> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.[0]
Read:
If we were just profit motivated we could block ad blockers, but we're not
The article has a lot about how they're struggling for money. Which is a constant issue for Mozilla. Which a big reason for that is the low browser share. Which a big reason for that is crazy comments like this and people feeling better about using a browser that steals their data...
> The article has a lot about how they're struggling for money.
Not really. The closest it comes is briefly mentioning some 2024 layoffs.
What the article is discussing is revenue diversification.
> Which is a constant issue for Mozilla.
No, Mozilla has had a consistent and growing revenue stream from Google.
> Which a big reason for that is the low browser share.
In what way? Software development costs have been less than half Mozilla's annual revenue for over a decade.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
This isn't a direct quote, but voy does the Author of that article not inspire confidence by the way this is worded. "It feels off-mission" should be "It would be antithetical to everything Moxilla standa for". The way this is phrased it feels like Mozilla explored this and decided that the 150 million wasn't worth the reputation hit (yet.)
Edit: I do suspect that the lack of revenue diversity led to product decisions that favored their paying customer's and prevented the types of browser innovation that would have competed more successfully for market share against that paying customer.
Also, should be obvious but the consistent and growing revenue stream is hardly going towards the browser. Most of it is going back to the employees (namely the CEO, etc).
I think it is trendy to hate of Mozilla. I'm not sure why, but it is. I mean you get tons of people who will even say they haven't tried it since before the qantum days. Or people that tried it once and just gave up.
I seriously don't get it and I understand why there's conspiracies about disinformation campaigns. But on all places I don't understand how HN users are just happily giving the keys to the internet to a singular company, let along Google.
> Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.
Honestly, what doesn't it do? Everyone says chrome is better but other than a few niche things I have been entirely unconvinced.
Why are browsers even "sticky"? There's no social network. Bookmarks are trivial to migrate. It's like the easiest thing to switch out there...
I think it is trendy to hate on Firefox because of how cool Firefox felt in 2002 and how dominant they became in the mid 2000s before Chrome and so everything feels like a fall from grace from that.
I do think there have been missteps. I think Firefox is good and is my browser of choice but most of their new features feel superfluous.
Firefox has made some shady choices of late. The settings functionality is getting ever more unreliable and they are moving more essential settings to about:config and then you have to go and dig around in there and hope you find all interdependent parameters. That is one thing that has definitelybdeclined: be open to your users and enable them to customise the software. All the ML settings can only be changed via editing the profile. How many non-techies go and dig around in the profile?
The setting exists, but may or may not actually be respected based on user reports.
Just like their auto-updates, you can turn the option off, but whether the feature is actually disabled is another question entirely.
I don't trust Mozilla enough. For one, not giving UI options and hiding all the settings in about:config where non-technical users can't access is a shitty thing to do. Second, I have zero trust that the settings actually do anything since many don't.
I don't believe for one moment that turning off their AI features actually 100% prevents that code from running.
This is not a position based on anything factual. If you have evidence of a setting not being honoured it will be treated as a bug and fixed, there is no evidence of bad faith about that that I can recall.
As for about:config, if you submit working patches to better expose options you care about I'm pretty sure they'll be considered, but every complex software has obscure options not exposed through a polished UI and frankly it's OK...
They’ll let you turn it off until people don’t care as much, then it will quietly become mandatory. Only some of the nerds will even care, since by then the panopticon will probably be fully constructed.
You can turn the existing AI off if you learn the magic incantation for about:config, its not very usable. I would hope they will provide some proper switches in the settings menu for each of the AI features they intend, including the one for automatic tab grouping (which so far is total garbage and a complete waste of CPU).
Can we just not be irrationally mad at Mozilla for once?
It is beyond me that here, on HN, of all places people do not understand the criticality that FF is to the free and open internet. Use WaterFox or whatever, but stop picking a different color of Chrome.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out Mozilla is trying everything they can to stay relevant. Literally everything they do ends up with tons of HN comments making complaints. Tons of complaints coming from people who haven't even used FF in a decade! It feels like a disinformation campaign but I'm pretty sure you all just like to hate on Mozilla and justify your usage of Chrome.
