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

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.

Comments

1,200 employees!!!

[BLToday]

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.

Re:1,200 employees!!!

[ls671]

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.

Re:1,200 employees!!!

[roca]

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.

With all that money

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Quantum is quazy fast

[Hal_Porter]

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

I see a major disconnect here

[jenningsthecat]

"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 way not to do it...

[QuietLagoon]

...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.

Re:The way not to do it...

[Ghostworks]

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?

Firefox could take privacy much more seriously

[mrwireless]

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.