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Mozilla Revenue Jump Fuels Its Firefox Overhaul Plan (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the fighting-back dept.

Well, now we know what paid for all those programmers cranking out the overhauled Firefox Quantum browser: a major infusion of new money. From a report: Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the open-source web browser, saw its 2016 revenue increase 24 percent to an all-time high of $520 million, it said Friday. Expenses grew too, but not as much, from $361 million to $337 million, so the organization's war chest is significantly bigger now. Mozilla, which now has about 1,200 employees, releases prior-year financial results in conjunction with tax filings. Most of Mozilla's money comes from partnerships with search engines like Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu and Yandex. When you search through Firefox's address bar, those search engines show search ads alongside results and share a portion of the revenue to Mozilla. Mozilla in 2014 signed a major five-year deal with Yahoo to be the default search engine in the US, but canceled it only three years in and moved back to Google instead in November. Mozilla's mission -- to keep the internet open and a place where you aren't in the thrall of tech giants -- may seem abstract. But Mozilla succeeded in breaking the lock Microsoft's Internet Explorer had on the web a decade ago, and now it's fighting the same battle again against Google's Chrome.

17 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Expenses grew...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I didn't know that $361 million was less than $337 million...

    1. Re:Expenses grew...? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Funny

      The error is in the article text itself. I presume the numbers should be flipped.

      There was a Firefox add-on that corrected this type of thing, but it doesn't work in version 57. :-)

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  2. 1,200 employees!!! by BLToday · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mozilla has 1,200 employees!!! What projects are all these people working on? Because I can't imagine even 600 of them working on Firefox.

    1. Re:1,200 employees!!! by asa · · Score: 3, Informative

      About 600 of them work directly on Firefox.

    2. Re:1,200 employees!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's hard to fathom why Mozilla needs either 1200 employees or $520 million in income.

    3. Re:1,200 employees!!! by ls671 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Does anyone have a functional breakdown for how that works? Even if you had ten people per module, that would imply like 60 modules?

      Well I assume the breakdown is like in any modern project:

      Project management: 40%
      Marketing: 40%
      HR: 18%
      Developers: 2% = 12 developers.

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    4. Re:1,200 employees!!! by jopsen · · Score: 3, Informative

      I work on a team that manages automation infrastructure, we're about 7-8 people building tools and services for automation; with other teams building test suites and release pipelines on top of the automation infrastructure. A mono-repo like mozilla-central runs some ~2k tasks per push; this involves building across platforms and configurations, a long list of test suites, performance tests, etc..

      All in the name of making sure Firefox doesn't break the web, etc. I'm sure we could try to be more efficient about running tests, but this is also risky, because we have so many developers and contributors.

    5. Re:1,200 employees!!! by roca · · Score: 4, Informative

      You have no idea how complicated a browser is.

      I don't know about currently, but I've been told that at times Microsoft and Google each had over a thousand developers working on their browsers.

      Apart from the difficulty of implementing the client software and its various axes --- security, compatibility, performance, platform porting, and so on --- these days a significant server-side component is also needed. Downloads, updates, addons, crash collection, telemetry, push notifications, and so on. And for developers, CI, massive test farm, telemetry/crashes analysis and viewing, etc.

      Then you've got people writing tools and frameworks for the above teams. E.g. the rr project was born at Mozilla to improve life for Mozilla's C++ developers.

      Then you've got people doing standards work (at Mozilla, usually part of the developers' jobs), Web site evangelism and other external relationships.

      Then you've got Mozilla Research building stuff like Rust and Servo exploring technology that may eventually become part of Firefox.

      Then of course you have the overhead --- HR, PR, lawyers, accountants, logistics, office managers, event organizers, personnel managers, executives.

      I worked at Mozilla for a long time. Over the last five years headcount was at about the same level, even during the FirefoxOS years. We were *always* butting up against headcount limits, more work than we had people to do it. It's not like the stories you hear about Google where people are wandering around underemployed.

  3. With all that money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They can afford to make an XUL version of Firefox for people who want to use real extensions officially. and not having to use forks like Waterfox and Pale Moon.

  4. Re:Quantum is quazy fast by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's fast. And more importantly it's not made by Google. Because right now Google seems like it's becoming a problem.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  5. I see a major disconnect here by jenningsthecat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Most of Mozilla's money comes from partnerships with search engines like Google...".

    So they get a lot of money from Google - probably the lion's share. And Google gets most of their money from advertising.

    "(A)nd now it's fighting the same battle again against Google's Chrome".

    So how long is Google, (an advertising company whose browser is a core part of its advertising strategy), going to keep funding a company whose stated aim is to "keep the internet open and a place where you aren't in the thrall of tech giants"?

