this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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The Justice Department's proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.

In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering "something of value" to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.

The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.

"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”

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[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

What smaller browsers?

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 219 points 2 days ago (4 children)

May I be frank? I suspect that, in the long run, Mozilla not getting this money will actually benefit Firefox. Sure, so exec will get pissed as they won't get 5.6 million dollars a year, and Firefox won't get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that'll be ditched some time later; but I think that they'll focus better on the browser this way. Specially because whoever is paying the dinner is the one picking the dish, and with a higher proportion of their effective income coming from donations, what users want will stop being so neglected.

Just my two cents.

[–] irreticent@lemmy.world 23 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

WTF‽

"The head of Mozilla earned roughly $5.6 Million during 2021."

[–] valkyre09@lemmy.world 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Excuse me, where do I fill out the form to have the first $30,696 of my salary processed as non taxable benefit? Please and thank you

[–] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 67 points 2 days ago

I totally agree.

Frankly, Mozilla should be embarrassed to have released this statement.

It's basically 'Please don't harm our competitor for corruptly bribing rivals! We like those bribes very much!'

[–] ryper@lemmy.ca 69 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Firefox won’t get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that’ll be ditched some time later

Nah, the features nobody asked for will just be limited to ones that will provide a revenue stream.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

However once they lose the googlebux, a meaningful part of the revenue stream will be donations. And features implemented because of donators asking for them are, typically, things that we users desire.

[–] pelya@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

Donations are not sustainable. Many open-source projects tried them, and the only thing they can cover are server costs or conferences, developers are still working for free on their own time.

[–] lung@lemmy.world 26 points 2 days ago (10 children)

Yeah but in the short term the company will literally go out of business

[–] e0qdk@reddthat.com 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets -- roughly half a billion dollars of which was in "cash and cash equivalents" -- in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

[–] lung@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

Y'know, you're right & that's wild. I guess I should have known, but didn't assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not Mozilla. The software is open source and will persist.

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The way Mozilla can advocate for web standards will be sorely missed.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

To my knowledge they don't though, Chrome has had the overall market share for years. Most of the time them is a little project is tailing behind Chrome, because anything that they add to Chrome if the other browsers didn't follow suit they were left in the dust. I haven't seen the Mozilla project as a Trailblazer in years

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[–] Potatofish@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The comments are a who's who of anarchists. Watch them burn it all down and end up with Microsoft owning the dominant browser again. Idiots...

[–] Walk_blesseD@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Do… do you even know what an anarchist is???

[–] Potatofish@lemmy.world -3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Makhno@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Lmao so you're a self-professed idiot.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just a dumb child smelling their own farts 😂

[–] Potatofish@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago
[–] TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world 68 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's unfortunate, but it still needs to happen. Mozilla will adapt.

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech 0 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

They haven't launched a successful product in a decade. Pretty sure they'll get more desperate and have even more misses. Probably AI.

mozilla ai sold to antrophic?

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago

Eh. Given how dead Thunderbird was, I feel it's fair enough to call it's recent massive renewal a launch.

And fkr what it's worth, their recent 'AI' endeavours have been private offline language translation (i.e. no sending data to Google translation servers), and better screen reader functionality for blind people. Both good features.

[–] ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 59 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"Listen, making the entire market dependent on one corporate benefactor just sothey aren't a 100% monopoly and only a 99% one is important"

Jesus Christ Mozilla, do you hear yourself?

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 day ago

Remember, Mozilla spends more on executives and their “outreach” programs than they spend on Firefox developers.

[–] astro_ray@piefed.social 137 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

what Mozilla is really afraid of is losing the over inflated bonus the execs get paid.

[–] prof_wafflez@lemmy.world 59 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Mozilla needs to ditch their CEO and maybe even their board. They’ve lost their way all because the leadership is greedy

[–] HailSeitan@lemmy.world 7 points 14 hours ago

That’s mistaking a structural problem for a personal one. Zeynep Tufekci has a great argument about why that wouldn’t work:

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

[–] Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works 61 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I understand why Mozilla would want to keep the money coming from Google, but it might also be good for them to be less dependent from Google.

Nothing is preventing them from cutting deals with other search engines if they want to keep doing that.

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 62 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

I feel like Mozilla is a big money laundering scheme at this point. It only exist so chrome isn't a monopoly, and I pretty sure the CEO and several other workers are getting paid an obscene amount to do nothing all day while only 20% of the money actually goes toward working on the browser.

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[–] R3D4CT3D@midwest.social 28 points 2 days ago

tldr: but muh paycheck!

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I don't care. Just do it.

[–] jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip 18 points 2 days ago

Oh my fucking god Servo cannot get here soon enough.

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It's certainly better than the status quo. Sure, Mozilla will hurt at first because they've put their revenue source in the same basket, but it's an opportunity to grow back.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

You've just given a great summary of the history of breaking monopolies, really. History says you are correct. For example, AT&T is still kicking.

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[–] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 20 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There are other search engines. Maybe Firefox can partner with them.

[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 23 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I'm guessing that once Google is prohibited from providing incentives, the bottom will fall out of that particular market and those other search engines will likely pay less, if anything, for the privilege.

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