We're just fucking ourselves over here. Yes, there's reasons to complain about FF. There's no shortage. But are they truly big enough reasons to hand over the keys to the internet to a singular entity? And to Google of all companies?! Who the fuck cares about this AI browser stuff, you can opt out or use a fork like WaterFox who makes that the default. Guess who's AI stuff you can't opt-out of?
Is it really worth it?
Is 3 clicks to uninstall AI seriously enough justification to give Google the internet?
Firefox holds about 2.25% of the global browser market share. There is absolutely no "criticality" at all. Google won and also they are the ones who pay for your favorite browser to remain somewhat alive.
If you didn't daydream like that would you have the motivation to pursue it? Are not those daydreams your kind encouraging you? "Look how great it'll be, this is why you'll put in the hard work now". You can get trapped in the dreams, of course, but they're useful too
Baking is weird. You first should start by following instructions to the letter. Then once you get it you'll be able to break all the rules.
The bread rises because of the yeast bacteria eats sugar and expels carbon dioxide. So ask yourself, what does yeast like? Probably not hard to guess that it's a warm, moist environment with plenty of sugar. Too cold and they're slow moving. Too hot and they burn up. But the goldilocks zone is that of most bacteria, a hot summer day in the tropics.
How long to rise? That's more a question of how fluffy you want the bread and how fast the bacteria eats the sugar.
Follow instructions while you're learning but think about things like this while practicing and you'll get your answers pretty quickly. The problem is no one can actually give you a direct answer because there's variance. Besides, the more important skill is to learn to generalize and get the intuition for it. So pay attention to how sticky the dough is, how fluffy, how it stretches, and all the other little things. Think about it during and after. If you do this I promise you'll get your answer very quickly
Same. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message.
If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.
I'm with you on this, though I do think some people are true believers. Say a lie enough times, right?
But a big part of it to me is looking at the job data[0]. If you look at devs during this period you can see that during the pandemic they hired more in early to mid 2022 but currently are lower than any other industry.
Tech loves booms and busts, with hiring and everything else. But more than anything the tech industry loves optics. The market has rewarded the industry for hiring during the pandemic and in the past year it has rewarded them for laying people off "because AI". And as the new year comes around they'll get rewarded for hiring again as they "accelerate development" even more. Our industry is really good at metric hacking and getting those numbers to keep going up. As long as it looks like a good decision then people are excited and the numbers go up.
I think the problem is we've perverted ("over optimized") the market. You have to constantly have stock growth. The goal is to become the best but you lose the game by winning. I think a good example of this is from an article a read a few months ago[1]. It paints AWS in a bad light but if you pull out the real data you'll see AWS had a greater increase in absolute users than GCloud (you can also estimate easily from the article). But with the stock market it is better to be the underdog with growth than the status quo with constant income[2].
What a weird way to optimize our businesses. You are rewarded for becoming the best, but you are punished for being the best. Feels like only a matter of time before they start tanking on purpose because you can't go up anymore, so you need to make room to go up[3]. I mean we're already trading on speculation. We're beyond tech demos pushing stock up (already speculative) and now our "demos" are not even demonstrations but what we envision tech that hasn't been built to look like. That's much more speculative than something that is in beta! IDK, does anyone else feel like this is insane? How far can we keep pushing this?
[2] Doesn't take a genius to figure out you'll make more money had you invested $100 in GCloud vs $100 in AWS (in this example). The percentile differential is all that matters. Being percentile punishes having a large existing userbase. You have double the percentile growth going from 1 user to 100 than from 10 million to 500 million, yet any person who isn't severely mentally incapacitated would conclude the latter is a better business.
[3] Or at least play a game of hot potato. Sounds like a collusion ring in waiting. e.g. AWS stagnates, lets Azure take a bunch of users, Azure stagnates and users switch to AWS. Gives both the ability to "grow" and I'm sure all the users will be super happy with constantly switching and all the extra costs of doing so...
reply