The Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.
In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.
The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.
"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”
That’s unfortunate, but it still needs to happen. Mozilla will adapt.
“Listen, making the entire market dependent on one corporate benefactor just sothey aren’t a 100% monopoly and only a 99% one is important”
Jesus Christ Mozilla, do you hear yourself?
Yeah, I don’t care. Just do it.
May I be frank? I suspect that, in the long run, Mozilla not getting this money will actually benefit Firefox. Sure, so exec will get pissed as they won’t get 5.6 million dollars a year, and Firefox won’t get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that’ll be ditched some time later; but I think that they’ll focus better on the browser this way. Specially because whoever is paying the dinner is the one picking the dish, and with a higher proportion of their effective income coming from donations, what users want will stop being so neglected.
Just my two cents.
Yeah but in the short term the company will literally go out of business
Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets – roughly half a billion dollars of which was in “cash and cash equivalents” – in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
Y’know, you’re right & that’s wild. I guess I should have known, but didn’t assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org
I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not Mozilla. The software is open source and will persist.
The way Mozilla can advocate for web standards will be sorely missed.
Perhaps.
Worst hypothesis the company gets completely bankrupt, but someone takes up the torch.
The thing is it’s never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it’s bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn’t even close, despite relying on Apple’s webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)
If Google is the only thing holding up the non-Apple web browsers, maybe then this will lead to scaling down the insane scope of the web standards so it becomes reasonable to implement and maintain a browser for non-megacorps.
Wishful thinking, but hey.
Bigger scope than a kernel? That’s a bold statement.
Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that’s a different layer that the kernel historically didn’t worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there’s shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management… A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS
Not sure it’s that bold even. Chrome has approx. 10% more lines of code than Linux, and even for Linux 60% is just drivers.
Flawed metric, sure, but it at least shows that they’re probably similar in complexity.
Hopefully, yes.
I totally agree.
Frankly, Mozilla should be embarrassed to have released this statement.
It’s basically ‘Please don’t harm our competitor for corruptly bribing rivals! We like those bribes very much!’
Firefox won’t get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that’ll be ditched some time later
Nah, the features nobody asked for will just be limited to ones that will provide a revenue stream.
However once they lose the googlebux, a meaningful part of the revenue stream will be donations. And features implemented because of donators asking for them are, typically, things that we users desire.
what Mozilla is really afraid of is losing the over inflated bonus the execs get paid.
Mozilla needs to ditch their CEO and maybe even their board. They’ve lost their way all because the leadership is greedy
tldr: but muh paycheck!
Maybe force them to give it to Mozilla since they are the primary ones that are hurting from googlopoly?
How will Mozilla fund development? Firefox only survives because Google pays them.
I guess they could start saving money by not paying their CEO millions/year.
I guess google would pay for search on chrome too, which is extra funny.
With a user base as big as chrome you would have to look for ways to lose money.
Oh my fucking god Servo cannot get here soon enough.
I understand why Mozilla would want to keep the money coming from Google, but it might also be good for them to be less dependent from Google.
Nothing is preventing them from cutting deals with other search engines if they want to keep doing that.
I feel like Mozilla is a big money laundering scheme at this point. It only exist so chrome isn’t a monopoly, and I pretty sure the CEO and several other workers are getting paid an obscene amount to do nothing all day while only 20% of the money actually goes toward working on the browser.
It really looks and feels like that.
Just out of curiosity, where does the 20% estimate come from?
It’s half exaggerated and half true.
Last year, there was some breakdown of Mozilla earnings circulating on the web and I vaguely remember them gaining like 600 or 800 millions (mostly from Google) while only spending something around 200 millions for software dev, and this was in 2022 (their revenue from Google increases each year for some reason). That’s 33% to 25%, so it’s either 66% or 75% of Mozilla revenue used for god knows what.
Thank you for that breakdown. I’m a big fan of Firefox, but have been aware of there being issues with Mozilla for some time now (albeit from the periphery). I figured when these cases came against Google, that even though I generally supported the breakup of the monopoly, I knew that a story like this one would eventually land.
If Mozilla is indeed burning money instead of putting the majority of it towards Firefox and, to a lesser extent, Thunderbird, then yeah, they’re going to need to reassess their budget and where to allocate their assets as without big moneybags Google forking over the funds, it’d be within their best interests to really invest hard into making their browser better.
Thanks again.
It’s certainly better than the status quo. Sure, Mozilla will hurt at first because they’ve put their revenue source in the same basket, but it’s an opportunity to grow back.
You’ve just given a great summary of the history of breaking monopolies, really. History says you are correct. For example, AT&T is still kicking.
The AT&T of today is not the same one from pre-breakup. That AT&T is decidedly not still kicking.
Well yeah, thankfully.
There are other search engines. Maybe Firefox can partner with them.
I’m guessing that once Google is prohibited from providing incentives, the bottom will fall out of that particular market and those other search engines will likely pay less, if anything, for the privilege.
Would other search engines be able to “pay to be default”? My understanding is if this went through then browsers wouldn’t be able to take money from any search engine to be the default.
As I understand google is only prohibited from doing so because they are a monopoly and this would be abuse of their position, so smaller engines should be unaffected. For example, if I recall correctly, bing pays Vivaldi to be the default.
Thanks! So then the judgement is two fold. First to split chrome from google. Second to restrict google from paying to be the default search engine on any browser.
Mozilla should partner with Kagi and bundle the browser with that search engine and share revenue
Mozilla will be fine. I’ll literally pay them annually if worst comes to worst and I bet others would too.
Not sure I would. Though I probably would for some high quality fork. At this point I don’t have much faith in Mozilla.
Fair enough. They have been up to some wacky stuff lately. I just love the browser so much and don’t want to see it go .
Before or after they fire 90% of their staff?
Preferably after they fire the “Feminist AI Alliance for Climate Justice” people.
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