Okay hear me out. What if we all chipped in 5 bucks to @firefox? How many people would it take to fund it well enough so they don’t have to do layoffs? I get it, the FOSS community wants the “F” part but we all should contribute some for good infrastructure. And the idea that search engine payments from Google is what keeps Firefox afloat should worry us all. We need browser engine diversity if the web is going to stay open and not littered with walled gardens any more than it already is.
Poor leadership causes layoffs. Give them money now and you’ll be asking the same question a year from now.
The “focusing on AI and Pocket” part provided proof that the current crisis is due to poor management. The poor management could even have come from tech leadership; I’ve met plenty of chief architects who were just as prone to bandwagon-jumping as anyone else.
It’s always poor leadership, but people on the lines never write the press releases.
They failed too much and it could be too late for Firefox, being years behind Chromium in terms of security and performance. Focusing on AI is another failure attempt, we have AI allready and bringing one to Firefox won’t solve anything at all.
Security and performance are hard to measure but it’s at least questionable that they’re behind in either.
AI has many good uses, for example the local translation capability that allows for privacy-preserving translations of websites is AI and already in Firefox, and makes it possible to translate in environments that do not allow sending data out for security reasons.
Security and performance are hard to measure but it’s at least questionable that they’re behind in either.
Firefox misses multiple security features Chromium had for years, altough they did add some like site isolation though mutliple processes. The following link showed up first after searching. [1]
Security isn’t everything though. I love how Firefox has local translations, which I’ve wanted for many years.
[1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html#sandboxing
They get 600 million a year from Google…
Only to prevent Google getting slapped with a monopoly suite
For those that look at this and still think the solution might just be more money, first recognize that Google donates only to keep Firefox as a viable competitor to avoid anti-trust legislation.
If we raised half a million dollars, we haven’t saved anyone any money except Google - they’d simply donate only 100k next year so Firefox remains competitive, but not successful.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment of the post, but we also have to realize that we’d only be improving things after the first ~600k.
That’s $2 per US citizen.
$0, not because it would actually help. But $0 because CEOs and their board would rather have the money in their pockets. Sad, but true
kinda agree with you.
Firefox is not doing well, and greedy CEO’s are not helping the cause. I wish they’d take a playbook from Nintendo’s leadership, show they really back the product, and take a pay cut to help the cause.
I can’t imaging the CEO being significantly impacted if they had to go from $6,700,000 per year to $3,350,000 and could single-handedly save at least 10 engineers at $300,000+ each to continue to work on core features and guarantee long-term success.
Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata on layoffs:
If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world
Fun fact: non-profits are required to report the incomes of their highest paid employees on IRS form 990. In 2022, Mark Surman was paid $344,483. This is well below executive pay in Silicon Valley, and on par with normal software engineer pay in the same area according to GlassDoor.
Sure, some executives are overpaid, but this is very much not the case here.
It’s worth it to find out before spewing hate and bias.
The Mozilla Corporation is not a non-profit. This confusion is why articles talking about what “Mozilla” is doing are also doing a disservice unless they are specific. The Foundation is not doing layoffs, and the interim CEO at the Corporation came from Airbnb after eBay, PayPal, and Skype. She isn’t working for $400k.
The Mozilla Corporation itself isn’t, but it’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, so some of the same legal restrictions apply.
I don’t think, we would know these wages otherwise…
I don’t think most of the legal restrictions apply at all, actually, as long as the entities are kept sufficiently separated. That’s one of the reasons non-profits use a for-profit subsidiary that pays taxes for its income. I’m not sure if they have to report the CEO salary on the 990, except the previous CEO was also a staff member of the Foundation.
I have no problem with how it is set up, but to say the executive was making $400k is incorrect, as he has nothing to do with Firefox.
I do wish they made the distinction more obvious though. I see a lot of criticism for advocacy things the Foundation does “distracting from Firefox” when it is not the case.
Well, that’s one point I meant, that the CEO is a Foundation employee, so the non-profit rules apply there. But the big one is that because the Corporation is wholly-owned by a non-profit, its only stakeholder where profits could get paid out to, is the non-profit which practically can’t take it. (“Profit” excludes wages.)
So, the legally for-profit subsidiary actually doesn’t have a profit motive to the same extent as traditional companies.
They do still want to make money, because contrary to the non-profit, they can save it up for bad times, and paying your workers at least industry-standard wages is also nice.Which is also where the CEO salary comes from. Similar companies pay probably just as much or more. I fully agree that it’s stupidly too much money, but we also cannot expect anyone to perform as a CEO out of the goodness of their hearts, and to not take an equivalent job at a company which does pay them stupidly too much money.
As for people not understanding the distinction between Foundation and Corporation, I agree that it’s a bit of a problem, but I wouldn’t want them to rebrand one or the other. My mum is already confused between “Mozilla” and “Firefox”. I guess, they could call it “Firefox Company”, but I do think both benefit from the shared branding.
Disagree. A job that pays 6 million attracts a person who wants 6 million and more. A job that pays less attracts a different kind of person. Look at how successful Wikipedia is, then look up their executive salaries.
EDIT: And, if it is the corp laying off, then that is money that could be keeping employees on board.
Link to donate: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/?form=donate
That isn’t for Firefox development though, that is for the Foundation and their advocacy work. The Mozilla Corporation builds Firefox and last I checked they do not take donations (unlike MZLA Technologies that builds Thunderbird, which is also a for-profit but still rakes non-tax-deductible donations). The Corporation is the one doing layoffs.
They’d use it for something else. Certainly not to keep jobs they believe are useless anyway. Someone up there will decide that the project their niece is working at requires more funding, and a few company cars.
No thank you. :)
The thing is they don’t need a one-off donation, they need a stable revenue stream. Can’t plan for the future if the financials are uncertain or bleak…
They don’t need any money because they had a good browser once upon a time and made it so bloated and tracking and garbage that people quit using it.
I agree with this: Firefox claims to be privacy-focused, but if you truly need privacy, you have to use a fork like Librewolf. Chrome is a better choice as it supports PWAs and you can also use Vivaldi, which is more customizable and secure than Firefox.
It’s less bloated than the alternatives, and the tracking is opt in for the most part?
Browsers need to stay up to date with the features people need. If they kept it as the original “good browser”, it would have been ditched even harder
That was true when Chrome dropped, but that was years and many major ersions ago. FireFox is a different beast now. It can be annoying in ways, but it’s insanely customizable if googling tweaks doesn’t scare you.
What if the community funded a living trust that accepted all donations in perpetuity and had set payouts regularly scheduled to Firefox (or other FOSS/privacy projects)?
I’m chipping in $2 a month as it is…
60 people would be like… 9 mil for just a year. That’s like 2 million donations of 5 bucks. I don’t think Lemmy is at 2mil users yet
Firefox is a company
The Mozilla Corporation does not take donations for Firefox development.
The only reason I don’t donate to mozilla right now is that mozilla doesn’t actually funnel any donation funds to firefox. I want to support firefox with donations, but I can’t.
Exactly, 100%. Hell I’d drop them $100 a year forever if it all went to Firefox, and they didn’t fuck around with stupid monetisation like pocket, adding AI, etc. I don’t mind them selling a VPN, but I do mind that I can’t use any VPN as a container proxy because of them selling a VPN.
