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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 07 2019, @07:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the search-me dept.

Mozilla's revenue in 2018 fell by nearly 20% compared to the year prior, and for the first time expenses outweighed income, the organization said in its annual financial report.

The nonprofit behind Firefox implied that the apparent downturn was misleading because of the comparison to record revenue of the year before. "2017 was an outlier, due in part to changes in the search revenue deal that was negotiated that year," Mozilla said in the "State of Mozilla 2018" report published on its website.

Mozilla also asserted that the revenue decline would not affect its work. "Despite the year-over-year change, Mozilla remains in a strong financial position with cash reserves to support continued innovation, partnerships and diversification of the Firefox product lines," the organization wrote.

Most of the $451 million in revenue the Mozilla Foundation recognized in 2018 came from royalty payments, with the bulk of that produced by deals struck for Firefox's default search spot. Mozilla Foundation is the nonprofit that in turn runs Mozilla Corp., the commercial organization that actually develops and maintains Firefox.

According to Mozilla's 2018 financial statement[0] released Nov. 21, the $451 million in overall revenue was $111 million less than in 2017, a plummet of 19.8%. The statement marked the first time Mozilla reported a year-over-year revenue decline in the 14 years that Computerworld has tracked the organization's financial health.

Of total revenue, $430 million, or about 95%, came from royalty payments. As always with Mozilla's revenue, the greatest portion of what the organization categorized as royalties came from search contracts. In 2018, those search deals accounted for 91% of all royalty revenue, Mozilla said, representing about $391 million. That was a whopping $110 million less than in 2017, a 22% decline. As with revenue, the search deal total was the first-ever search revenue slump in Mozilla's history.

Mozilla did not explain the massive decline in search revenue, other than the brief reference to 2017's number and how it was an "outlier."

0Bogus link. 2018 audited financial statement (pdf).


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  • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @08:37PM (29 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @08:37PM (#929505)

    Looking at the pathetic quality of their browser and UI you know that they're not spending anything on engineering. So just how many transgender bathrooms and climate-change outreach programs did they fund this year?

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @08:40PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @08:40PM (#929507)

      It's all spelled out in the financial report. I was surprised to see that they spent $13.25 million buying a yacht for Greta Thunberg to use, but I guess they can call that a climate-change outreach program.

      I'll stick to Pale Moon.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:10PM (1 child)

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:10PM (#929514) Homepage

        Waterfox is really doin' it for me, runs all the add-ons I like and lets me disable all the bullshit I don't. It's pretty much equivalent to the last usable version of Firefox.

        Before trying that, I first tried Palemoon but that choked on install. Then I tried UnJewgled Chromium but quicky discovered that it wasn't as UnJewgled as I thought, and I never liked Chrome's squirrely feel. Then I tried brave but was horrified that there's no way to disable autocomplete in the search bar. Really? What the actual fuck?!

        • (Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:13PM

          by zion-fueled (8646) on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:13PM (#929802)

          You must not watch videos or use linux because ungoogled chromium is the only browser that supports HW video decoding there. Gee, why is firefox losing money?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:06AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:06AM (#929600)

        I was going to say drop the sex-discriminating Outreachy monkey and maybe not get swanky digs right across from Taiwan 101 in Taipei, but they bought a yacht for Greta? I hope you are joking.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:26AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:26AM (#929632)

        Trannies and Greta Thunberg! Are they also funding gun control and the war on Xmas?

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @08:36AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @08:36AM (#929985)

        was surprised to see that they spent $13.25 million buying a yacht for Greta Thunberg to use,

        Which page of which financial report says that?

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Kunasou on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:28PM (13 children)

      by Kunasou (4148) on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:28PM (#929520)

      Pretty much their expenses in technology aren't working as they should:

      Firefox Quantum (which was a big leap for Firefox's speed/responsiveness at the big cost of losing all XUL/XPCOM extensions) was released in 2017... They're developing WebRender (a new renderer that is faster than current firefox but with mixed results) but still lag behind Chrome in terms of speed.
      This days they use the same extension system as Chrome (WebExtensions), adopted code from chromium (ie IPC stuff), adopted most of the UI visuals from Chrome too.
      They've stopped innovating and they just try to keep up with Google's pace. Even if they make the whole browser more chromeish their marketshare is still going downhill.

      Their mobile browser, even though has addons support (and could be a selling point) is slow as hell, specially with Javascript heavy websites. They've surely improved it but still is ways behind its competition. It has around ~1% of mobile market share according to netmarketshare.
      Using alternatives like Kiwi Browser (mobile chrome fork with addon support) feels like night and day.

      They've also neglected their other main product - Thunderbird - switching the whole project to the ESR branch and receiving mostly security updates.

      So, money is surely spent but not that well spent. Things like expensive offices in San Francisco or London or buying Pocket instead of trying to fix their internal problems first.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:00PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:00PM (#929532)

        With ublock origin and umatrix, firefox mobile blows the doors off chrome for speed. You're just doing it wrong.

