I love Firefox (its my browser) but It’s insane to say it requires 400 millions per year.
That’s 4000 people at 100k salary. Browsers are complicated, but you do not need an actual town of developers to maintain one.
I’m not convinced it requires 1/2 a billion dollars to keep Mozilla running. I think Mozilla is mismanaged, wasteful, easily distracted by unrelated projects, & bogged down with ‘bullshit jobs.’
I’ve yet to see convincing evidence to the contrary short of folks simply telling me ‘developing browsers is insanely expensive!’
Like implementing fucking ai
The modern internet, driven by corporate mandates, is rather complex. A browser needs to (at least):
- transmit and receive several protocols, usually HTTP/IP (ipv4, ipv6, http2, SSL/tsl for security, sometimes also ftp, gopher, torrents, etc)
- parse HTML documents and render them correctly to screen
- parse user input to forms
- parse CSS, correctly apply and cascade all the rules to the HTML element
- include a full, performant VM to run ECMAScript in, manipulate the rendered document tree according to those scripts
- include APIs required by ECMAScript covering the DOM, windowing, network requests, screen readers and other accessibility options
- render and work on at least 3 major desktop OS flavors and 2 mobile ones, across countless versions
- play media: images, audio, and video
- DRM handling for media
- Handle rendering of text in any world language
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! I’ve come around to the idea that the modern internet is actually, to be technical here, totally fucked. Big Tech is going to keep pushing users deeper into walled proprietary gardens. They’ve already made the open internet so complex and heavy that it requires a multimillion dollar company (dependent on Google’s allowance or massive ad dollars) to create a browser for it.
I think the only solution is to throw it all away and start over. Twitter and reddit aren’t being “saved” by the “resistance” users. The concept of free and open exchange of ideas on the net is being saved by new protocols and services that are built to resist corporate ownership, like Gemini and the Fediverse.
It’s going to be hard weening off the flashy, ad driven Web, but its the only way. Go download Lagrange and start browsing Gemini space. If you weren’t around for the 90s era of GameFAQs and the mostly-text web driven by individual writers and hosts, then here’s your chance to go back to a better way of doing things.
We can’t “fix” an internet that’s owned by Big Tech, we need new spaces owned by the people using them.
I guess a less extreme solution is the one we’re all currently looking at. I’m posting from PieFed which more or less works from freaking Lynx.
I’m trying to stop using the bloated web entirely, and it’s easier than I thought it would be.
I’d love to get into Gemini, but I’ve found the challenges of hosting a Gemini site too great to overcome. It’s a fun space to look around in some times.
Burning things down and starting again is a silly fantasy. Just like the dream of revolution in politics, in practice it never works and only makes things even worse than they were already. This is a terrible take.
And that is why we are all still Egyptians who worship our dog faced Lord & Savior, Set.
No, you don’t need a hovercraft to go grocery shopping.
A browser doesn’t need to be multiplatform, or work on gopher, or build a JS VM from the ground up, or build a media renderer from the ground up, or build a text rendering engine from the ground up.
Building browsers is hard enough, you don’t need to make it artificially harder by tacking on bullshit requirements.
Yeah, you can just use Google’s VM, Google’s renderer, Google’s sponsored image library, write it in Google’s language, and you can probably borrow some of the WebGL code from the Servo project.
Obviously the problem is so trivial when you’re just bolting together premade components that the fairies delivered to you. Good thing none of those components are hard to write, hard to integrate, or written with corporate interests in mind.
Hey where’s your snap-together browser project? It’s so easy, all this free code just laying around.
Oh or were you arguing that I said you had to write everything from scratch? Because I didn’t say that. I also didn’t say that you needed all those things for communication, kind of the exact opposite. What exactly was the point of your “well acktshually” comment?
Unfortunately any viable web browser has to be able to browse the real web, which means the awful bloated web that is actually out there in the real world, rather than the clean and sane web that we idealists might wish for. Mozilla is at least partly to blame for the current situation, but that’s not of much help for most users today. So here we are.
I always see the same developing browsers is hard sentiment. But if it’s not true, why hasn’t a completely free open source volunteer team created a popular usable browser yet?
That’s happening right now: https://ladybird.org/
There are other open source browsers/engines.
Aside from that, Imo, it’s not cheap to do what Mozilla is doing, but 1/2 billion annually is probably more than enough.
I believe thar be grifting in them waters.
I mean, all those WebKit browsers are descended from Konqueror, which was free and open source. But those were different times.
