In my limited career I have been in several projects whose plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than success was the goal.
I can't understand how this keeps coming up when Google just lost an antitrust case largely because they pay Firefox and Safari for their default search. Chrome only exists to funnel people into Google, they wouldn't risk their search monopoly so there's browser competition.
1. A marketing department that can get it more than 2% market share
2. A legal and advocacy department that can work with governments to stop monopolists like Google and Apple privileging their own browsers on platforms they control
3. To use its seat on standards boards to stop abhorrent practises like the W3C endorsing DRM, or Google dropping effective web-blocking APIs from extensions.
Firefox should focus on not hemorrhaging users, they're about to reach the cutoff (1%) where the US government will no longer even support their browser.
No normal person will switch to Firefox for tor, despite us nerds thinking it's cool. And if they can't get actual users to switch, the browser has no future.
I'm trying to use it right on mac right now. It's still slow with many tabs (even with autosleep enabled), visibly slower than both Safari or any Chromium based browser.
Also they killed visual tab expose, and any extensions that could replace it, so all I have for managing the tabs is a vertical list.
In addition to what everyone else said, comments like yours confirm that it would be a waste for me to check out Firefox for the hundredth time. You are among a sea of comments enumerating the specific reasons why it sucks, and you're here insisting with zero substantiation that it is "effective" and "by far the best browser around". A better approach would be to acknowledge the issues that users have had with it and explain how it has improved.
On the other hand, if your definition of "effective" and "best" describes Firefox the last time I checked it out, then our definitions do not match, and I don't need to check it out again.
I'm not sure if you are serious. I mean, look at Chrome and Edge and Safari. They are managed by corporations that control their own platform. I get Chrome, Edge, and Safari because it is actively pushed onto me.
What does Firefox have?
The ugly truth is that browsers like Chrome and Edge and Safari are just as good as Firefox, and a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Edge and Safari yes, but Chrome doesn't come pre-installed in both Windows and MacOS. You and every Chrome user actively goes out of their way to download and install it.
> What does Firefox have?
Every single nontrivial Linux distribution out there comes packaged with Firefox as the default browser.
> a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
Clearly then all Chrome users on laptops/desktops are software militants..
> What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Firefox had at least half a decade of a headstart against Chrome and did jack shit with it.
This here is a single comment that explains everything. Firefox is kept clueless.
Sorry to all the devs grinding inside the machine - you are doing great work, and while it is not your fault the ship is going in the wrong direction, you are providing the fuel for it to keep going there by keeping your heads down and not revolting.
That's insane :/. But, maybe, "on the bright side", The Mozilla Foundation is unrelated in some sense to Firefox? AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway.
The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.
I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia Foundation.
They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?
People get annoyed at them for their massive banners begging for money making it seem like wikipedia is on the verge of being closed down unless you donate despite the fact they have a ton of money they have saved away which could keep wikipedia running for decades. Even long running wiki editors and donators get pissed off with the behavior of the wikimedia foundation as not enough of this money actually seems to get spent on Wikipedia. Kinda similar to the whole Firefox situation now I come to think about it.
If the donation is given on the false belief that the donations are necessary to keep Wikipedia running, I'd argue donors are being conned into donating. And that is exactly the message the donation banners convey.
> AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway
The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.
Every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that enables them to better sabotage Firefox development actually. If they were starved like cancerous tumour the body might heal and survive.
"If we destroy the organization responsible for this thing I like, then only the bad parts of the organization will die and the thing I prefer will become better!"
No, if you destroy the flawed-but-sometimes-okay organization you just wind up with something worse. There is no magic save-the-thing-you-like fairy.
Large bureaucracies don't "learn their lesson" from being torn down.
Vote against increased taxes because the road department already has "such a large budget" and "maybe this will teach them to cut the administrative fat"? No, you'll just wind up with more potholes.
Vote for Donald Trump because you think the Federal Government is wasteful and the Democrats need to be taught a lesson? No, you'll just get billionaire tax cuts, erosion of civil liberties, and absolutely no behavior change from the people you wanted to "punish". Everything just gets worse.
> The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
wikipedia still being around after all this time and still maintaining links to just download the entire thing and having no ads makes whatever they're doing good to me, ha.
And they do experiment and i think the passion for the society upholding project that is the encyclopedia is still there. Its the same wirh web archive.
