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Firefox Forever (www.quippd.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
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“A republic, if you can keep it.”

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[–] 7 points 2 years ago (27 children)

They spend so much superflous money on crap like AI and random advocacy groups. Mozilla makes a lot more money then people tend to think they do.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (20 children)

    Feel free to share how much money they spend on random advocacy. I believe the Google deal nets a couple of hundred million - it sounds like you're saying that if Mozilla scraps the AI and advocacy, that should recoup that money? Because otherwise losing the money is still going to require finding other sources of income to fund Firefox.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (19 children)

    well for one, disclosed in their 2021 they spent 300'000 on an advocacy group called MCKENSIE MACK GROUP and 375'000 to new venture fund. Neither of which have anything to do with free internet technologies. And much more has been left rather hard to find.

    In their annual report for 2024 they also show weird spending https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-foundation-form-990-public-disclosure-ty23.pdf

    Page 7 (PDF page 8) lists the funding that executives have gotten, quite a lot for a "non profit" Page 10 (PDF page 11) is also relevant.

    Where it gets really interesting is after PDF page 35

    300'000 for european AI fund, 100'000 on an interactive tool for exploring broadband inequalities, 50'000 for Carbon footprint, 50'000 for another pollution related project, 50'000 for studing the impact of nuclear reactors in africa and a bunch more of these, while in some cases meaningful, completely unrelated projects from mozilla which used to be about internet and other digital rights stuff (which has changed in recent years)

    I don't think it would recoup the money that is spent, I don't even think it needs to. Yes, a majority of their income comes from google, but they still make a lot of money, mozilla's search income is 85 percent according to https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-revenue-share-doj-antitrust-remedies

    If firefox were to focus on just firefox and thunderbird, and sure other things that do directly make them money, then they would still have plenty of funding left over for developers to work on mentioned projects

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    From those projects, which ones are out of scope for the Mozilla Manifesto?

    The African nuclear reactors might need more explaining, but the rest seem to be right on the goals:

    • Anti-censorship groups
    • Lobbying EU AI regulations
    • Tool to reveal censorship on ISPs
    • Coding/operations related carbon footprint and pollution, which can be used to prevent people's access
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    I don't believe things like AI fund are things that should be in mozilla's scope, at least back when I was religiously donating to mozilla, their manifesto didn't even exist when I was, but even their old one is something more in line with what I agree with. Mozilla has changed a LOT over the years, and the return to old mozilla is what I, and many others want.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I was going to say that AI has a lot of implications in the online world that Mozilla was supposed to promote... but maybe you're right, the AI genie is out of the bottle and there is little left to do about it. Its impact will be whatever it will be, no matter what people want to say about it.

    Not sure which "old Mozilla" you want, the 1998 one? the 2005 one? the 2015 one? It has changed a lot indeed, but kind of has been Google's anti-anti-thrust shield for 20+ years.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    for AI, a lot of what mozilla is doing is kinda... meh, llamafile is maybe useful. But mostly, the only really neat thing that is relevant to mozilla is webgpu local AI stuff which chromium has better support for anyways atm lol.

    Been with firefox since it was seamonkey, and been donating regularly until around baker. Mozilla has had it's up and downs throughout then for sure. but lately, it's just been downs.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I don't think I like llamafile, reusing some weights between models, and smaller updates, sounds like a better idea.

    What I'd like to see is a unified WebNN support, for CPU, GPU, and NPU: WebNN Overview

    (Not to pull rank, but my mail profile can be tracked to Netscape Navigator, across multiple OSs 😁)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    webnn is neat. I'm not super excited for it too much since last time I looked into it, it for sure had some issues. They seem to be addressed though. ONNX is not a terrible interface to work with either and has good platform support so that wont be an issue. I do prefer wgpu solutions however. While they don't work with NPUs (for obvious reasons :D) they are pretty much a "program once run anywhere" solution since it supports metal, dx12 and vulkan. (Only recently got fp16 support though so most things are still rough)

    but for higher perf needs I can see webnn being a lot more useful

    (Not to pull rank, but my mail profile can be tracked to Netscape Navigator, across multiple OSs 😁)

    just means older then I am ;D

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (12 children)

    Sorry, you're saying that if 85 percent of funding disappears (hundreds of millions), and "weird spending" (including the venture fund, which usually make money) to the tune of 0.3 million (let's make that 2 million, assuming they have several such projects) is cut, then that would be able to sustain Firefox? Because that math doesn't add up for me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (11 children)

    Google pays mozilla iirc around 400m a year, loosing 85% of that yeah, that sucks, sure. but yeah, there is enough to sustain firefox and thunderbird and some other things. If not, something is dreadfully wrong.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    The numbers you have quoted so far don't make a dent in the 400M though - we haven't even reached 1% yet. How much do you think Mozilla is spending on Firefox? How much of that is "extra" per your back of the envelope math?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (9 children)

    Appologies, I am not a tax auditor, I don't have enough spare time to go comb through mozilla's finances to list out every single expense mozilla has. If mozilla can't make do on that funding, they maybe they deserve to shut it's doors for good afterall.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    I don't think there's anyone on planet earth who can build a browser at a budget of, say, 2 million USD annually. See also: Ladybird and Servo not being anywhere near ready.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    good thing there would be a lot more then 2m usd left.

    Servo and Ladybird are progressing at an extremely rapid speed, using them as an example isn't a good one IMO.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Well, let me know when you're using either for your regular browsing. If that's in my lifetime, I'll happily admit they were a bad example (and be a lot more comforted about the state of the web).

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Sorry, you aren't a tax auditor, but you are out here making claims. Try defending them?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Do you have numbers behind these assertions? How much money is spent on "crap"?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Some of them are, copy and pasted from another comment,

    300’000 for european AI fund, 100’000 on an interactive tool for exploring broadband inequalities, 50’000 for Carbon footprint, 50’000 for another pollution related project, 50’000 for studing the impact of nuclear reactors in africa

    and much more here https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-foundation-form-990-public-disclosure-ty23.pdf

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    What would be the proper advocacy groups? Would you've ever heard of Mozilla without some advocacy group?

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