Imagine how much open source software could be developed for $500 million/year. What the fuck has firefox done?
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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They've paid their CEO.
Try to get MORE money so that they can pay their CEO.
500 million would pay for almost 5000 full time developers.
Fuck developers, we need more "leadership"
Hopefully Mozilla won't die until Ladybird or Servo is ready 😅
I don't think the EU will let it die. Maybe Mozilla dies and Firefox gets reborn as a EU (ZENDIS?) project.
- Finish off Firefox
- Break up Chrome
- Profit
Ceo makes how much?
Yeah, but their job is like reeeally hard!! They deserve it. /s
CEO is paid for from the for profit. The majority of costs are engineering salaries for Firefox.
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Oh look we're back to the "open source software can't survive on its own without gobs of money and million-dollar CEOs wah wah wah" again.
Wtf you on about?
The grand majority of all costs for Firefox are in engineering salaries. And there is no million dollar CEO relating to the nonprofit's expenses, that CEO is paid for from funds from the for profit organization.
Browsers are CRAZY expensive to build and maintain. And teams of engineers are crazy expensive.
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Fiy, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the highest rates charities on Charity Navigator.
They don't always make the best choices as far as product direction, but as a charity, they are quite respectable.
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Well goodbye mozilla it wasn't great knowing you. Hopefully you are able to fuck over the devs and golden parachute your c-suite bastards one last time.
Maybe, but what are the odds of a fork taking off? It was started under the codename "Phoenix" and went by "Firebird" for some time before becoming "Firefox".
Maybe it's time for a fork to rise from the ashes and take off...
Any fork will die a slow and painful death of it can't get the necessary funding for project management and maintainer salaries.
It will also dwindle, hard, towards irrelevancy.
In world where the only viable browser is one owned and operated by Google.
I'm not that pessimistic, development for Ladybird seems to be going well and those crazy people are building it from scratch rather than basing it on Chromium or Firefox. There's also Servo. When Mozilla dies the forks will hang on for a while then we'll have alternatives.
I'm familiar with them.
These are projects sitting years, maybe even a decade, away from maturity. IF web standards and capabilities don't change at all over the next 5-10 years.
Hopefully that puts this into perspective. These are really cool projects, but without a massive influx of engineering effort and organization, they will likely be perpetually, hopelessly, behind the standard rate of change required of browsers. Nevermind meeting the current standards of performance, security, observability, ecosystem, user and developer experience.
It's always good to check in on these projects yearly, see how it's going, see if they are accelerating or slowing down. Eventually one of them will take off, and potentially leech resources from other similar projects.
Though, the nature of FOSS is that 1000 people will work on 200 different projects all trying to do the same thing, instead of combining and organizing efforts to go after the same unified goal.
This isn't really a statement of fault but rather a statement of reality. Without dedicated full-time organization, this is usually how scattered resources solve problems. Which is a core problem here in that dedicated organization to rapidly grow the engineering effort for a particular project usually requires funding and full-time employees. To both market it to engineers as an interesting project, mature documentation and DevX, mature the onboarding experience for devs, and to handle the organizational aspects of distributing said work.
This is going to probably sound like a stupid idea, but I mean this earnestly:
Can we just make Internet 2? Just a new underlying protocol with less restrictive browser requirements, sure you might need to use Chrome to log in to your bank, but we could just host everything else on the fedinet. Just like back in the old days, webrings hosted on closet servers and rented racks.
Google didn't build the internet so why do they have so much clout about how it's run? We can just start over again with self hosting. This time we even have all the knowledge we gained from already doing it the first time. I'm picturing an entire second layer of internet unlinked with the first one. Kind of like onion sites I guess, the more I think about this the more I'm realizing that the tor network is probably exactly what I'm talking about. Just that, but instead of hosting pirated content or weird porn or bitcoin assassins it's just a low stakes noncorporate internet protocol. You probably won't want to do a lot of transactions on it, but social media or personal websites or video hosting would probably be fine.
The thing you describe is probably I2P and epsites.
Even worse - it looks like Google might be forced to sell Chrome to some AI company.
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Maybe, just as a crazy thought here, jwz was right. Mozilla and Firefox exist for 2 purposes - to build the standard reference browser, free of corporate crud (like, say, Google WebExtensions); and to be an absolute attack dog against ridiculous corporate desires.
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Why can't they just use the Wikipedia model? That should bring in enough to cover development and operating costs.
Because a browser is several orders of magnitudee more complex than a website.
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Its interesting they don't have all the services Proton does. I'd pay them for a email and VPN combo.
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How much active development does a browser engine need? If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren't supported? Because as it sits, Firefox feels like one of the most corporate pieces of open source software I use daily, and I need to know just how tragic it would be if Mozilla died.
If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren’t supported?
Likely yes, as Google will keep enshittifying the web unless stopped by antitrust or whatever. Which isn't looking so likely.
A ton. Mozilla is already behind on all kinds of miscellaneous less used standards implementations compared to Chrome AFAIK. On top of that there are security fixes needed monthly and realistically you need to be able to push emergency patches within 48 hours or less (really 1/4 or 1/2 that) or people are going to flee because they got cryptolockered because of you.
How quickly would sites be unsupported? Hard to say. Most likely large chunks of the internet would start blocking Mozilla user agents as an out of date security threat for their userbase before it actually ran into actual implementation problems. The problem would be that, websites and services no longer even bothering to try to support Mozilla and making changes that break things, and of course security holes and exploits which would likely eventually lead to no-click complete computer compromises and other very bad things. Once it falls far enough behind on standards a lot of sites will block it for that reason because they don't want bug reports or to spend money chasing down an issue potentially caused by an out of date piece of software.
Google or whoever owns Chrome would keep pushing new web standards at a fast pace to kill and bury any attempts to keep Firefox running. At that point there's nothing really stopping them closed sourcing large parts of Chrome to kill privacy forks and lock down control of the web which most big websites would be fine with as Google's interest is in getting through ads and preventing the end user from control over their own computer in favor of the interests of the website owner.
It would be apocalyptic potentially for what remains of the open web and user freedom.
In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most "alternative browsers" do - tweaking or repackaging.
These days, a browser is like it's own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.
I'd say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.
So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop "apps".
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Except it isn't. And we know it isn't because the amount you spend on Firefox vs the rest of Mozilla is peanuts
Not even remotely true, this is a myth. Most of what they spend is on development, operations, and legal. They publish their 990 online which gives the breakdown. IIRC the foundation gets like 2%.
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