Wikimedia is run transparently which is great but I dont really believe they need the money when you see their financial statement (link below) and think about what they need to run. Plenty of really deserving charities running on the sniff of an oily rag not paying 100m in salaries plus travel, conferences etc.
Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences, hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation, but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.
They have 82 million dollars in cash and 116 million in short term investment, why do they need to run giant screen sized popup banners a few times every year begging for money and making it seem like everything will be gone tomorrow unless you donate now? They don't even run these adverts by the wiki editors themselves, just impose them from on top. They are very controversial in the wiki community and always cause pages of arguing every year.
Because you don't have to pay and most people don't, + the reasons from my previous comment.
On the other point: Discussions are at the core the movement, and how to do fundraising "right" and how to use funds is worth discussing and gets discussed. But that it is needed in general is obvious I think. What else should be done? Let all the projects run out of funds and call it a day? That would mean the end - and today Wikipedia is more needed than ever.
As a liberal I've always had to fight the tendency we have to not see legitimacy sinks in the name of politeness. Lately I think people are willing to listen and I'm working on ways to explain this to people who don't bellyfeel them already.
Since I was a kid I thought that the endless fundraising drives destroy the legitimacy of public television. At the bellyfeel level it is visible moneygrubbing, but at a political science level these run side by side with ads promoting the sponsorship of the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation. ADM is notably the prime beneficiary of ethanol subsidies in the U.S. that wreck the environment and make farmers go broke spending money on nitrogen fertilizers that kill off life in the ocean off the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The trouble is that small donations don't give voice, but large donations do.
I can logically justify how I feel about fundraising drives on PBS, but I feel a resonance that causes me to feel the same way for Wikipedia -- I don't know what the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation of Wikipedia is, but it probably exists. Finding out that they don't really the money confirms this feeling.
a lot of engineering positions at WMF don't pay particularly competitively - you do take a pay cut working there to run/manage k8s clusters than you would elsewhere (even some public sector gigs pay better in big cities).
i dont know, the way they have managed to consistently roll down a hill that seemingly is the wrong one, despite how obviously it could have been done better, is frankly quite impressive
It says "PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT", which looks to be the Mozilla Corporation. Donations are not directly paying the CEO, although I agree more of the profits from the Corporation could flow into the non-profit.
The reasonable assumption here is that without any donations, most of that money from Mozilla Corp would have had to cover what the donations paid for instead. So in practice, every dollar donated might have increased the CEO bonus by say 90 cents, which feels like donating to the CEO.
I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.
If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.
There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.
> If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.
I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here but this really isn't true for basically any plausible value of "finished Oxidation of Firefox".
As context for scale, during the Quantum Project, Mozilla imported two major pieces of Servo: Stylo and WebRender. Each of these involved sizable teams and took years of effort, and yet these components (1) started from pre-existing work that had been done for Servo and (2) represent only relatively small fractions of Gecko. Replacing most of the browser -- or even a significant fraction of it -- with Rust code would be a far bigger undertaking.
The new CEO isn't any better. According to their first CEO (Brendan Eich) "Mozilla is being looted now, mitchell taking $38M+ out over 9 years was just a start"
I mean if you reduce something enough you can say “x pays for y” in almost any case for anything since it’s all technically one big pot for one group. Even earmarked money.
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
But that's the whole point: they did pay their medical bills. It's not like they didn't pay their medical bills and instead bought a ps5. They did both.
Mozilla develops Firefox, and they also pay their CEO a lot. Their CEO may be overpaid, the company may be mismanaged, but at least they are still upholding their commitment to maintaining Firefox. Picking out one expense that you don't like and saying "all the donations go to this, see!" is just disingenuous.
Whether donating is worthwhile is another question, and it seems like the answer would be no. But it is a very different thing to say "All the donations just go to the CEO" instead of "I think the CEO is paid too much".
We could also cherry-pick in the other direction and say the CEO is negotiating deals to bring in the 90% of non-donation revenue of Mozilla, in which case you could easily say that his pay is a result of that revenue creation.
I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them. My point is that cherry-picking one expense that you don't like, and then saying all the donations go to that, is cherry-picking the financials, and is misleading.
This is absolute nonsense. I am arguing that cherry-picking one expense is ridiculous. A much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla. That would suggest 1% of your donation is going to the CEO, not 100% of it like earlier commenters suggest.
