would?

Re:How's this going to work

[enter to exit]

A search engine doesn't actually guarantee any revenue for Mozilla. They get a cut of the Advertising revenue initiated by a Firefox search (or similar). Firefox needs users to generate the searches. A search engine would pay Mozilla in proportion to the amount of eyeballs it gives them.

Firefox would be foolish to change the default search to yahoo, as a large proportion would change it back to Google - but not all. They would effectively be dividing the profitability of their user base. The sort of people who use yahoo don't care what search engine they use but plenty of people insist of using Google and will change it back.

Google isn't simply giving money away to Firefox, they do derive some benefit from FF referrals, but how much? I suspect Google's past relationship with Firefox was largely a way for them to mitigate against challenges IE could pose if MS fiddled with it. They might have thought it necessary to be generous to Mozilla, as a long term strategy, but they have their own very popular browser now.

Has Yahoo offered Mozilla significantly better terms? Did Google simply decline to renew (or renew on good terms)? Is this all a negotiation tactic? Has Mozilla lost the plot? It'll all be clear soon.

Re:How's this going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Yahoo is only paying for US browsers, typical woman lead no risk taking....

Re:How's this going to work

[Charliemopps]

In the real world, people care about as much about their browser as they do about tires.
Put the tires on and shut up... Radial? Winter tires? Siping?
Shut your stupid mouth and make my car go! I'm missing The real housewives!

Re: How's this going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Block != contain. What if all requests from fb or google got isolated in a context that couldn't leak information (no available history or current document or canvas fingerprint or anything)-that is, if the browser actively lied to blacklisted sites rather than blocking them.

Re:How's this going to work

[Rob Y.]

Is this payment only for search from the default Firefox 'home page'? Or do they get payed for searches from the location bar?

Re:How's this going to work

[davydagger]

well if you read the article, revenue is only up %1. Combine with 90% of revenue comes from google. Combine with massive growth in previous years

It should be obvious:

Google obviously isn't paying mozilla anymore money, and Yahoo is probably paying them even more money that Google was.

Who cares

[ShieldW0lf]

Maybe if they spent more time and resources on their project and less time and resources on "gender issues", they wouldn't be circling the toilet.

Their organization been corrupted at the highest levels. It's not going to be repaired. It'll just degenerate further until the project is forked or dies with a whimper.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bizarre thing to say. You don't pay much attention to what they do, do you?

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he's referring to Mozilla firing (a.k.a. asking for the resignation of) that guy for not being pro-gays. I don't remember Mozilla burning money in gender bullshit otherwise.

Re:Who cares

[ShieldW0lf]

Query: Why is it that anyone with the word "wolf" in their name is almost guaranteed to be a pencil-dicked basement dweller who blames women for his inability to interact with them? I'm genuinely curious about this phenomenon.
 
Beats me... I'm on the 7th floor with a gorgeous view of the Rocky Mountains, I had a beautiful woman share my bed last night, and my dick is slightly thicker than a can of Red Bull.

Query: How many times did you follow strange men into their basement and check out their dicks before you noticed a pattern?

Re:Who cares

[sound vision]

diiiiiiiiiiym!

Re:Who cares

[ShieldW0lf]

When they fired the guy who invented Javascript because he believes, as I do, that marriage should be between a man and a woman... yes, that was the straw that broke the camels back.

But they were involved in that Gnome Outreach Program for Women fiasco too, if you need another example, and some if not all of the SJW's who were responsible for wasting all of Gnome's resources now work at Mozilla in positions of authority.

You're welcome to try to make a case for their values being superior to mine if you like, but you'd have to be willfully blind to not know that this is happening.

Re:Who cares

[ShieldW0lf]

No thanks. Try Mozilla's offices, I imagine you'll find a willing mouth there. Just don't ask the womyn, or we'll all have to read the story on every social network for weeks to come, and it'll just make everyone miserable.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Mozilla employee, yes, the organization is corrupted. Not by "gender issues" but by people who are milking the money.
Employees are paid under the average (and don't get me wrong some of them are very smart and very hard working), but there's dozen of directors and VPs which are coming for coffee every now and then and naming their friends with similar titles and self congratulating if they work a couple of month a year and maybe over night once or twice (while others work week ends, night shifts, etc every fucking day). These guys are not paid under average, they get 250k+ for showing up a few times a week (due to the remote culture at Mozilla, they don't actually show up every day of the week - if they don't show up that also mean no reply to emails, etc. Unreachable.)

As long as there is money an the CEO isn't exactly a ballsy one that will not change. I don't know if that will kill Mozilla that fast though. People who work there are in it for the opensource/mission/etc. Still, we're far from realizing our full potential. So far.

AC obviously... and I'm quite tempted to just list all their names.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom doesn't count.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue wasn't about that he "believed" marriage should be between a man and a woman. Everyone is free to believe what they want. But he paid money to fight against the possibility of gay people getting married. He gave out his own money to actively limit happiness of others. That's fucked up.

Believe what you want, but don't try to force it on others. Eich paid money to (try to) have his views forced on others and coded in law. See?

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine lives on the 73rd floor of a building with a view across Abu Dhabi, while working with the various billionaires there.

Your turn.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

What I like most about your reply is that you pointed out that the GP is being a selfish dick and didn't join in his game of "My beliefs are superior to yours!"

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

SINCE WHEN has marriage been between a man and a woman? It's sure wasnt the Bible. Or the Koran. Or.... pick any Holy Book.

You cant defend your position because your belief is BS in a secular world.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

He was fired (or retried to spend time with his family if you prefer fiction) because of his participation in the political process. That is what is fucked up.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Pics or didn't happen.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Marriage should also be between a man and a girl (female child), or multiple girls+women. As the Old Testament allows.

