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...
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.
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.
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.
This. Web engines cost a tremendous amount to develop.
Donations won’t raise hundreds of millions per year, unless they get serious commitment from the enterprise sector, which has already settled on Chromium unfortunately.
While I do want competition in the web space, its a good thing that Google could get told to stop doing stuff like this.
I dont want Mozilla to die of course but companies need to be held responsible for all the shit they pull. I’d imagine if Mozilla wasnt able to maintain firefox anymore it would fall to the open source community like they said in the article and I’d probably still use it.
Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots
Is this llamafile?
The thing about LLMs is that no one knows how to write the ultra low level optimizations/runtimes, so they port others (llamafile largely borrows from llama.cpp AFAIK, albeit with some major contributions from their own devs).
Performance is insanely critical because they’re so darn hard to run, and new models/features come out weekly which no sane dev can keep up with without massive critical mass (like HF Transformers, mainly, with llama.cpp barely keeping up with some major jank).
So… I’m not sure what Mozilla is thinking here. They don’t have many of those kind of devs, they don’t have a GPU farm, they’re not even contributing to promising webassembly projects like mlc-llm. They’re just one of a bazillion companies that was ordered to get into AI with no real purpose or advantage. And while Gemma 2B may be the “first” model that’s kinda OK on average PCs, we’re still a long way away from easy mass local deployment.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I’m a local LLM tinkerer, and I’ve never touched or even looked at anything from Mozilla. The community would have if anything of theirs was super useful.
And based on their actions on recent years, that something is probably going to be: 1) firing more developers, and 2) increasing the compensation of their CEO.
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.
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 would stand behind the idea of splitting Google in it’s seperate branches with no shared assets. Basically Google search becomes is seperate corporation, Google AI, Google Webservices, Google Ad Services, YouTube. etc… This will hopefully undo some of the webs enshitification since now the essentially most powerful company on the web has to actually offer good product for profit instead of compensating bad product with more profitable one.
That doesn’t produce any practical competition however. Some vertical splitting of the search business seems reasonable so we end up with multiple companies doing search out of it.
I have written this elsewhere many times and I know it’s extremely unpopular with FOSS crowd but truth needs to be told in here once again:
Everyday I use Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 10/11/Servers.
I’m an “IT guy” and have installed Firefox on literally hundreds of computers over a decade. I also install and setup extensions like uBlock Origin (with few comprehensive ad & malware blocking lists) , Dark Reader, Auto Delete Cookies, Crypto blocking and many more… but I have given up on Firefox 2016 onwards.
You could give Mozilla 10 billion per year just to develop Firefox but Mozilla can and will decide that they wanna spend only 1 or 10 percent of that money on actual Firefox development.
They will spend most of their money on anything but Firefox.
I mean I love world-peace, and cancer and aids free world too but with the money Mozilla get in a year, none of that gonna happen.
Mozilla couldn’t stop Russia attack on Ukraine; neither were able to solve Israel Palestinian conflict nor hunger and migration from African countries to Europe…
Then what are they spending money on?
What they could have done successfully is to spend all the money they made from Firefox towards Firefox development alone. But this is the thing Mozilla do not want to do and are open about it.
Now I don’t want Mozilla to stop developing Firefox either but because Firefox needs money from Google, Google must be allowed their monopoly on search… is utterly insane thinking.
If Mozilla cannot survive without Google monopoly, so be it.
I would say some open source/ Linux foundations/ Linux distros needs to fork Firefox and let Mozilla die peacefully.
They do not even want to develop a better (than Chrome) browser… they wanna “build a better Internet”.
Mozilla Foundation is making US$ 300-400 millions for many, many years (US$ 593 in 2021-22). If they could not develop a better Firefox all these years, it’s not happening __ with or without Google money __ ever.
When Mozilla /Firefox developers don’t even care/do not listen to feedback for simple things like ability to differentiate between active and inactive tab colors (why everyone that uses Firefox must play around with css to make Firefox usable?), expect them to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browser is out of question.
Longer, rant version:
According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments.
Complete lack of vision. Utterly worthless CEOs. Spending money on everything else but development of Firefox.
Especially when Firefox made them US$ 510 million in 2021-22.