        • (Score: 2) by Kunasou on Sunday December 08 2019, @09:19AM (1 child)

          by Kunasou (4148) on Sunday December 08 2019, @09:19AM (#929660)

          Firefox Mobile can be faster than Chrome Mobile (thanks to the extension support) but even with those two extensions enabled and configured, Kiwi Browser (chrome derivative with extensions support and the same extensions installed), on a mid range android phone, feels way faster than Firefox Mobile.

          I've been using both (Firefox+Kiwi) as my daily drivers:
          Starting Firefox Mobile with extensions means waiting 5~10 seconds before the browser is fully responsive (the more extensions I install the worse it gets), even if the menus are responsive, clicking a bookmark/doing a search/loading a shared link does nothing (used to be way worse, like 30 sec). Kiwi is responsive in less than a second.

          The first page load is often served without extensions filtering (depending of the site, things like ads or privacy popups get through). Reloading fixes it.

          Switching image heavy tabs (ie Imgur) means 2~3 seconds of looking a blank screen before Firefox shows the content again or losses it and forces a page reload (even with 3gb of ram). Kiwi again is responsive just after doing a tap (but the page sometimes blinks once).
          Randomly Firefox looses long presses (ie trying to open a link on a new tab), I first thought it was my phone but tried on several devices and the same thing happens. Zooming sometimes helps though.

          Maybe stuff like this doesn't happen on a high end Android smartphone.

          • (Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:23PM

            by zion-fueled (8646) on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:23PM (#929807)

            I use a phone for 2014 and this doesn't happen. I did disable a bunch of firefox "services" like accounts and wifi scanning, however. A chrome based alternative is definitely worth a look as long as it isn't full of spyware.

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by epitaxial on Sunday December 08 2019, @09:11PM

          by epitaxial (3165) on Sunday December 08 2019, @09:11PM (#929821)

          Sure, disable images and javascript too and watch it fly!

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:05PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:05PM (#929533)

        Thunderbird going ESR is a feature.

        I don't want major updates to grep or ls, either.

        • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:21PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:21PM (#929538)

          Then you won't be happy to hear that Red Hat is planning to replace grep with new search functionality in systemd... Poettering's working on an improved regex syntax now.

          • (Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:00AM

            by coolgopher (1157) on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:00AM (#929579)

            I wish I could be certain you were joking.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:16AM (1 child)

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:16AM (#929655) Journal

        Even if they make the whole browser more chromeish their marketshare is still going downhill.

        “Even if”? What about “because”? If I wanted Chrome, I know where to get it. And so do all those people who want Chrome.

        I don't want Chrome. That's why I switched to Waterfox. Mainly because of the extensions. I don't want to live without All-in-One sidebar. I don't want to live without Tree Style Tabs (yes, back then I tried the suggested replacement; it sucked). And I don't want to live without the Session Manager extension. And in particular, I don't want to live without Classic Theme restorer, fixing earlier unasked-for Firefox UI changes.

        That's not a complete list of extensions I've got installed, but it's those which I would miss most.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Kunasou on Sunday December 08 2019, @09:49AM

          by Kunasou (4148) on Sunday December 08 2019, @09:49AM (#929663)

          Mozilla maybe thought that switching to a Chromeish UI with limited customization will magically lure their already gone user base back to Firefox. Or that's the way it looks from outside.
          Reality, however, is quite different. Their actions have pushed their remaining user base to try forks like Waterfox/Pale Moon, doing userChrome.css hacks which need to get updated every single release, trying browsers like Vivaldi, Brave or just giving up and switching to Chrome. Some power users (like you?) need the old extensions and they can't use them anymore if they don't use a fork.
          I first went the Pale Moon + Waterfox forks way before I found out I could live without the old extensions, then switched to a heavily modified userChrome.css Firefox before realizing I could do the same with Vivaldi.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:13PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:13PM (#929835)

        Stopped innovating? When did they start? Remember the old joke that "labs.Mozilla.org" simply redirected you to "opera.com" during the Presto days?

        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 09 2019, @01:06AM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 09 2019, @01:06AM (#929878) Journal

          Stopped innovating? When did they start?

          Before they started. You're welcome. (grin)

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 1) by rumata on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:54PM

        by rumata (2034) on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:54PM (#929844)

        They've also neglected their other main product - Thunderbird - switching the whole project to the ESR branch and receiving mostly security updates.

        Exactly as it should be in a mature project. So thank bog for that "neglect".

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @10:07AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @10:07AM (#930507)

        The next, v3, version of WebExtensions will prevent adblockers from working.
        Won't that be fun for Mozilla's market share.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by corey on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:48PM (3 children)

      by corey (2202) on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:48PM (#929550)

      I couldn't believe that figure either! Half a billion dollars, what do they do with it all?? What does Mozilla do? How many people do they employ? Sheesh.

