The State of Mozilla
Bryan Lunduke (via Hacker News):
The Mozilla Foundation has released their latest annual report -- covering the time up through December of 2022 (Mozilla’s reporting always lags by one year) -- and something peculiar leaps out of the data:
- The compensation of the Mozilla CEO has skyrocketed (by millions)
- While the Mozilla revenue drops
- And the Firefox Marketshare takes a nosedive
Mozilla (via Hacker News):
Mozilla was built to make the internet better
[…]
Building Mozilla stems from a harmonious blend of philanthropic vision and commercial acumen, embodying the balance between social impact and sustainable growth. Driven by the mission to serve the public good. Two examples are how we build through our Venture Fund and the amazing projects funded through In Real Life.
Richard Speed (via Hacker News):
Unsurprisingly for a technology company, the report is heavy on AI going mainstream where Mozilla reckons it can make an impact in the technology, particularly with regard to open source developers and privacy.
Mozilla’s adventures in AI? The organization says it has 15 engineers working on open source large language models and is working on use cases in the healthcare space. Moez Draief, managing director of Mozilla.ai, said: “There’s a lot of structured data work in that industry that will feed the language models; we don’t have to invent it.”
Mozilla’s corporate structure has the same problem OpenAI had. Because Mozilla is not a for-profit entity, management isn’t accountable to shareholders with a financial stake. Because Mozilla isn’t a charity, management isn’t accountable to donors. Who is Mozilla management accountable to? A board; mostly made up Baker’s associates. It is an incestuous arrangement. If Mozilla were serious, they would change the way management is held accountable. Baker needs someone who will actually hold her feet to the flames.
Mozilla is entirely unimaginative, but is self sustaining as long as it keeps its advertisers. Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.
Diane Brady (via Hacker News):
Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.
[…]
Chambers says she plans to focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO.
Mozilla Corporation was sued this month in the US, along with three of its executives, for alleged disability discrimination and retaliation against Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira.
Teixeira, according to a complaint filed in King County Superior Court in the State of Washington, had been tapped to become CEO when he was diagnosed with ocular melanoma on October 3, 2023.
Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.
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By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology, we can enhance user privacy and advertising effectiveness, leveling the playing field for all stakeholders.
This seems completely normal and cool and not troublesome in any way.
Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
[…]
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
• • •
Floris Hulshoff (via Hacker News):
Mozilla will soon remove its telemetry service Adjust from the Android and iOS versions of browsers Firefox and Firefox Focus. It appeared that the developer was collecting data on the effectiveness of Firefox ad campaigns without disclosing that.
AdGuard (via Hacker News):
If you haven’t been following Firefox super closely, you might wonder: Why was there an ad-tracking SDK in the first place? After all, Mozilla has always positioned itself as a champion of privacy. So, what’s the deal with third-party trackers in their browser?
[…]
It might shock some, but Mozilla has quietly used the Adjust SDK for years. Back in 2020, a curious Redditor on the Firefox subreddit demanded answers about this telemetry partnership — questioning what data was sent, how it was used, and how it squared with Mozilla’s privacy-first image.
[…]
Mozilla says that Firefox for Android uses the Adjust SDK to track and analyze the origin of app installs, specifically to determine if a user installed the browser in response to a specific marketing campaign.
European digital rights group NOYB (None Of Your Business) has filed a privacy complaint with the Austrian data protection watchdog (DSB) against Mozilla, alleging the company uses a Firefox privacy feature (enabled without consent) to track users’ online behavior.
The feature, called “Privacy-Preserving Attribution” (PPA) and jointly developed with Meta (formerly Facebook), was announced in February 2022 and was automatically enabled in Firefox version 128, released in July.
NOYB’s complaint claims that, despite its name, Mozilla uses the feature to track Firefox user behavior across websites.
• • •
Raymond “gorhill” Hill, maker of the world’s most popular content blocker uBlock Origin received two emails from Mozilla recently about his Firefox add-on uBlock Origin Lite.
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Mozilla says that it has reviewed the extension and found violations. […] As a consequence, Mozilla disabled the extension on the Firefox Add-ons Store.
[…]
Hill refuted all three claims that Mozilla made on the GitHub repository stating that the extension is not collecting any data, that there is no minified code in uBlock Origin Lite, and that there is a privacy policy.