I've had my opensource projects taken down by feminists in the past, and more recently one of my projects rejected from debian because they do not like my beliefs.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

he is totally a dick, what did he say that caused me to friend him. marriage between a man and a woman. jesus christ, aren't these people dead yet?

Re:Who cares

[BitZtream]

Gee, the people who ran Netscape in the ground leave when thrown out of Sun ... and milk the name and open source buzzwords ...

SHOCKING!

Mozilla is just another Netscape. Not impressive, just riding a wave, and falling behind. The only thing that gave them any hope was IE dominating and being that that is long over and everything Mozilla does is done 10 times better by someone else ... well, the writing has been on the while for years.

Then they go and switch from the winning search engine to the biggest loser that hasn't yet completely went out of business ... yea, brilliant leaders, this will end well.

Re:Who cares

[Rob Y.]

It sounds like high-ups at the Mozilla Foundation are a bunch of usurpers that managed to take 'ownership' of an open source project and turn it into a cash cow for themselves. Not saying they didn't do a good job of popularizing Firefox back in the days when getting the general public to download a replacement browser for IE was a hard job. But it seems like that mission's been accomplished, and they're all too happy to simply coast as long as they can collect their outsize salaries.

Why don't you serious developers fork it then? And then go for your own Google - or Yahoo - or whatever deal.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Also posting AC, not that I work at Mozilla, but I'd say I have one of the jobs you describe...

It sounds like a pretty cushy and rewarding job, right? Yep, most of the time. Aren't those the type of jobs we want everyone to have?

I noticed the same thing as I grew up through a few organizations I worked in, and so why not just put yourself into that job instead of complaining and being miserable about how much worse your life is?

Fact is, while some people in VP-level positions are terrible (as with any position), and most make it look easy, it does require a certain skill set not many people have. I consider myself lucky to be smart enough to be able to watch and see what that skill set is, and work on it. Ultimately, it is being a very sociable person. Can the coder actually befriend Yahoo executives and strike a deal that actually brings their money into the door? No.

Worse yet, in most places I held senior management, believe it or not we thought very highly of our staff and treated them with utmost respect. It was their decision to work all hours of nights, building things exactly how they wanted, and grumbling about how they need to "work harder" to get ahead. Angry and mistrusting of management with no malice just because they are bitter. Just because they can't or won't change their social behaviour.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Oooo... I get to say one of the cliche that gets people all worked up.

Get back to us when you can say that about bestiality too. Until then I will just have to believe that your "Its fucked up to actively limit the happiness of others" is really just "I want to force others to validate my life choices."

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you haven't. You are making excuses for the fact that you are just as incompetent with software as you are with women. And deep down, even you don't believe your own excuses.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

You are painfully aware that every single person who reads your idiotic boasts can see them for the transparent lies they are.

And yet you keep trying to tell them, even though you know they never work. The reason for this is that you aren't smart enough to think of another way, so you just keep trying the only thing you know in the desperate, pathetic hope that it will one day work.

It won't.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't those the type of jobs we want everyone to have?

In the long term, yes. I hope that someday a life of comfort and security and leisure is available to everyone on the planet who wants it - that we will have developed the science and technology to have robots do all the work that no one feels like doing.

But, until we develop that science and technology, our economy essentially has a fixed capacity. Our economy can produce more luxury goods for rich people and less basic necessities for poor people - or more basic necessities for poor people and less luxury goods for rich people. But we can't just print up trillions of dollars and give everyone a guaranteed millionaire income and millionaire levels of real consumption.

So if you get paid relatively more as upper management then other people necessarily get paid relatively less in real terms. And that's really the first question: why is the upper management at Mozilla (or anywhere else) paid so much more than the developers who are doing the actual work?

The second question is more subtle: why are the upper management working the same hours as the developers? To some extent, creativity does require space and time. If the upper management is taking long walks at the beach pondering the future of Mozilla then that may actually be time well spent. On the other hand, if the upper management is spending most of their time on personal stuff unrelated to Mozilla then that's a serious problem.

Re:Who cares

[ShieldW0lf]

Of course I can.

Marriage is about subsidizing the creation of the next generation of mankind. Used to be, if you couldn't get pregnant together, you could get an annulment, and the marriage was considered dissolved.

My position, and, in a democratic society which runs on consensus, I don't actually need to defend it, is that if you get married, and enjoy the privileged status that that entails at my expense, you OWE me several well adjusted children to carry society forward when I retire, and if you get divorced, you OWE me for all the benefits you enjoyed at my expense. If you are infertile, you can't get married. If you are too old to have children, you can't get married. Live with who you want, fuck who you want, but marriage is about families, and if you're not interested in making and raising one, then leave it to others.

Religion really doesn't have anything to do with it. Homosexual marriage is an outrageously, ridiculously irrational thing all by itself.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Your position is objectively wrong and always has been. At no point in history has marriage involved any kind of promise to bear children, even in times where it was the predominant expectation.

There's also the fact that homosexual couples are perfectly capable of raising children, as many do.

And no, the fact that our society is democratic does not magically remove from you the burden of defending your position. You threw that up as a preemptive measure to excuse the fact that - just as the GP said and you have demonstrated - you couldn't defend it at all.

Furthermore, that "democratic society that runs on consensus" that you alluded to? Yeah, about that: the consensus is that we DON'T have to have kids to be married. So not only are you making a retarded argument, you're not even making one that would have helped your position if it were valid.

Are you some kind of gay-marriage activist operating in stealth mode to discredit the opposition or something?

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

What about adoption? Would you rather kids go without any parental figures instead of having two adoptive daddies or two adoptive mommies? Or do you suspect that there simply aren't all that many kids up for adoption?

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

His answer to that is literally "Adopted kids don't count because IDUNNO"

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

So the developers' altruism makes them easy to exploit, which damages the whole project. Supposedly nerds have become so social over the last decade, but we still don't manage to unionize.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah. Shame that comment isn't the one being marked as +5 Insightful so everyone can see what kind of person he really is.

