Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla
lunduke.locals.com
The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes are taken from official Mozilla docs.
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The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes are taken from official Mozilla docs.
And this is one of the many reasons I don't donate to Firefox. Firefox employees should really fork that project and make it better than what it is now instead of just being Google's dog + an excuse to pay millions to a single person and hundreds of thousands to random individuals, who have nothing to do with Firefox.
400M in cash could go to a lot of development efforts. They could rewrite Firefox entirely in Rust, make it run on any platform, move the needle on web technologies in a big way, hell, they could make their own damn phone with that kind of money, or even write their own competitor to ChromeOS.
But instead...
And what do you do after three years? Then the cash will be used up.
Mozilla isn't just developing the Firefox browser. Technology is inherently political - and educating people and influencing actors politically on the free and open web is very important. Firefox is much less likely to mis-align away from their browser users than chrome simply because they don't have the misaligned incentives like the chrome Browser which is equally made by the largest internet advertising firm of the world.
They even has created FirefoxOS for phone at some point in the past 10 years. But I don't remember what happened with that.
They tried making a phone already and it failed to gain steam.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS
It's worth noting that KaiOS, a fork of Firefox OS, has been successful - particularly in developing markets.
This is reassuring, I’ve been debating installing Ubuntu’s phone OS on my old Sony Xperia. It’s great that it’s not a complete bust to have a nice FOSS OS on phones. Mozilla just didn’t have the resources or wherewithal to follow through with Firefox OS and that’s just how it goes.
What are you on about? This is super confusing to me. Mozilla does a lot of great work. It's insanely hard to make and develop a web browser... Are you aware of that? Apple probably spends a large fraction of the amount Mozilla does and yet safari benefits more from open source than Mozilla and is still one of the biggest shit piles on the planet.
Use LibreWolf. I've switched to it from Brave because it's counted as firefox market share but it gets rid of all the non-browser features (Pocket, Telemetry, etc.) and enables some interesting flags in the config (ResistFingerprinting for example).