Instead of spending millions on worthless CEOs, why not spend millions on developers so people would use Firefox on their own, instead IT guys like me forcing friends & family to use it.
I try to find annual cost of developing & maintaining Linux kernel but could only find articles and PDFs from 2008/2017 mentioning total worth etc but not actual annual cost.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine every Firefox (desktop, mobile etc) stops working all of a sudden… IMO, the world and internet will not come to a full stop.
Now imagine what would happen if every computer, server, router, switch, phone, tablet, stops working completely at once, that runs on Linux kernel.
So if Linux kernel can be developed for $510 million (assuming its below this mark), why can’t Firefox be?
I’m trying to figure out why US$ 510 million is not able to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browsers.
Then there are issues related to lack of vision and no importance/urgency towards finishing a product.
Why only few extensions were allowed on Firefox mobile for many years without any explanations. Even developers of major extensions were not able to figure out the criteria to make their addon available on Firefox mobile.
What was the rationale behind it… Driving people away who were using Firefox mobile? If the product was not ready, do not fucking release it.
You need highly talented and additional developers to release product sooner… hire more, pay more. You got $510 mil just from Firefox.
I do not see any future for Firefox under Mozilla.
Only if some real big names (like Linux foundation etc) from FOSS world hard fork the Firefox, it might have a future.
I think, with real big name sponsors (pro-open source companies), search revenue will not be an issue.
IMO, the new organization (of course with big sponsors) of new fork must have one, single mission/goal… develop a great browser. New org must not have a mission statement written by MBAs:
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.
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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.
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.
Fuck.
$510MM out of $593MM?!? WTF Mozilla?
The problem is: who is going to hive money for a web browser?
They got a one of a kind deal with Google, which ended up being problematic, but where else are they going to find the same thing?
Asking for donations will get you chump change.
This. Web engines cost a tremendous amount to develop.
Donations won’t raise hundreds of millions per year, unless they get serious commitment from the enterprise sector, which has already settled on Chromium unfortunately.
They’re in a tough position.
While I do want competition in the web space, its a good thing that Google could get told to stop doing stuff like this.
I dont want Mozilla to die of course but companies need to be held responsible for all the shit they pull. I’d imagine if Mozilla wasnt able to maintain firefox anymore it would fall to the open source community like they said in the article and I’d probably still use it.
No one company should own the internet.
Is this llamafile?
The thing about LLMs is that no one knows how to write the ultra low level optimizations/runtimes, so they port others (llamafile largely borrows from llama.cpp AFAIK, albeit with some major contributions from their own devs).
Performance is insanely critical because they’re so darn hard to run, and new models/features come out weekly which no sane dev can keep up with without massive critical mass (like HF Transformers, mainly, with llama.cpp barely keeping up with some major jank).
So… I’m not sure what Mozilla is thinking here. They don’t have many of those kind of devs, they don’t have a GPU farm, they’re not even contributing to promising webassembly projects like mlc-llm. They’re just one of a bazillion companies that was ordered to get into AI with no real purpose or advantage. And while Gemma 2B may be the “first” model that’s kinda OK on average PCs, we’re still a long way away from easy mass local deployment.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I’m a local LLM tinkerer, and I’ve never touched or even looked at anything from Mozilla. The community would have if anything of theirs was super useful.
Mozilla gotta do something.
And based on their actions on recent years, that something is probably going to be: 1) firing more developers, and 2) increasing the compensation of their CEO.
I’ll add:
I would pay money to keep Firefox foss for other people who can’t afford to do so.
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.
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 would stand behind the idea of splitting Google in it’s seperate branches with no shared assets. Basically Google search becomes is seperate corporation, Google AI, Google Webservices, Google Ad Services, YouTube. etc… This will hopefully undo some of the webs enshitification since now the essentially most powerful company on the web has to actually offer good product for profit instead of compensating bad product with more profitable one.
That doesn’t produce any practical competition however. Some vertical splitting of the search business seems reasonable so we end up with multiple companies doing search out of it.
How exactly would you break up search? You can’t really do it geographically like the Bells.
If if wasn’t American, I’d say nationalise it. Maybe at some point we’ll need some kind of international version of nationalising.