Re:Who cares

[ShieldW0lf]

I'm very frank about what kind of person I really am. Always have been.

You're the anonymous coward.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

You're open about what kind of person you are, yes. But not on purpose. It's simply a side effect of your clumsy posturing.

You're weak, stupid, and bitterly resentful of those who succeed where you always fail. That's what you're constantly screaming at the world.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you get back to us when you can come up with a valid reason why bestiality is comparable to same-sex marriage.

Re:Who cares

[chrish]

This pretty much sounds like every corporation to me; executives are constantly soaking the company and providing poor value for the amount of resources they're absorbing.

Good ol' crony capitalism is going to send the work back into a feudal state...

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

A negative income tax would be nice. ((Federal Poverty Level - Federal AGI) / 2 = credit; 22+ years old; etc.)
Single-payer universal health care with prescription drug patent reform. (Medicaid, Medicare combination, with an earmarked income tax to pay for it)
A push to move to a 32-hour workweek with 33+ hours being considered overtime.
A guarantee that there is an 11 hour gap from shift end to shift start. (Sleep, winding down, etc.)
Cap federal student loan interest rates at inflation (CPI).
Require colleges to meet certain guidelines in order to be eligible to receive federal student loans. (Perhaps a cap on administrative costs that the college can collect from tuition rates.)
First two years of college (while in good standing) free based on average in-state tuition costs.
For every 50 hours worked, 1 hour of 80% sick pay acquired.
For every 50 hours worked, 1 vacation hour (100% pay) for hourly employees and perhaps employees earning under the per capita income.

Back to Thunderbird?

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost everyone except Microsoft is ignoring email clients...

Re:Back to Thunderbird?

[Luckyo]

That's because it's really hard to compete with outlook. It's an exceptionally solid email client.

P.S. I'm a Thunderbird/Fossamail user myself.

Re:Back to Thunderbird?

[M1FCJ]

Seriously? Occassionaly I use that turd at work (usually use Thunderbird), half the time it crashes, sorry, stops responding and then offers me to search for a resolution, losing my draft in the process. If you are writing an important mail, it must be avoided.

Re:Back to Thunderbird?

[Anonymous Coward]

can't understand the gmail interface.
enabled smtp/pop3/imap on my gmail account and plugged that into
thunderbird.
happy again ^_^

Re:Back to Thunderbird?

[BitZtream]

Stop using shitting plugins with it. Probably because you installed the LinkedIn data theif or the shitty Adobe PDF plugins which crash everything they touch.

Wait, 314 million per year?

[Karmashock]

That is a lot of money. What could they possibly be spending it on because it certainly isn't firefox. I mean... it is a nice browser... but.... 314 million?

I'm a little flabbergasted by these numbers.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Macbooks and UI designers

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know about that awful Street Fighter movie? In it, the socialist idealist Zangief got dumbfounded when he discovered that he was the only one working for free. After knowing about the amount of money the Mozilla foundation makes each year that goes straight to the millionary pockets of their founders, I wouldn't like to be one of their volunteers right now.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[93 Escort Wagon]

That is a lot of money. What could they possibly be spending it on because it certainly isn't firefox. I mean... it is a nice browser... but.... 314 million?

I'm a little flabbergasted by these numbers.

Some people never learned the lessons of Dot Com 1.0. Remember when Eazel got $20 million worth of venture capital just to make a file manager for Gnome?

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Stormwatch]

Nowadays it's not called UI, but UX. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that interfaces are turning into shit.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Stan92057]

What could they possibly be spending it on

How many version updates/upgrades did they release in 2014? I'm guessing the endless line of version updates/upgrades/bugfixing. I stopped using it when they removed the bottom bar. I don't like the top all cluttered up with endless bars and icons. But that's just me, but me counts the most.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Stan92057]

"Nowadays it's not called UI, but UX."

Well that's news to me about ux. But I do agree, the UI changes were the reason I switched back to IE. Personally all the browser suck one way or another nowadays

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Stormwatch]

Are you kidding me? IE's interface is utter shit, as bad as Chrome. At least on Firefox you can set it up to a modicum of normalcy, especially with the Classic Theme Restorer add-on.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[The Grim Reefer]

What could they possibly be spending it on

How many version updates/upgrades did they release in 2014?

Someone got a copyright on numbers and the licensing fees to name all those new versions gets rather expensive.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. I work for a nonprofit that feeds 30,000+ people every day. (In the 3rd world) And provide basic sanitation and education We go through about $8-12 million (USD) annually.

It's very clear thar much of the money is wasted. Though I hate apple for other reasons, Safari on Mac uses 90% less power having the same 40 tabs open. Running FF kills my battery. I'm sure apple doesn't spend hundreds of millions every year on Safari/WebKit.

Firefox didn't even care at all to progress JavaScript until WebKit destroyed everyone and started a flat out competition.

I commonly run safari chrome and Firefox simultaneously to be logged into 3different Google apps accounts.

Firefox is basically the same thing as chrome these days and it sucks donkey balls in the UI realm.

So sad.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Anonymous Coward]

The VP/Director personnel is eating that money. That's where it goes.
Since Mozilla Corp doesn't have shareholders this is not being raised as an issue. Some of them are the actual members of the board.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[jopsen]

That is a lot of money. What could they possibly be spending it on because it certainly isn't firefox. I mean... it is a nice browser... but.... 314 million?

Disclaimer I work at Mozilla... There is obviously a lot of development, not just Firefox and FirefoxOS, but also research projects like rust, servo (new browser engine), daala (video codec). Followed by an end-less line of smaller projects, services and what not. For example I work on a project called TaskCluster which runs tasks (currently only docker containers on AWS spot nodes); the goal of this project is to make our CI infrastructure faster, cheaper and easier to configure (more self-serve; and more cloud based).