It is dishonest to pick out one expense you don't like and equate that to all of the donation money being spent on just that. That's all. I don't know how you got from that to "this guy thinks money isn't fungible."
> much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla
Transactions happen at the margin. If a junkie spends every dollar of a bonus on dope, it’s fair to say the bonus is being burned on dope. Even if they also pay rent with their base salary.
You gift me $100 on Venmo or cashapp or whatever to go dinner with my partner. I transfer it to my bank. It’s in the same bank account as all my other liquid cash. How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
Mozilla/FF has a pot of money that donations go in to, which is the same pot they use to operate as well as pay people, which includes their CEO.
> How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
there's no such thing as a specific $100.
The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else (which the donor may or may not like).
It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to make a judgement on future donations.
You’re making this a very strict, binary situation. Either you’re broke and every single dollar you are gifted or requesting is specifically earmarked for a specific thing, or you have all the money you need and you can’t ever receive a gift or request a donation. Nothing is that simplistic. Charities doing well and able to meet all their goals/payroll still keep asking for money because they need it to be sustained for more than months or a year.
Also at the end of the day, they are requesting donations to keep things operating. And that means paying people to run things, including CEOs. Every charity has somebody at the top, so your donations are also paying for those people as well. Unless you’re willing to say that all charities are therefore fraudulent because you are paying executive personnel, I just don’t see how this argument can really be put forth in earnest.
It isn't binary in general but in this case it is. The money from mozilla corporation is close enough in quantity to the donations to make it so. Someone used the example of a medical bill and a ps5, but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary. That wouldn't be ok. Furthermore one of the key pieces of research before donating to a charity is executive compensation. This level of compensation is a red flag in any non profit and means it won't be getting good ratings from the watchdog groups. That in turn hurts future donations.
I gave the PS5 example fyi. Not that it changes anything it just felt weird to not clarify that haha
>but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary.
But that doesn’t really apply here, it’s not parallel to the Mozilla/Firefox situation. And if we want to arbitrarily decide that all donations go to the CEO strictly because the numbers are kind of similar, why can’t I just say “no all that money goes towards staff and operating“? Why is my assertion any less valid? The numbers being similar doesn’t tell us anything about how it’s being spent. It’s just a coincidence.
I mean that’s what this all hinges on right? That the two numbers are kind of close? I can’t really think of how that tells us where the money is going. I don’t understand how that follows.
If donations 10x tomorrow can we no longer claim the donations are going into the CEO’s pocket? Or if they cut to 1/10th? Would we be having this conversation if either was currently the case?
If it was the head of the foundation making that much no one would donate. It would be a matter of opportunity cost. A non profit that size would normally have a leader compensated on the level of a software developer. I'd argue the ceo of the corporation is also wildly overcompensated too, but that normally wouldn't be relevant to the decision to donate. The issue arises because of the close financial ties between the corporation and the foundation, which is enough to prevent my donations by itself, those ties though create the perception that fewer donations would increase transfers from the corporation. If that is in fact true, then the question of opportunity cost does extend to all of the corporations expenses and someone considering donating sgould absolutely consider all of those expenses and decide if they are doing good with their donation or not.
Charitynavigator and guidestar have datasets. Most websites have you pick a charity and then give you metrics to judge by rather than picking a metric. But they indicate for a non profit with revenue between 10-50M (mozilla foundation is 30M I think?) usually has compensation for the leader between 180k and 350k.
Exactly, so the donations are not being funneled to the CEO, and suggesting that they are would be silly.
If you split up your donation by how Mozilla actually spends its money, then most goes to operating Mozilla, and a small amount (~1%) goes to paying the CEO.
I agree but your tone suggests you’re disagreeing with me? That’s the point I am driving at. Directly linking every donated dollar to the CEO’s pay simply because they’re close in number does not make sense.
Mismanagement or waste isn't the same as corruption. Corruption means deliberately lying, cheating, or acting unethically for personal gain, not just spending money poorly.
Paying their CEO $7 million is generous, but not particularly unusual for a corporation with $650m in revenue (as of 2023).
Calling it mismanagement IS corruption. What we are discussing here is known by Mozilla high-ups and board. They know their current and past CEOs are getting a huge prize for destroying Firefox and they couldn't care less. That's clearly corruption.
Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7