this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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I remember reading a lot this past year about Mozilla fretting about their market share and trying to figure out how to grow their user base. Did I hallucinate that? Cuz their actions lately appear to be driving users away. Are they taking notes from Google or is there some other MBA making these brilliant changes?
Remember the Looking Glass fiasco? The people in charge of Firefox are so stupid it's indistinguishable from malice.
Idk the CEOs $6mil salary sounds more like malice to me
Need more advertising in Firefox to keep pumping those exec salaries.
Most of their income has come directly from Google, the incumbent browser monopoly. I'm full tin foil hat on this one, Google is pulling the strings here.
Didn't judge rule that google can no longer pay mozilla?
Yeah you're correct the deal was cut off late last year so it was not renewed for 2025 but it was on the radar for a couple years. It's why the sudden sketchy rush for other sources of income so they can keep going as normal. I did make an edit to my post and changed 'comes' to 'has come'.
It's been set up to fail. Over 80% of their revenue was from that deal and Google could likely dictate whatever they wanted as part of it. That income is the only thing that even allowed for such an insane pay package for their c-suite in the first place, and so the current form of Mozilla is a direct result of all that cash. It's supposed to be a nonprofit and now they're basically in withdrawal because they cannot afford their insane"normal tech company leadership" salaries.
Idk how Mozilla survives this without another sugar daddy, the leadership pay looks like the biggest liability killing the company and they have to willingly give it up before the company goes bankrupt and/or becomes another ad machine.
I would really love for them to drop pocket and all their other stupid shit and just make a browser like they used to. Even just that is a huge undertaking these days though, and that is because of (again) Google's ability to basically dictate web standards. They strung Mozilla along as a pet "look we're not a monopoly" competitor while continuously raising the bar to entry for any competition. I think the antitrust case should have gone after web standards to allow for competition rather than basically cutting off the only real competitor, but that would have been harder to do and the actual case was based specifically on Google's search and ad monopoly rather than the chromium browser monopoly.
It never actually clicked to me how screwed mozilla is, but your comment made that pretty clear. At this point, to me it seems like the best course of action would be to fully embrace open source and community driven development instead of trying to run it like before, especially if paying wages becomes unsustainable.
As of 2023 Mozilla had over 1.3 billion dollars in reserve (thanks Google!). This is not over yet, but it will be drained pretty quickly if they keep treating a nonprofit like a typical silicon valley tech company.