But this is only the development things... Mozilla does things ranging from lobby work (net neutrality to name one); to education and campaigns for this (See webmaker parties). Sometimes I'm surprised to see all the things that goes on at Mozilla.


A lot of what Mozilla does yields little obvious results... A lot of it is high risk (from a business perspective)... A lot of it has no business perspective at all. But Mozilla is not about money, it was we should really dump a lot of the projects that goes on :)

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Sudline]

JavaScript and Webkit are different things, you should compare SpiderMonkey and V8. Chrome started in 2008 to improve JS speed in V8 and the competition then started.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Kjella]

Translation: Our core business (browsers) is so ridiculously profitable and since our mission is open ended we can spend it on almost any pet project we like. Sounds like a good opportunity for a smaller and more focused group to create a better fork and run off with the market, but what do I know. It seems Firefox was initially a two-three man project (depending on which page I look at) that rebelled against the Mozilla suite, with ~17% market share (according to StatCounter) being worth $300 million then 0.17% should be worth $3 million. That sounds like solid money for a reachable goal, if you got enhancements that would make 1% of the user base switch.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of what Mozilla does yields little obvious results... A lot of it is high risk (from a business perspective)... A lot of it has no business perspective at all. But Mozilla is not about money, it was we should really dump a lot of the projects that goes on :)

Yes, you ~should~ dump a lot of the projects that go on, and get back to the core project of making a usable cross-platform web browser that doesn't suck.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[AbRASiON]

http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Sorry, I'd feel like I'm doing myself a disservice by not hassling you.
P.S The stability is getting better again but the performance goes to the utter shitter with 100 tabs, memory usage is bananas (I'm ok with that, to an extent) but it feels like a leak, not actually using the memory efficiently.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you helped them figure it out in any way? If not, you're doing yourself an even bigger disservice by passing the buck. Bugs can't be fixed if they can't be replicated, let alone prioritized if nobody speaks up where it counts. I mean it's fun to wait until one of them makes a peep on Slashdot and then inundate them with a backlog of vitriol, but it would be far more useful to get a bunch of these perpetually-disappointed users to actually participate in the debugging process. Last I checked a few weeks ago, there weren't many votes for these issues yet a couple of devs were working on a fix for a poorly-chosen algorithm causing delays when switching tabs. Imagine if they had people willing to help them isolate the problems and fix them rather than complaining on Slashdot? Why things might actually get done.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[jopsen]

Translation: Our core business (browsers) is so ridiculously profitable and since our mission is open ended we can spend it on almost any pet project we like.

I don't speak on behalf of Mozilla; let's be very clear about that.

Anyways, if you wanted to do a startup, or a small and focused group, you can certainly find more lucrative opportunities (also open source), than writing a web-browser. Granted I don't touch much gecko code, but it's my clear impression from co-workers (and the few patches I've done) that moving it forward is not easy.

By the way, a lot of things still is happening in Firefox. Try out the latest nightly, it comes with process isolation (e10n); it still extremely buggy, but it's nice to see it happening.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[jopsen]

Yes, you ~should~ dump a lot of the projects that go on, and get back to the core project of making a usable cross-platform web browser that doesn't suck.

Maybe/probably, to be honest I suspect prioritizing projects at Mozilla isn't trivial.
I mean when your goal is to improve the open web, how do you measure impact of your projects?

Number of users, etc. is certainly a metric... But so are specs implemented by multiple vendors.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Karmashock]

For the love of god, please get Mozilla to update Thunderbird into a more robust email client. The damn thing is embarrassing sometimes.

Anyway, while I'm sure Mozilla does a lot of stuff, that number still shocks me. I had no idea your team was that large. Every time I hear about Mozilla, I hear about them being starved for cash and on the brink of shutting down Firefox. Then I see this budget and have to wonder what the hell they are talking about.

An idea might be to save some of that money for a rainy day. Possibly invest it or create some sort of endowment so that you can get some independence from Google. It appears that you're utterly dependent on their funding which means they can kill you at will. Ideally, you should have a more robust financial position.

What is more, focusing on your core products is not a bad idea. Firefox and Thunderbird could both use a lot more love.

I am currently watching my firefox browser creep up to 2061 MB of ram with three tabs open. I'm sure there is a bad extension that is doing it but I have no means of monitoring or controlling memory usage on that basis. And Firefox itself doesn't appear to be able to control it or detect it either. All I can do is periodically restart the browser.

The whole point of firefox is supposed to be these cool extensions. And yet we're not given good tools to manage them. Come now. I could go on and on.

I'm sure it is harder then I think it is... but 314 million dollars per year tells me you've got more then enough money to deal with it.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Karmashock]

I found that annoying as well. I had to install a lot of different extensions to effectively roll the UI back. It looks classic now. But it was a pain in the ass to do it.

I'm used to this sort of thing though. Did the same thing for my windows 7 laptop. It has all the classic menus and attributes I got used to in XP. I had to manually modify arcane registry entries and install a lot of third party UI hacks though.

Re:Wait, 314 million per year?

[Karmashock]

That is a good point... that is utterly disgusting if they're still relying on volunteers while a tiny group are basically buying yachts and hookers.

Free Software

[MSG]

A lot of us benefit from Free Software. Android is primarily developed by Google, so it has a steady source of funding. GNU/Linux has a large community of volunteers, but is honestly developed primarily by businesses that get revenue from server support contracts (Red Hat, Intel, SuSE, IBM, Google, to name a few).

Firefox is, by a host of measures, the best browser available. If I'm reading arewefastyet properly, it's the browser with the fastest Javascript engine now. The last time I checked, it's the smallest download. It uses the least RAM. It starts fastest. It supports plugins on all platforms, including mobile.

The browser is key to practically every Internet service, and they all really should be contributing to the development of the one browser that's fully Free Software. Sadly, unlike Android and GNU/Linux, Firefox is essentially ad-supported. It's a bad situation for us, the users.