    I've never really understood Google's support of Mozilla. Might it be that Google expects a company with both a growing war chest and a shrinking user base to implode more rapidly when funding is suddenly withdrawn? If not that or something like it, then the reasons for Google's support are a mystery to me. Can anyone here explain it?

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  6. The way not to do it... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...But Mozilla succeeded in breaking the lock Microsoft's Internet Explorer had on the web a decade ago, and now it's fighting the same battle again against Google's Chrome....

    The way not to take on Chrome is to become a total clone of it and, at the same time, destroy all the functionality that extensions had provided.

    1. Re:The way not to do it... by Ghostworks · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The old extension model gave you access to everything. I hesitate to call them "hooks", because when people here that they usually think of a well-enumerated API option or port. It wasn't that. Everything was made of modules with a defined module API. Any extension could leverage any model by talking to it. That made you able to do literally anything with their model.

      Do you want to cut out the (then) Gecko rendering engine and instead use IE's (then) Trident rending engine? An extension did that. Do you want to filter everything that goes to the (then) SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine before the code is run? An extension let you do that. Do you want to leverage the rendering engine to view a webpage in a way that it was never intended (say, as hierarchical text)? An extension did that. Do you want to inject your own code into every page you're shown? An extension did that. Do you want to add support for a new or obsoleted protocol (like gopher), or new image formats? You could do that. Do you want to implement completely new UI features, such as dragging-to-rearrange tabs? That was an extension, later added to the main program.

      The trouble is that most extensions did really banal shit like changing the UI by modifying the chrome. And when Firefox revs and redefines chrome element (and the mediocre extensions do not update at all), all of a sudden the browser gets laggy and leaky and doesn't work like customers expect, and Mozilla looks incompetent. They had the same problems with their CSS-based themes, which is why they started moving back to customizable by mostly-meaningless skins (in their Jetpack initiative).

      Now by moving to Google Chrome's API model, they've finish cutting out most of the wild, wooly, user-generated code that made it less stable... but also the only thing that makes Firefox unique or useful in a modern browser. It did it's job and ended IE dominance. With the passage of time it has forgotten the goal of making a browser that was lightweight. Modern web features make it impossible for it to be nearly as cross-platform as it was. They rarely ever supported user choices over API standards (they always had to be badgered into things like 'never deny the user access to the menu'), so it's hard for me to believe them when they claim any kind of moral superiority. They only care about user choice so long as it doesn't make work for them. So other than the fact we have a _different flavor_ of chrome now, what's there to be thrilled about?

  7. Firefox could take privacy much more seriously by mrwireless · · Score: 4, Interesting

    After installing an outgoing firewall on my laptop I was amazed to see that Firefox was continuously sending updates about the wifi networks I was connected to to a maps.google.com/something address.

    I was quite dissapointed, and switched to Waterfox for a while.

    Chrome is, of course, much worse. But still. I would love to see a fast browser that really takes privacy seriously. You'd think that limiting tracking might speed up the browser as well.

    1. Re:Firefox could take privacy much more seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Those are your location data requests (which prompted you and you accepted). All browsers do that. See this Stack Overflow question for details.

    2. Re:Firefox could take privacy much more seriously by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Informative

      After installing an outgoing firewall on my laptop I was amazed to see that Firefox was continuously sending updates about the wifi networks I was connected to to a maps.google.com/something address.

      I was quite dissapointed, and switched to Waterfox for a while.

      Why were you disappointed? How else do you think Geolocation features in a modern browser on the modern internet is supposed to work? If you want to drop the evil conspiracy then here's some information:

      What, why and how: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...
      Google's specific policy of how it handles Mozilla's requests: https://www.google.com/privacy...

      Of course this API request is for Mozilla to get the current location from Google, so it sends your connected WiFi spot and Google replies with where you are. Nothing too exciting since all it's doing is getting the information from Google. It doesn't hand anything out without your permission (and neither does Chrome). That can all be managed under Settings > Permissions > Location.

      Finally if you're truly paranoid, head to about:config and set geo.enabled = false.

      The worst thing we ever did was give data to those people who are unwilling to take the time to understand it. With the curiosity of what is being sent where you should also add the curiosity of why, how and for what reason. Then you may actually simply turn the relevant setting off instead of panic switching to a whole different product for the wrong reasons.

  8. Re:Quantum is quazy fast by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Informative

    It actually has always been an issue. Just in different ways. Back when Microsoft had infamously embedded IE into Windows 98. It meant the application took less time to load, because much of the components were loaded during boot time.
    Firefox was at the time quick to load and was light on system usage, and rendered stuff fast and followed the standards well and was secure.
    Chrome came out after Firefox kept on adding stuff to it slowing it down, so it was the light and fast browser.

    It seems the trend is the small and fast browser wins, then the browser maker puts so much junk on it, it slows it down for an other company to make a new one stripped down to what people want.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.