Ah yes, cos that would lead to stellar leadership in Mozilla.
Will this make ladybird our only hope overnight?
I guess they read the room and this is why they started delving into the ad business
So Mozilla will find other forms of funding. That’s how this works.
good. Maybe firefox will die like it should have long ago
I have written this elsewhere many times and I know it’s extremely unpopular with FOSS crowd but truth needs to be told in here once again:
Everyday I use Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 10/11/Servers.
I’m an “IT guy” and have installed Firefox on literally hundreds of computers over a decade. I also install and setup extensions like uBlock Origin (with few comprehensive ad & malware blocking lists) , Dark Reader, Auto Delete Cookies, Crypto blocking and many more… but I have given up on Firefox 2016 onwards.
You could give Mozilla 10 billion per year just to develop Firefox but Mozilla can and will decide that they wanna spend only 1 or 10 percent of that money on actual Firefox development.
They will spend most of their money on anything but Firefox.
I mean I love world-peace, and cancer and aids free world too but with the money Mozilla get in a year, none of that gonna happen.
Mozilla couldn’t stop Russia attack on Ukraine; neither were able to solve Israel Palestinian conflict nor hunger and migration from African countries to Europe…
Then what are they spending money on?
What they could have done successfully is to spend all the money they made from Firefox towards Firefox development alone. But this is the thing Mozilla do not want to do and are open about it.
Now I don’t want Mozilla to stop developing Firefox either but because Firefox needs money from Google, Google must be allowed their monopoly on search… is utterly insane thinking.
If Mozilla cannot survive without Google monopoly, so be it.
I would say some open source/ Linux foundations/ Linux distros needs to fork Firefox and let Mozilla die peacefully.
What improvements would you like to see through development?
Semi-TLDR: Improvements under Mozilla? None.
They do not even want to develop a better (than Chrome) browser… they wanna “build a better Internet”.
Mozilla Foundation is making US$ 300-400 millions for many, many years (US$ 593 in 2021-22). If they could not develop a better Firefox all these years, it’s not happening __ with or without Google money __ ever.
When Mozilla /Firefox developers don’t even care/do not listen to feedback for simple things like ability to differentiate between active and inactive tab colors (why everyone that uses Firefox must play around with css to make Firefox usable?), expect them to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browser is out of question.
Longer, rant version:
According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments.
Source: https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-potential-loser-google-antitrust-search-ruling/
The fundamental issues as I see are:
Complete lack of vision. Utterly worthless CEOs. Spending money on everything else but development of Firefox.
Especially when Firefox made them US$ 510 million in 2021-22.
Instead of spending millions on worthless CEOs, why not spend millions on developers so people would use Firefox on their own, instead IT guys like me forcing friends & family to use it.
I try to find annual cost of developing & maintaining Linux kernel but could only find articles and PDFs from 2008/2017 mentioning total worth etc but not actual annual cost.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine every Firefox (desktop, mobile etc) stops working all of a sudden… IMO, the world and internet will not come to a full stop.
Now imagine what would happen if every computer, server, router, switch, phone, tablet, stops working completely at once, that runs on Linux kernel.
So if Linux kernel can be developed for $510 million (assuming its below this mark), why can’t Firefox be?
I’m trying to figure out why US$ 510 million is not able to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browsers.
Then there are issues related to lack of vision and no importance/urgency towards finishing a product.
Why only few extensions were allowed on Firefox mobile for many years without any explanations. Even developers of major extensions were not able to figure out the criteria to make their addon available on Firefox mobile.
What was the rationale behind it… Driving people away who were using Firefox mobile? If the product was not ready, do not fucking release it.
You need highly talented and additional developers to release product sooner… hire more, pay more. You got $510 mil just from Firefox.
I do not see any future for Firefox under Mozilla.
Only if some real big names (like Linux foundation etc) from FOSS world hard fork the Firefox, it might have a future.
I think, with real big name sponsors (pro-open source companies), search revenue will not be an issue.
IMO, the new organization (of course with big sponsors) of new fork must have one, single mission/goal… develop a great browser. New org must not have a mission statement written by MBAs:
“We’re building a better Internet”
Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
Something people will use it on their own for its merit.
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.