Re:Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

> It uses the least RAM

Only right after you started it with about:blank as your homepage. As soon as you browse the RAM usage goes up.

Re:Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox does use less RAM than Chrome or IE because it doesn't have per-process tabs. Some people have memory issues (I'm not one of them) so that does bloat up Firefox.

A lot of addons can also add bloat. For example, Adblock Plus increases RAM usage by a huge amount.

Re:Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox isn't ad-supported, it's just trying to be so it can rely less on Google's revenue. Not even Linux is made "for free"; everyone needs a living wage. If "we the users" donated more, perhaps it wouldn't have to be supported by revenue we don't like.

Re:Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Android is primarily developed by Google

IS developed by Google. It's open source, but it isn't community developed. They don't always go hand in hand.

Re:Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

> Firefox is, by a host of measures, the best browser available

Not for the last 2 years. The feature bloat, insane "architecural upgrade" to that piece of impossibly specced ape flueds known as HTML 5, and half a dozen other "big vision" initiatives have bled away the stability, compatibility,a nd usability that were once its hallmarks.

Chrome all the way, baby, becuae it *works* out of the box.

Re:Free Software

[sound vision]

I don't remember the last time I've had the Firefox process crash. FF does have a separate process for plugins - the Flash plugin has crashed many times and taken that out, while not interrupting the browser itself. Process-per-tab isn't necessary unless some core browser component is going to crash. Even if Firefox were to crash, or the power gets cut to your PC, you still have the "Restore previous session" option which has saved me during more than one storm.

Re:Free Software

[MSG]

That's true of all browsers. Firefox uses less RAM than any other browser, with an equal number of tabs open, on any platform I've seen numbers for.

Re:Free Software

[MSG]

Quite the opposite. In the last few years, Firefox has worked harder on reducing memory use and improving performance than anyone, and it shows.

Re:Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey shill, how's the shilling?

Re:Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats, you just managed to figure out that it's not ready yet!

That's not what other Firefox zealots have told me. Besides, the fact that their "multi process" approach doesn't... you know... spawn more than one process... is sort of a fundamental issue.

Nice try with your attempt to channel Steve Jobs and try to convince everyone they don't need or want a feature simply because the platform can't deliver it yet. Phase 2 of the Jobs maneuver is to announce the implementation of the missing basic functionality with great fanfare while acting like no one had ever thought of it before.

It was so amusing to listen to the original iPhone users tell me that they didn't need or want the ability to copy & paste, just like it's amusing to hear people tell me they don't need their browser to use more than a single process.

Re:Free Software

[Antique Geekmeister]

I'm afraid that "working harder" has not translated to controlling the bloat of undesired features (of which I'm afraid HTML 5 is a major one), crashing frequently, and memory leaks. I'm quite unhappy with its performance in the last two years.

Re:Free Software

[Teun]

You're joking right?

I run Firefox the whole day, the last weeks with some 30 tabs open and there are no crashing or memory problems.

Because I try to extend the battery life of my laptop I'm right now running powertop and adding up the power use of a couple of Chrome tabs easily overtakes Firefox.

Re:Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Google does not give Firefox money as a gift. That 300 million dollars is revenue sharing from ad clicks made by users who arrived at Google's search results page via Firefox's search box. So, yes, 90% of Firefox's revenue comes from ads. The deal with Yahoo! is not a substantial shift in revenue models, Mozilla is just switching partners while keeping the same model. Presumably Yahoo! agreed to pass along a larger fraction of the ad revenue or to make a higher fixed payment in the terms of the new contract.

Re:Free Software

[serviscope_minor]

I run firefox on a quite memory constrained system (1G). I've noticed it has improved recently.

Their plan to increase revenue is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...to give more stuff away for free, but to "make it up on volume".

I'm here all night, folks!

What do they spend the money on?

[hawguy]

They spend $200M/year on software development -- have browsers become so complicated that Mozilla and associated projects need 1000+ developers?

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[SeaFox]

Isn't it interesting how, as Mozilla becomes more and more corporate, their software seems to become less and less what people really want? Stupid features and interface changes no one wants are landing in the code and bugs from real users go unresolved.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Microlith]

Stupid features and interface changes no one wants

Better to just never, ever change, right?

bugs from real users go unresolved.

Whereby "real users" are... who exactly? What obscure bug have you hit, and how does my not hitting it make me not a "real user."

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Pablew Nopl]

Better to just never, ever change, right?

Change for the sake of change is just a waste of everyone's time, since they need to adapt to the new way of doing things. If your little changes don't have practical benefits, then they're just useless, and worse, harmful.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[MrL0G1C]

Cursor disappears:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

I've seen this bug umpteen times over the years, why would Mozilla not try to fix it? Also a text selection bug that they clearly have no interest in fixing.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick glance at their bug tracker proves you wrong, if having used older Firefoxes didn't make it abundantly clear that they are indeed fixing vital bugs and generally improving the browser. Please stop forcefully making up a narrative where Mozilla can do no right, and only your opinions matter. It's grown incredibly tiresome and obnoxious. You're not the only users out there. Many of us also dislike (or outright hate) some of the changes, but we can live with them just fine so Firefox continues to improve overall (and the third-party builds that rely on them to do the real work).

Why can't you? What entitles you to this constant bitching? Why must you insist that everything you dislike is "change for the sake of change" and "not for real users"? Do you actually contribute anything significant back to Firefox, or are you just throwing hissy fits in the hopes that someone can convert that simpering into actual useful work? If your kind donated more than hot air over the years, perhaps Mozilla wouldn't have to rely on search engines or advertising to pay their employees a living wage. And if their revenue is up in spite of all your negativity, then clearly someone wants these changes.

