- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox’s revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser’s default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla’s ability to keep things “business as usual.”
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company’s actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search “partners completely,” which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google’s money suddenly dried up.
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Almost hoping this somehow causes browser support to fracture again.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
Also because I’m tired of google dictating the www by being a monopoly. It’s 2024 and jpegxl is being treated as ransomware as if enabling a god damn image format is too hard for web browsers. HTTP3/QUIC was 100% google’s invention that they just threw onto the web because no one else is developing this standard anymore. Manifest v3 is an explicit attempt to limit user control over web content. They even cornered the market along with Microsoft using gmail.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
That can’t be helped. Hard to explain well without knowing how much CS you’re familiar with, but basically in order to guarantee security/user safety you have to sandbox each tab (basically running an entirely separate container program for each tab which constantly checks for illegal memory access to prevent it from being exploited), all separately running their own interpreters for javascript/typescript, HTML, CSS, all of which are very resource intensive (mainly javascript/typescript). There’s not really any getting around this, no matter how well you design your browser.
Now, theoretically, with the growing popularity/advances in WebAssembly, and increase in usage of frameworks/graphics APIs like WebGPU, you could completely get rid of that sandboxing and completely get rid of the extremely slow javascript and html/css, in favor of completely using safe, compiled Rust programs. There’s active research using versions of WASM which only accept completely safe code (mainly safe Rust code) so using memory bugs generated from user error to access data in different tabs becomes impossible (aside from potential unaddressed bugs in Rust itself obviously) and you don’t need to sandbox each tab – the program practically sandboxes itself. Then you could potentially have browsers with thousands of tabs perform perfectly fine, assuming each of the websites is programmed competently.
But that’s not going to happen, because billions of users rely on HTML/CSS and JS, and it’s not pretty to transition away from. Getting rid of it would be like getting rid of pointy shoes, or getting rid of US Customary Units in the US, it’s just not happening no matter how much benefit it would bring to users. It’s not so much of a browser company issue as it is everyone ever would complain and potentially trillions of dollars of damage would be done. Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
This is kind of true, but at the same time, I’ve also seen some pretty talented front-end devs fwiw.
If this hurts Firefox more than it hurts Chrome, that’s probably not a good thing for the health of the Internet. Google running the Internet unchecked would be bad for everyone.
I use only Firefox / Fennec, but fuck Mozilla. The obscene amounts they paid their CEO for stupid decisions, their shitty Pocket acquisition, regressions such as saving page as pdf simply disappearing on mobile. Let that rotten corporation die, the code is open source, someone will do a Gecko browser.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as someone just forking it. Realistically, a browser is an extremely complex piece of software that requires a lot of organizational effort to maintain, deal with security issues, etc. Pretty much every other piece of software on a similar scale I can think of (the kernel, KDE, Blender, Libreoffice) has some sort of organization behind it with at least some amount of officially paid work. All the major forks of Firefox or chromium follow quite closely to upstream for this reason (which is also why I’m skeptical of Brave’s ability to maintain manifest v2 long term, despite their probably genuine best efforts to do so).
I do wish that Firefox were developed and funded by an organization specifically dedicated to developing it. This could of course happen if Mozilla dies. But that’s going to require someone starting it, which is not at all a small or cheap task.
I could also see a future where Oracle or IBM buys it 😂🤡
Firefox enterprise edition, now with Lotus integration!
Good, Baker can go find an other x millions salary elsewhere because it’s necessary for her family (as she said in an interview), and Firefox can become a community project again that still pays salary to actual developers but without the expensive bullshitting C-suite.
So Mozilla will find other forms of funding. That’s how this works.
On the other hand, might also be good for Firefox to not be 86% funded by the maker of its top rival (Chrome).
Right? Great knowing there wouldn’t be an adblock killswitch waiting for us all like the sword of damocles
#BreakThemUp
Specifically separate the browser side from the advertiser side. Get rid of that conflict of interest.
