A significant portion of this blog post is complaining about Mozilla’s repeated attempts to find new revenue streams that aren’t Firefox. It’s a sentiment I see a lot and I just don’t get it.
They complain about Google paying to be the default search provider being a bad thing, and yet when Mozilla says “yeah, we hear ya, that’s why we’re trying to find stuff to diversify into so we can become less reliant on Google” people cry and shout “you should be sticking to Firefox, why aren’t you focussing on Firefox??”
Like, which is it? Do you want Mozilla to diversify and have a more sustainable revenue stream, or do you want them to focus on Firefox and commit to reliance on Google? Because maintaining a project as big as Firefox without any funding simply isn’t possible, and people aren’t going back to paying for web browsers.
What these people want is not at all realistic. Devs want to be paid for their work. They can’t have that if Mozilla follows idiots like Lunduke’s “don’t take money from Google, but also don’t do anything that will make money. Only do Firefox.”
I’ve yet to see a single one of these people offer any alternative that comes even remotely close to being feasible.
I’m okay with Mozilla trying to diversify their source of incomes, as long as it’s focused on privacy. Firefox Relay is a great example of a paid service that helps preserving some privacy and I gladly pay for it.
I hope they’ll make more privacy-focused optional services like that. If it helps paying for Firefox continued development while detaching from Google then it’s a good idea.
They’ve got some pretty interesting stuff in the pipeline, like container tabs optionally being hooked up to their own independent Mozilla VPN connection.
IMO I think they’re going to go all in eventually offering a kind of “privacy ecosystem” similar to Proton
The privacy of… checks notes
Category of Personal Information Collected Third Parties to Whom Personal Information is Sold/Shared browsing history Advertising partners, Service providers search history Advertising partners, Service providers your device’s precise location Advertising partners, Service providers a profile about a consumer Advertising partners, Service providers records of personal property, products or services purchased Advertising partners, Service providers Source: Mozilla
Good comment. I like the fact that Mozilla is branching out into Relay and VPN as subscription services. I’ve got to pay someone for VPN, after all, and email masking looks interesting. If the revenue from those kinds of useful subscriptions helps to sustain Firefox and it’s derivatives, so much the better.
Like, which is it? Do you want Mozilla to diversify and have a more sustainable revenue stream, or do you want them to focus on Firefox
Presumably these are different people.
That’s the thing. They aren’t different people. Just people with unrealistic expectations.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms, I’m not sure why you decided to respond to this comment exclusively.
IIRC deleted response to your comment pointed out that you say Mozilla employees need to be paid, but Mozilla fired its employees and then paid its CEO more. So if we’re talking about misaligned ideas…
It’s the only criticism that matters. Yeah, I’m irked by the CEO making millions too, but that’s unfortunately the standard for pretty much any widely known company.
Shit, Mozilla is actually on the low end in that space. So while I don’t like the egregiously high pay, it seems weird to call Mozilla out on it specifically.
And Mozilla having layoffs a while back doesn’t change the fact that their workers need to be paid, so the “get rid of Google’s funding and stop trying to look for other income too!!! Just focus on Firefox!!” is still the dumbest take on planet Earth.
But I’m not surprised, it’s a take from Lunduke, after all. A person who has also advised that people shouldn’t use Firefox because it’s “woke”.
The standard is actually:
- CEO salary decreased on average last year
- It was tied closely to stock market performance
Meanwhile in Mozillaland:
- CEO salary went up ~24%
- Certainly not tied to Firefox’s diminishing user base
In other words, not only is Mozilla acting like every other dishonest, unethical, trashy corporation… They’re acting worse.
Re Lunduke bad: of course he is. He’s divorced from reality. But these are facts from Mozilla ledgers.
Re pay the employees: I agree. But I don’t see how you are okay with them laying off employees in order to not pay them, while raising the CEO salary.
They get roughly as much in donations as they spend on ff dev. They get a LOT more from google, that they spend on… bs.
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla
Of course they spend it on more than just Firefox. What part of “we’re trying to diversify” don’t you understand?
And I’m sorry, Lunduke is not a trustable source. He went seriously off the deep end years ago.
From a great Linux content creator to a crazed Qanon, COVID conspiracy anti-vaxx nut trying to pedal all kinds of nonsense, who loves to shit on LGBT Linux devs. I really don’t know what the hell happened to him.
It is hard to draw conclusions without knowing much facts. How much is needed and how much is got.
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How do rambling blog articles full of terrible assumptions and analysis like this get posted? Is there an alternative technology community I could sub to that cares about quality content?
This is the real problem with these Silicon Valley fads like crypto and AI - they cause idiot tech executives to disinvest in their worthwhile products in an attempt to get on the bandwagon.
You mean you don’t see the synergy between Firefox and an AI landing page generator? /s
Firefox Marketshare nosedives
That can’t be true, literally everyone on the Fediverse uses Firefox.
This is for the year 2022. The reddit migration was 2023.
Also the fediverse is less than 0.1% of social media market share.
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I’ll never understand how someone can get paid like that. If Mozilla was destroying the opposition, I’d get it though.
They have to pay that much to attract talent! The same talent that destroyed the other companies they worked for.
I’d like to have the same kind of bonuses when I don’t meet my KPIs
What’s KPIs?
Key Performance Indexes, used mainly in performance reviews.
Okay, so, good news for the CEO, but terrible news for the Internet as a whole. Awesome.
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