It's not like you've got any other browser maker out there who still cares about you as anything more than a dollar sign. If that changes and even Mozilla stops caring, then I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't care about you anymore either if all you can do is bite the hand that makes your browser.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't you? What entitles you to this constant bitching?

Freedom of speech, perhaps.

Do you actually contribute anything significant back to Firefox, or are you just throwing hissy fits in the hopes that someone can convert that simpering into actual useful work?

Irrelevant to the validity of his arguments.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Stan92057]

I agree 150% they took the bottom bar away. Wont bring it back so I switched back to IE. Plus the gay thing That sucks too but ya have to make a statement only way stop using it and I did.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[jmv]

Yes, browsers have indeed become so complicated. It's not just Mozilla, Google's putting even more resources on Chrome than what Mozilla can afford. A browser is now essentially an operating system (see FirefoxOS) that can do pretty much everything *and* needs to do it in a way that's secure against untrusted code (JS). On top of that, Mozilla is involved in projects that reach beyond just the web, like the Opus audio codec and the Daala video codec that I'm personally involved in (there's many more of course).

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for proving my point. You insist his/her arguments are valid, yet present no actual evidence. Also, nice attempt to dismiss me with a cheap invocation of the freedom-of-speech defense. Did the rest of my words hit too close to home, forcing you to resort to empty snark? You're still doing nothing to help anyone, just bitching and dragging me down to your level in response.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[SeaFox]

Better to just never, ever change, right?

Well, if your user base is happy with how things are... why should you change? To piss off them off when they are used to the old interface, to interrupt their workflow? Wouldn't they appreciate the time (and money in this case) be instead spent on things they do want -- like a faster browser, or less memory usage, since those are the two thing people are always crowing about.

Change for change's sake is the sort of thing Microsoft does -- when they're desperate to try and get people to pay attention to them.
The Australius UI and version number jump just shows how lost Mozilla is. They're chasing Chrome users and forgetting they have a userbase that is with them specifically because they aren't Chrome.

Whereby "real users" are... who exactly? What obscure bug have you hit, and how does my not hitting it make me not a "real user."

My current beef is actually with Thunderbird. But it's funny that comes up, since Thunderbird is not quite good enough for Mozilla anymore.

I use Unified Folders view, and since Thunderbird 31 I have three issues
1) Sorting order on unified folders is no longer remembered -- it changes to Date:Ascending on every launch.
2) Column views are no longer maintained -- I had the "Location" column hidden and the "Account" column displayed (obviously a more useful substitution when in this view), and on restart they change back to the other, original, column choices.
3) Unread messages are being double-counted on the Inbox (two new emails are listed as four unread on the folder indicator) -- I don't know if that has even been since 31, I feel like it just started more recently.

These issues are on two different installs of Thunderbird on two different platforms (Win 8 and OSX), and the OSX build isn't even regular Thunderbird -- but the TenFourFox third-party build.

These aren't large bugs. I even found an extension to work around #1.
I don't have much faith in them getting fixed, though.

But if we go though Firefox's bug tracker, how many of those bugs have been open for years and years without any activity? If Mozilla has time and money to waste, they can start by auditing their bug list and just start knocking them out, oldest first (if they're still a problem).

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[BZ]

Browsers are pretty complicated, yes. Things like low-latency high-performance VMs, hardware-accelerated video pipelines, plus the details, like actual HTML parsing, CSS layout, a network stack, and so forth. Also, what matters is not just the complication but how fast you're trying to change things, and people are adding new things (flexbox, more complicated CSS layout modes, mode DOM APIs, etc) faster than ever before.

But also, in addition to a browser Mozilla is working on FirefoxOS, which involves a whole separate bunch of developers, since it's not like the browser developers are writing things like the dialer app for FirefoxOS. Also, you need QA, not just developers.

And yes, Mozilla has 1000-ish employees, for what it's worth.

It's not just Mozilla. If I look at https://www.openhub.net/p/chro... I see on the order of 600 committers with commits in the last month. And that's not even counting whoever is working on the non-open-source parts of Chrome. And not counting, again, QA and so forth.

And the worst part is, this is not a new development. Microsoft had over 1000 people working on IE6 in 1999, according to http://ericsink.com/Browser_Wa...

So yes, browsers, complicated.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[khchung]

Stupid features and interface changes no one wants are landing in the code and bugs from real users go unresolved.

Because that's how large corporation lead by non-tech management works. Two developers, one said "I added a new feature X", the other said "I fixed Y number of bugs", guess which one got more bonus? Guess what would developers flock to do after that?

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Anonymous Coward]

You insist his/her arguments are valid

Straw man; I did no such thing. I merely said that his own accomplishment or lack thereof are irrelevant to the validity of his arguments. Learn to read.

Also, nice attempt to dismiss me with a cheap invocation of the freedom-of-speech defense.

Here is what you said: "Why can't you? What entitles you to this constant bitching?" You essentially asked what entitles him to speak his mind. That would be freedom of speech, so my answer was totally appropriate.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I stopped installing FF on computers after that.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why they're churning out new versions all the time, so they can close bugs because they're for an old version.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Well, if your user base is happy with how things are... why should you change?

Clearly they weren't, given how they were steadily leaving Firefox and how few people have installed CTR or changed to Pale Moon compared to the whole. I'm sure that a vocal minority wants to pretend that's not the case, and wants to blame only the causes they dislike for Firefox's steadily eroding market share, but being intentionally myopic and self-centered like that is just being an asshole (even moreso than the devs that apparently "aren't listening" to them).

>But if we go though Firefox's bug tracker, how many of those bugs have been open for years and years without any activity?

Not as many as have been closed over the years, by far. And again, just because you don't like certain big changes doesn't make them "a waste". Catering to the existing crowd of users who don't help fix any bugs or implement any features clearly isn't helping Mozilla. And yet they're still trying to leave them ways to customize the browser as they wish. I'd call that a fair trade-off. Perhaps it's time for those users to actually contribute to their "beloved" project, instead of constantly fussing about this nonsense. But no, Slashdot doesn't want to actually be nerds, they just want to complain and offer empty advice.

