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Discussion (74 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Everyone's only in it for the money. There are no good or bad people anymore, only...unfortunates. (that last line I stole from The Equalizer 2).
Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side project at the point that it got cancelled (the parts that had been largely successful had already been merged into Firefox, the rest was either nowhere near ready or being completely rewritten or both, and the main application for it at the time was some attempts to make a browser for running web apps in VR headsets at high framerates). Thunderbird was a side project.
But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money, like the branded VPN service. Or projects like FirefoxOS, which ultimately failed but still resulted in a lot of improvements to Firefox and web standards. And it wasn't a bad idea either, it just put the cart (mobile OS) before the horse (the web APIs that are needed to make a browser-based mobile OS successful, like access to GPS and IMU hardware, which didn't exist at the time) without the heft to really push through the barriers while competing directly with Apple and Google.
It seems like people define "frivolous side projects" as "anything Mozilla did that didn't end up being incredibly successful" and anything that did become incredibly successful gets taken for granted. "What did Rome ever do for us" rewritten as a tech parable.
(don't tell me that "we're going to create a whole new language to fix security issues in our web browser" didn't sound a bit frivolous in 2012)
I'm surprised they didn't integrate their own internet search engine into Firefox. But the contract with Google probably prohibits it and Google would immediately pull the plug on Firefox if it got wind of it anyway.
Firefox is like 25 million lines of code. Incredibly complex code, much of it decades old and wrapped in layers of legacy architectural patterns (see XUL, XBL), with severe backwards compatibility considerations (if you break existing websites or people's extensions, they might switch and not come back).
You suggest that NOT rewriting all of that in a couple of years is "hubris"?!? Rust 1.0 didn't happen until 2015 mind you, and Firefox OS was canceled in 2016. The timeline doesn't even make sense.
This kind of nonsense is why I can't take HN seriously when it comes to discussions about Mozilla. Criticisms are perfectly fine (and there are plenty of legitimate criticism to make) but people just abandon all logic when it comes to them for some reason and upvote mindless drivel because Mozilla Bad.
FYI, there are more than 6 million lines of Rust in Firefox, so it's not like it hasn't been happening.
But I'm sure people would complain if they moved operations to Brno and Warsaw too.
Instead they dreamed up the idea of being a multi-billion corporation next to the non-profit so they could give management commensurate compensation.
That said, the terms of the contract are not public, and it's possible that it was restricted in a fashion which did not permit such usage.
However, I don't see who picks up the reigns if Mozilla dies. Like it or not, Firefox is essential for a somewhat (increasingly less) open web, and (at least for now) Mozilla is essential to Firefox. For those who want to see Mozilla die but Firefox live on, what are the more likely outcomes in your opinion if Mozilla went down? Do you see a big corp (which it increasingly seems is the only way to keep up with the needed pace for a browser) stepping up?
It might appear that FOSS has won, however in reality what happened is that corporations have managed to control the message thanks to business friendly licenses.
I often wonder if the current model has been driving away contributors, since it _feels like_ contributing effort to support someone else's paychecque.
How many of those features were really organic, driven by actual pressing need and not driven by Google's needs.
And Mozilla keeps attempting to diversify its income stream by coming up with commercial services for which there are loads of alternatives, such as VPN. Why don't they just give up on that and spend all their money on Firefox? Hire someone with a deep technical background and a vision to take Firefox forward. As long as it doesn't involve A.I. I think it's worth a shot.
We would end up in the same place if everything is based on Blink/WebKit; arguably we're partway there already.
Hopefully Servo will provide a competitive browser engine and full browser in the future as well, with the bonus of being great for embedding. But it's not quite there yet. And other potential competitors have their own problems. Firefox is, for the moment, the most popular and only viable browser not based on Blink/WebKit.
If there's only one browser engine the Web immediately closes up like a giant impenetrable clam. All of humanity will be left outside, doomed to scrape forlornly on the shell with our nails and dream of the pearls within.
> US federal and state competition authorities recently asked the court of appeals to overturn the part of Mehta’s ruling that permits these payments.
You get the "competition authorities" you pay for. Decades of government-bashing, bureaucrat-bashing, sidelining and shit pay give you this level of institutional competence.
Bought by whom? Another monopolist bigcorp that surely won't care to monetize it? That is not how you reason about antitrust issues.
Google should still be split, but along lines which are cohesive, financially viable and would level the playing field for competition, e.g.
- google workspaces / gmail / maps / search / chrome / youtube
- search index / cloud / datacenters
- youtube
- android
"Nibbling at the edges" is what the competition authorities are proposing.
They need to figure out how to break away from Google. It's clearly an abusive relationship.
Mozilla also manages itself horribly. They need to do things differently. For one, stop paying the CEO an inappropriate amount of money. Second, stop loading up the browser with garbage features, hyperfocusing on side quests nobody cares about (VPNs, Pocket, AI garbage, etc), and get back to basics. What they were doing in the 2000s was glorious and they need to return to that.
also, previously on android, when apps were cleared from desktop, the browser used to quit. now you need to go to menu->quit. otherwise it will keep opening new tabs.
a non-tech friend of mine was once complaining about their phone being very slow. i looked at their chrome and -- i kid you not -- it had 800 tabs open.
non tech folks are a goldmine for the data stealers, and firefox likely implemented that 'enhancement request' to make it easy for them, not for the user.
I believe we need to get legislation in place to ban the selling of customer information to third-parties.
They have more than enough money to be better, and focus more on development, they just... don't.
I'm sure many other players will play top dollar to be the default on a browser that virtually commands all the market. That'll let us discover the real price of search engine defaults because the Mozilla payout is partly due to antitrust reasons.
In that case, I think we'll also see a visible decrease in "bugs" affecting Firefox on Google's properties.
I don’t think Firefox survives as a community based project.
cf. Mozilla Firefox Is Dying (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44939271 and a list of posts from 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303736
I'm aware that this very revenue is what Mozilla is complaining about. But the CEO could get off his fat ass and do his job finding an actual business model instead of just being a parasite.
HN would complain (and indeed has complained) every time they try to find a non-Google source of revenue. The advertisement for the Disney movie with a Red Panda got flamed despite being completely innocuous, Pocket and Mozilla VPN and Lockwise got flamed for being "distractions" or whatever, etc.
"Focus on the browser", everyone says, except that browsers are the most commoditized market you could possibly immagine, where their competitors (3 of the richest companies in the entire world) literally spend billions of dollars pushing their own browsers as loss-leaders, and also they come pre-installed on billions of devices by default. What kind of "business model" do you expect, exactly? Do like Brave and build a crypto scheme around in-page ad replacement?
Not their first foray into this case I suppose:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/amicus_b... (May 2025)
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/defendin... (Sep 2025)
Would this apply to services offering to "promote" your post/listing to the top of the page. Like what is the legislation and logic here.