I believe the bandaid needs ripping off.
Just like how community effort into making windows more tolerable never solves the fundamental problem of it being closed-source and out of your control, Firefox being largely dependant on Google, while fighting against privacy invasion and ads creates a conflict of interests.
This is solved by removing the influence
So what are other good browsers that compare to Firefox?
Librewolf. No android app though.
Librewolf is a build of Firefox. If Firefox goes away, so does Librewolf.
Fennec is decent sub but yeah it is Mozilla just for edge lords
I think the bigger question is, how did shaving off 1% of Google’s market share guarantee the absolute destruction of its single competitor? It’s a devilishly sneaky position Google got itself into, creating mutually assured destruction between one of its many tendrils and one of its competitors.
Not like Mozilla did much better, systematically painting itself into a corner while it promised tens of millions of dollars towards AI projects over the past few years…
It didn’t. Mozilla existed long before chrome ever did. It will continue to exist after chrome is gone. Anyone saying otherwise is trying to convince you to keep chrome around because it’s beneficial to them, not because it’s beneficial to Mozilla or humanity.
No, I want mozilla to die and for a better project to rise in its ashes. It might even drive the EU to decide that funding or even running a browser program is worth the money due to sovereignty reasons. At least with Mozilla gone there will be new projects for the developers to work on without being burdened by sticking to the status quo. We might see some actual innovation instead of “Google did this, now we have to too”.
Chrome being spun off from Google would be the best thing to happen to the open web.
Mozilla long ago made a deal with the devil, and there was never really a good long-term outcome. They have consistently failed to develop alternate revenue streams, even ones that they were well-positioned to capitalize on. Their VPN could have been built into the browser and powered by their own network. Instead it was (is?) a repackaged Mullvad. Which begs the question, why not just get mullvad directly at a lower price? Or choose a more capable option for a similar cost?
Among the numerous remedies that the DOJ is asking for, is an effective total ban on revenue sharing deals between Google and browser vendors.
This is dumb. Google might have leveraged this initially, but right now this is immaterial. The monopoly is maintained by its monopoly in the browser market. Divest chrome.
That said, I think drying up this well would be the best thing to happen to Mozilla in the past 20 years. All that money did was attract corrupt bloodsuckers that were happy to kill the project in exchange for an undeserved year end bonus.
Millions USD will make people do whatever rich daddy wants and the plebs don’t have USD to pay them like that. Shit most of us barely donate to FOSS.
I am pretty sutr most of Foss funding is government then followed the tech idealists.
We need the prosumers to start pitching in more. Pick at least like one projectand throw them some cash. Otherwise, we all will be cooked by the mega corpos within a life time
What a shitty headline. That’s the entirely wrong question to be asking and the real question is at the bottom of the article “Do you truly believe the web would be better off in a world where Mozilla no longer exists?”. My answer is a full-throated “YES!!!”. Fuck Mozilla.
You don’t need 500 million dollars a year to develop browser. Seriously, what the fuck are you doing with all that money? Ukraine is building thousands of drones with that money, maybe even spinning up a new nuclear program. You mean to tell me that developing a browser costs more than the nuclear program of one of the biggest arms producers in the world? You have got to be shitting me.
Firefox not being able to compete with that amount of money for a decade or more is just proof of gross incompetence on the part of Mozilla’s leadership. It’s not 500 million dollars as a one time donation, it’s 500 million dollars every single year for what, 10 years? Let’s say they started at 200 and only recently got to 500 million. That’s maybe 300 million per year for 10 years, making it 3 cool billion dollars. How many developers does that pay? Even if every single employee cost 1 million, that would be 200 and now 500 employees.
The more you break it down, the worse it looks for Mozilla. They are disorganised, have too many goals, make phenomenal waste of resources, and are doing the least amount possible to keep getting Google’s money. It’s made them languid and dependent. They should stop hogging the spotlight and let a better, more driven, less money-hungry suitor take their place.
I would like to set the question in a slight but impactful way:
“Do you truly believe the web would be better off in a world where Firefox no longer exists?”.
I would say no, that would be a damn shame. I will grant you, though, that Mozilla has lost its way and is no longer the respected steward of a fine browser that it used to be.
They and their products are as independent as a domesticated dog is. That’s what happens when you accept the money.
If chrome variants were my only method of navigating the web, I’d cut ties with the internet out of spite.
Interesting read. I didn’t know Firefox was so completely dependent on search revenue, though it makes sense. Hope the courts and FTC work out something that preserves it.