Re:What do they spend the money on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself, Firefox is better than it's ever been.

How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefox?

[tlambert]

How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefox?

I mean, seriously, help me out here?

Re:How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefo

[Microlith]

You get Firefox and a decent amount of research. From my perspective it's money well spent.

Re:How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefo

[spike hay]

Just having that much money means that the organization becomes bloated, and then produces worse and worse software due to design-by-committee and such.

My workplace blocks Firefox downloads.

[aristotle-dude]

Not that it bothers me as I un-installed Firefox when they had their witch hunt against one of their founders. I have been using Chrome ever since.

Re:My workplace blocks Firefox downloads.

[Ksevio]

Would you do the same to Google if you found a similar scandal there?

What's the next best browser for privacy?

[sizzlinkitty]

As a long time Mozilla support who flipped out when firefox updated with sponsored ads the other day. What is the next best windows based browser that doesn't report back your browsing habits to the mothership?

Re:What's the next best browser for privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a long time Mozilla support who flipped out when firefox updated with sponsored ads the other day. What is the next best windows based browser that doesn't report back your browsing habits to the mothership?

PaleMoon. Mozilla engine, but they've undone all the UX shit that's ruined Fx from 4.0 through Aurora.

Re:What's the next best browser for privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of them. They all report to one mothership or another, chiefly Google, just by your using the web. You can't practically avoid it, because the web is awash with these trackers and ads. You're lying to yourself if you think you can. At least this way you know where that ad revenue is going. So I'd say just keep using Firefox. Turn off these ads (it's not a challenge), use a search engine you agree with, turn off any other "mothership" features like Search Safe that you disagree with, and contribute back to Mozilla in some other way. Perhaps donate a couple bucks so they have less of a need to rely on such revenue sources.

Re:What's the next best browser for privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another question: Why haven't they fixed the Firefox 33 bug that prevents us from manually confirming 512-bit SSL certificates? Like oh if we want to edit our router configurations without having to downgrade to Firefox 32.

Does anyone know which browsers still support DD-WRT's self-signed SSL certificate?

Re:What's the next best browser for privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't heard anything bad about Midori's privacy-related behavior, yet.

However, while I haven't tried the new 0.5.9 release, after using 0.5.8 off and on for a few months, there are two glaring problems with the browser itself:

1) It still crashes. A lot. (Coming from someone okay with FF crashing three times a day.)
2) Some websites just don't work. I'm not a dev, just a dumb end user, so I can't say anything beyond maybe the JS engine isn't the best?

Re:What's the next best browser for privacy?

[toddestan]

The big annoyance I had with Midori is that clicking too fast on the scrollbar would open a new tab (this was in XFCE - may not be applicable in other desktops). I think part of Midori's problem is that they're using a version of Webkit that's a few releases old (as of 0.5.8). If you want something similar you might try Qupzilla, which despite the name is based on Webkit and so far seems to work pretty well and is a lot more stable. Comes with Adblock and DDG set as the default search engine.

So why Yahoo?

[HalAtWork]

So why are they moving to Yahoo again?

Re:So why Yahoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they think they can get as much or more from Yahoo, obviously. It's very likely that the existing Google contract terms were going to get less and less favorable for Mozilla, considering their market share has sunk while Chrome's has taken over. Mozilla has no leverage in that scenario, but they do have some with a company like Yahoo, that would love to get back into search. In that regard, Yahoo is in the same boat that Google was in years ago: search engine looking for a browser.

$311 Million

[giorgist]

$311 Million and they are circling the toilet !! What are they spending it on. I am sure they can rationalise their team and their product range. If it is profitability they want, they should focus in that direction and is find out what made them profitable, which might not be what is bringing in the money. Note Google makes money by selling our analytics but it is their presence on other fronts which makes them a household name.

Re:$311 Million

[Anonymous Coward]

Profit != revenue. I know a lot of people here like to cheekily suggest that Mozilla is no longer a non-profit venture, but they are. Workers need a living wage to keep working. That and you can't just grab any coder and they'll know how to work on the internals of a browser, so you need to work hard to find the ones who can, or to train new ones. That isn't cheap. Plus, if you want to develop an Android competitor, not to mention supporting Android and doing all the other things Mozilla does that they didn't before, you need more employees to make it happen. None of those that means you're working for financial gain.

Also, if you happen to know what "made them profitable", or will do so, then please: join Mozilla and steer them with wiser counsel. It's not like they're just twiddling their thumbs and randomly pulling ideas out of a hat. It's fashionable to pretend they are on Slashdot etc, but it's not like any of us knows better. If we did, we'd either be working for Mozilla or a competitor. I don't see anyone else doing what Mozilla is, only offering empty criticism masked as advice.

Perhaps they're "circling the toilet" simply because a non-profit browser is an anachronism, which cannot compete with the three biggest tech firms finally taking browsers seriously (unlike that period in time where Mozilla could just release a better browser than Explorer 6 and be #1). Opera was for-profit and they pretty much went down the drain. Mozilla is the next biggest vendor, revenue-wise. Maybe it's just their time, and the rest of us are trying to distance ourselves so we don't feel as guilty when they finally kick the bucket.

Apps, FireFox OS and Phones

[Capt.Gingi]

A colleague of mine left our company to go work for them. I asked myself the same question....WHY? He loves developing web apps, and that's what he and evidently quite a large team of people are doing. Big bunch of people working on FireFox OS, bunch working on Apps to try and show off features and draw developers to their OS...and a phone...that's cheap, and runs web apps. There are lots of things I kind of like about what they're trying to do...but I admit it seems doomed to failure or just...meh.