Taras Buria (via Hacker News):
Raymond Hill decided to drop the extension from the store and move it to a self-hosted version. This means that those who want to continue using uBlock Origin Lite on Firefox should download the latest version from GitHub (it can auto-update itself).
• • •
We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024.
Mozilla deciding to put an end to its Fediverse investments while simultaneously going all in on AI tells you everything you need to know about what it has become.
I understand that this is going to upset people but bffr, if you have 270 active users, that isn’t sustainable. I understand why Mozilla experimented with this. I equally understand why this isn’t something they could do in perpetuity with this low of a number of users.
• • •
As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we need to simultaneously work on public policy, standards, products and infrastructure. Today, I want to take a moment to dive into the details of the “product” and “infrastructure” elements. I will share our emerging thoughts on how this will come to life across our existing products (like Firefox), and across the industry (through the work of our recent acquisition, Anonym, which is building an alternative infrastructure for the advertising industry).
They’ve decided who their customers are, and it’s not you, it’s people who build and invest in surveillance advertising networks. But in a “respectful” way.
• • •
Open-source, not-for-profit software company Mozilla has revamped its digital identity to better encapsulate its mission to advocate for an “open, accessible, and supportive internet”. Best known for its Firefox web browser, the company now has a new branding system that aims to visually unify its expanded set of services, channels and resources, which Mozilla has developed over the years, as well as highlight its current “vital research advocacy work in the digital world”. So, central to the brand’s shift has been to move forward with Mozilla as a brand name in order to ensure that the software company “is recognised for its broader impact, not just Firefox”.
Thomas Claburn (Hacker News, Slashdot):
The Mozilla Foundation is laying off about a third of its staff. The non-profit org, which oversees the corporation that develops the Firefox web browser, insists it will continue its advocacy mission, though its approach may change.
[…]
Mozilla Corporation in February laid off about 60 staff, representing about five percent of that software maker’s headcount.
In an email sent to all employees on October 30th, Nabhia Syed, the foundation’s executive director, said that the advocacy and global programs divisions “are no longer part of our structure.”
Frederic Lardinois (Hacker News):
To kick-start some of this growth, Mozilla is looking at reaching new, and younger, users. Chambers noted that Mozilla is running a number of marketing campaigns to make people aware of Firefox, especially those who are only now starting to make their first browser choices.
[…]
Of course, she said, the browser also has to work very well — and that’s something Mozilla has focused on quite extensively in recent years. And at the same time, the team also has to keep innovating and giving users the features they are looking for. She noted that as part of refocusing on Firefox, Mozilla is running far more user experience experiments in the browser now, for example.
[…]
From a financial perspective, Mozilla is almost completely dependent on its search deal with Google. Since the Department of Justice is now looking at these deals, though mostly because of Google’s deal with Apple, there is a risk that this may also end up hurting Mozilla. Chambers didn’t seem too concerned about this, however. She noted that the scope of this ruling, which is expected soon, is the U.S., while Mozilla is a global organization.
Previously:
- Firefox at 20
- Chrome’s Manifest V3 and uBlock Origin
- Google Search and Ads Monopoly
- Safari Private Click Measurement and Firefox Privacy-Preserving Attribution
- Cue Testimony in US v. Google
- Brave Layoffs
- Mozilla.ai
- Mozilla Signs Fresh Google Search Deal
- Mozilla Layoffs
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All of this does not bode well for the future of web browsers. Currently Firefox (and its frankly superior privacy-preserving derivatives) are the only browsers left that really give the user proper control, especially with Chrome dropping support for manifest v2, and Apple pretending like it's ludicrous to use anything other than their highly buggy stripped down offering.
@Bri It’s unclear to me to what extent Brave will be able to continue supporting Manifest V2.
@Daniel Fixed, thanks.
Very grim. Kinda need to fork everything & rebuild a simple web without so much complexity that you need a supercomputer to run it + a giant corp to implement it.
@OUG That *is* interesting, yes. However, let's hope Google, who presumably still harbours all the talent on the Chrome team, don't just reincorporate Chromium into a new Google browser which they will then advertise on their dominant search engine. It all hinges on a level playing field if Chrome/Chromium ever becomes a reference implementation, de facto.