Everybody forgets that if chrome and chromium breaks away from Google because of this ruling, it’s going to have the same issues as Firefox, if not worse because it’s an arguably worse product. The ruling has been pronounced, but what will happen because of it is yet to be defined.
Why would Chrome/chromium break away? Isn’t this just about the search engine side of things? There’s no need to dump Chrome if all they need to do is drop themselves as the default search engine.
That’s not it at all. The issue is funding Mozilla. Having it as the default search engine is something google currently pays them for the right for. If the DOJ says that’s anti-trust practices, then Google stops paying Mozilla for that right, and 80% of Mozilla’s funding dries up overnight.
I feel like the real problem is Google paying Apple, since they’re both major players, not Google paying Mozilla. Firefox is not a major player at all (unluckily…)
I believe I remember reading that Apple gets a share of the money from google searches by their users, too. That’s an absurd amount of incentive to sit on your ass and never try anything different.
I’ll try to add a source here, later.
Edit: it is now later:
An expert witness for Google let slip that the company shares 36 percent of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple.
I can very much imagine this being a short to medium term issue (and still an existential threat to Mozilla), but hopefully, this improves the situation to the point that there is no future company like google who artificially maintains control over browsers and search engines, rendering competitors dependent on these massive contracts? I mean, this is what got them there, right?
good. Maybe firefox will die like it should have long ago
I needed, I would pay $5 per month in perpetuity for access to Firefox. Fuck google
There are dozens of us!!
At least 2, at the moment.
Three
Four… maybe even $10/mo after the manifest v3 chaos hits in full force.
Exchange rate is a bitch, but id chime in and do my part as well.
You’d need a hundred million people sign up for that $5 subscription to make up for Google’s bribe.
Your math is off. It would take 8.5 million people donating $5 a month, to equal the 510 million a year from Google.
My math (please correct me if I am wrong):
$510 million / 1 year
$ X / 1 month?
$510 million / 12 months = $42.5 million / 1 month
$42.5 million / $5 per person a month = 8.5 million people a month
Also, Mozilla says that it spends only $220M on software development expenses, so if 100% of the money went to that it would only require 3.7 million people paying $5 per month.
But, IMO, if the Google money spigot is turned off, it might be that other companies that rely on web browsers (Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, etc.) will want to spend at least a few tens of millions on Firefox. That would mean that end-users wouldn’t need to support the entire cost of developing it.
Right now, everyone except Apple uses Blink which is a Google project tied to Chrome. Since Google has been found to have been illegally abusing their monopoly, the status of Chromium / Blink has to be uncertain. It would be smart insurance for these companies to ensure that Firefox doesn’t go away in case something happens to Blink.
Is it not
5 x 12 = 60
$510 000 000 / $60 = 850 000
$60 is one year of subscription for if user.
850 000 users need to pay 60 dollar per year to amount to $510 000 000.
(Or 510 000 000/5 = 10 200 000 users per month to reach the same amount monthly.)
510 / 60 = 8.5I see that I missed a zero (510000000/60=8 500 000). That numbers didn’t seem plausible when I did the calculation.
You’re right. My European ass sees revenue and salaries as monthly
You mean 510 million divided by 12. That’s “only” 42.5.
Tax/fine Google more and give the profits to competitors like Mozilla (as long as those competitors use the funds for Firefox)
Sounds too European for the “land of the free”
The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy!
If Mozilla collapses for being too deeply intertwined with Google, I won’t mourn them.
Firefox is open source. We probably need to pass the torch to another maintainer anyway. Mozilla has been betraying their original mission a lot.
I’ll mourn them but now knowing this gross imbalance of funding it’s frustrating that CEO still has a job - and they will surely get a golden parachute while every other employee will just lose their job.
Will this make ladybird our only hope overnight?
Why can’t Firefox use DuckDuckGo instead?
The problem isn’t the search engine - it’s the money.
Firefox can do without Google being the default fine. What they can’t do without is all the money that Google pays them to make Google be the default.
The problem is would DDG pay them $500 million to be the default. That’s doubtful.
I hope some governments and EU see the need of a foss browser engine alternative from a non-profit and stuff some Money there