Re:How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefo

[twdorris]

Presumably a good chunk goes into keeping the accommodations, uh, humble....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

It's funny how well an organization can get along working out of a simple little office building until they have money coming in and then they need a big, fancy headquarters.

Re:How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefo

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more than Firefox: List_of_Mozilla_products.

That list is not complete. Servo is missing for example.

Re:Who cares about gender issues.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you didn't enjoy fucking yourself so much, we might not need to have this conversation.

Nonprofit??

[Stan92057]

A lot of talk about how and what they do with all the money Isn't Mozilla/FF a non profit? isn't there limits as to what they can spend the money on? don't know that's why I ask.

Re:Nonprofit??

[jopsen]

Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, it owns Mozilla Corporation which is a for-profit entity.

Re:How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefo

[Richy_T]

Exactly. Gotta keep adding features to justify the money long after the point that new features are much needed. And we end up with things like the awful bar and a disappearing title-bar mounted menu that stops working every few days on my system

Re:How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefo

[Richy_T]

Parkinson's other law

http://www.samizdata.net/2006/...

Pi Hundred Million!

[Bob9113]

Pi hundred million. Nothing more to say, but I'm guessing if I don't add more I will run into the lameness filter.

Who gets the $314 million?

[Futurepower(R)]

It would be very interesting to know who gets the $314 million every year.

During the same years that easy Google millions have been pouring in, Mozilla Foundation has become much more sloppily managed, it seems to me.

Firefox has become much less stable in the past few years when many windows and tabs are open for a long time. The most recent version crashes without activating the crash reporter. Instead of fixing the crashes, Mozilla Foundation has prevented reporting of them.

Apparently Mozilla Foundation is trying to discourage the use of the Thunderbird email client. The newest version of Thunderbird, 31.2.0, has the Save-As bug. All file saves are Save As, and suggest a different file name than name with which the email was saved before. The Save-As bug has been reported, but no new version has been released, giving the impression that the bug is deliberate.

Other obvious bugs were introduced into Thunderbird. For example, the fields for email addresses are much more difficult to read.

Pale Moon has been removing some of the issues in their FossaMail version of Thunderbird. I haven't tested it to see if the Save-As bug is fixed.

Re:Who gets the $314 million?

[Karmashock]

This has largely been my experience as well. I don't understand why we're not seeing a lot more from this company when their budget is 100 times I had imagined.

Why do you speculate???

[jopsen]

Yahoo knew this, and probably offered them $150 million a year (Google may even have declined to make an offer of renewal

From the official blog post you'll see that all the options, including a renewal of the Google contract, had stronger economic terms (for mozilla).
To spell it out: Google offer to renew the contract and to pay more than they currently do.

I see this partly as a way to diversify revenue, by having different partners in different geographical regions. And as a strategy to avoid a fostering a global search mono-culture.

Re:Why do you speculate???

[BarbaraHudson]

I read the blog post from the Yahoo CEO, and it didn't say anything of the sort. The Cnet article in the summary also doesn't say that the Google contract had stronger economic terms for Mozilla.

Mozilla was in a good bargaining position: search engines have been placing a higher value on its search traffic, Baker said.

""Both arrangements we were looking at had very good economics," Baker said. "We're utterly confident in our stability and viability going forward."

My point stands - Google had no incentive to even maintain their current level of financial support, given their continuous increase in Chrome market share and the fact that anyone can switch search engines back to Google just by selecting Google in the dropdown.

Mozilla wants perpetual growth, eh?

[fustakrakich]

Every American gave them a dollar (in a manner of speaking). What, now they want two? What if we just have more kids? It appears the economy depends on it.

Mozilla Corporation versus Mozilla Foundation

[u27039008]

Can someone explain in non-accounting terms what is the financial construction between the two? Are these results really from the foundation or from a combination of the revenue from both? Thanks.

$314,000,000 (three-hundred-and-fourteen) million.

[Anonymous Coward]

And you still can't format a PDF properly?

With all due, maybe you Mozilla boys should lay off the phones, politics & crackpipe a bit, focus on the actual issues. I have no problem if a feature isn't 100% finished (and quite a few more should doubtless never have been started..), but throwing in unfit for purpose garbage like your inbuilt Firefox PDF format garbler, and MAKING IT THE GODDAMN DEFAULT; like, just no.

My apologies for taking up your valuable time with, doubtless in your view minor, quibbles over your now-peripheral browser product. Hopefully, however, you may now find yourselves in a position to redirect some resources towards fixing basic issues as detailed, thank you.

Adsense vs yahoo ads revenues

[Anonymous Coward]

Our company uses both Google AdSenseForSearch (the ads displayed on a bar search result) and Yahoo Search. For the same number of searches (say 1 milion), the revenues we get with Yahoo is about 25% of what we get from Google. This move of the Mozilla Foundation is a suicide. They won't get more then $80 milion next year.

Re:How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefo

[gnupun]

Not sure if my answer helps but once an open source or free product becomes dominant in an area (like web browsers), there is little/no chance that a commercial product can even enter the market, let alone survive. That's true with the web browser market today, all dominant web browsers are free (IE, firefox, safari, chrome etc.).

These free browsers have a monopoly because the barrier to entry is huge (million$ to build a web browser from scratch) but little chance of recouping that investment by giving it away for free. With no competition, you're stuck with whatever quality there already exists in existing products.

Whatever its flaws, Firefox still commands 30% of the browser market and $314M translates to less than $10 advertising cost/user/year.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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What are they doing with all that money?

[rsilvergun]

With all due respect the browser has been kinda going to heck lately. Lots of performance and stability issues. I guess there's the phone, but it's not even popular enough to call it a flop. It's a complete non-starter. Where's the money going?

Re:What are they doing with all that money?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Cha the last week alone I had to uninstall Chrome from three seperate machines, it was crashing and opening multiple windows with no good explanation why, and no fix that actually worked.

You can always go back to IE I guess.