Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division (opens in new tab)

How about it becomes a squeaky clean non-profit, gets classified as a digital public good and gets funded by the widest collection of public sector / ngo's.

We are talking about the literal window to the digital world, with potentially billions of users. Its a dysfunctional world that cant sort out funding for such a super-critical software piece and has let adtech have this charade and fig leaf of "browser competition" going on for so long.

A chromium based solution would double down on the monoculture. If anything now is the time to envision what a users-first browser should be like, not what adtech wants it to be. From wasm to fediverse and (dare I say) AI, its a good time to snap out of the stagnation.

> Maybe the main FOSS browser will be a Chromium fork so it's cheaper to maintain?

Likely not. If the fork would need to fight against any privacy-threatning actions, it will start to be quite different. It can be cheaper to maintain your own browser than massive, very diversed fork. And Google would get all power over web standards. You would need to fight them too if there is something controversial, and the code is getting different, again.

At that point Web developers can update their CVs as ChromeOS developer.

There are multiple FOSS Chromium forks already, e.g. Brave.

> Maybe the main FOSS browser will be a Chromium fork so it's cheaper to maintain?

Firefox is more or less a Chrome fork. /s

>Revenue consists of the following: x Royalties - Mozilla provides the Firefox web browser, which is a free and open- source web browser initially developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Corporation. Mozilla incorporates search engines of its customers as a default status or an optional status available in the Firefox web browser. Mozilla generally receives royalties at a certain percentage of revenues earned by its customers through their search engines incorporated in the Firefox web browser.

[0] https://stateof.mozilla.org/

Based on the audit numbers I a bit puzzled about the reported amount of staff. Maybe I am reading it completely wrong

Doesn't the corporation fund the foundation as well though?

Cutting the source off mid-sentence is disingenuous.

Fully agree, that is why I usually put money on the software I care about, it isn't about using stuff from others freely while expecting to be paid myself.

However, there is the whole issue about the money that they were spending on CEO salary, the related bonus, and all the activities about who knows what, instead of Firefox and Thunderbird.

I would gladly pay $2-$5 a month without thinking for ff/tb if they committed to open accounting with user voting and a ruling council headed by devs and technical thought leaders. I think at least 1-10 million other people would too!

The empowered userbase would then direct Mozilla to make other solutions for their most pressing needs (maybe search or email or anti tracking) instead of the lame ideas they have wasted resources on

Does advocacy pay better?

If Mozilla cares about their pocketbook, they could reevaluate how much they are spending on their CEO and AI companies. The victims of their monetary incompetence are always their own employees. I'd say Mozilla is just another company now, but even the average for-profit will lower the CEO salary if the company underperforms.

We will see if this statement is valid or not depending on how Ladybird works out.

Then don't complain when Firefox goes away, it hardly matters anyway.

Exactly, I would even say the foundation has not only lots, but everything to do with Firefox. I don't understand how there are so many "ackshually" guys in this thread. It is all the same thing, Mozilla, and the separation is and has always been only a technicality, nothing more. It is exactly the same as saying The Walt Disney Company has nothing to do with Disney+.

Having worked for the Foundation for a decade: it has nothing to do with Firefox, and it does not "own" the corporation in any practical sense of the word. It has no say over what happens on the corporate side.