      We all know them for Firefox but Christ, it doesn't take half a bil to make a web browser!?

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @12:02AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @12:02AM (#929568)

        Six and seven figure salaries for their executives with paltry year over year operating costs and below average to above average programmer salaries mostly going to friends or kissups instead of the competent contributors who aren't on the salary but make most of the actual bugfixes while they crap all over it with new half baked features.

        Serious Mozilla.org and Mozilla.corp have both been fuckups since their divestiture from Netscape/AOL back in the late 90s-early 2000s.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by toddestan on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:08AM (1 child)

        by toddestan (4982) on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:08AM (#929580)

        You would think with nearly half a billion dollars, that they could rewrite the browser from the scratch every year if they wanted to.

        On the other hand, Microsoft has a lot more resources than Mozilla and even they've given up on making their own browser anything but a reskinned Chromium. I guess making a modern web browser is harder than you would think.

        • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:10AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:10AM (#929629)

          Or oversized, inefficient, and irrationally bloated multinational corporations are less competent than you think.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:44AM (3 children)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:44AM (#929588) Journal
      Trans bathrooms? There's men's, women's, unisex, and handicapped. What colour is the sky on your planet?
      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:26AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:26AM (#929607)

        I believe you mean men's, women's, unisex and differently-abled, you insensistive clod.

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:09AM (1 child)

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:09AM (#929619) Journal

          Nah, I'm half blind. That makes me handicapped, not differently enabled. The times when my vision went completely, I relied on my hearing, my sense of touch, or my dog. None of those are abilities that are different from anyone else.

          Differently enabled makes it sound like there's a special ability, a superpower, or something like that. Handicapped means a lack of what would be a normal ability, something abnormal. to cope with. Same with my fractured t6 and c5 vertebrae. After an hour or two of activity, I'm not "differently enabled ". I'm in pain. To say that pain makes me differently enabled is an insult that diminishes what I do despite handicaps.

          Even crippled would be more accurate - crippling pain does that to you

          Claiming that such terms should be avoided because of stigma just infantilizes people and leads to subsequent replacement terms doing the same thing.

          It's like telling people who have major depression that their brains don't produce enough serotonin (proven to be a lie promoted by pharmaceutical companies with dubious studies that show SSRIs have no better effect than a placebo), and that there is nothing the patients can do except take pills and, as things get worse, more pills. That takes away their self-actualization, their autonomy, and puts them on the path to learned helplessness.

          Crippled and handicapped don't minimize the problem . They don't sugarcoat it. They don't let the public just ignore it.

          --
          SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @08:41AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @08:41AM (#929986)

            Well at least the idiots are starting to move away from "disabled". To me disabled sure sounds a lot less capable than handicapped.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @12:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @12:15AM (#929866)

      But but they can force open Firefox Browser welcome pages anytime they like! Even when users have settings to disable this type of crap behaviour! How cool is it that your web browser shows you random crap and breaks your testing like this?

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:11PM (1 child)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:11PM (#929515) Journal

    "Despite the year-over-year change, Mozilla remains in a strong financial position with cash reserves to support continued innovation, partnerships and diversification of the Firefox product lines,"

    Maybe it's time to consider concentrating on the browser?

    --
    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:31PM (#929522)

      There is no hope for them. Take a look at the latest change in 71.0 that made about:config ugly and unusable. There were bug reports for it but the developers deemed essential features, such as sorting and showing only modified values, as not important "from a product perspective" (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1502867 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1500546). [mozilla.org]
      The recent history of Firefox has been filled with stupid decisions (Pocket integration and idiotic "experiments" pushed on normal users to name a few), cutting features and change for the sake of change with no regard for usability.
      Thunderbird is no different, the latest MINOR version changed the tray icon on Windows to one with severe rendering issues seemingly out of nowhere. I wonder if that change was good "from a product perspective".

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:37PM (#929526)

    Mozilla should do what they should do. They should organize development of software.
    Not witch-hunts because someone said something 30 years ago.
    Not giving build-critical hardware to whoever wants it.
    Not breaking things that work. Experimenting? OK, but they should never put broken things into production and remove working things with a thought "that will be fixed". Any experience in software development, 1 nuclear accident and 2 plane crashes shown that these things are never fixed, but forgotten.
    Not being used by shady companies to get users' data.
    And certainly not participating in extremist political activities, as this makes more enemies than friends. ANY side.
    Is this so difficult?

  • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:43AM (#929624)

    Financing witch-hunts & fishing expeditions is expensive, & of course, addictive.

    How to steal an American city - Montes v. City of Yakima: https://www.aclu-wa.org/cases/montes-v-city-yakima-0 [aclu-wa.org]

    How to steal a state budget: McCleary, et al. v. State of Washington - Supreme Court Case Number 84362-7: https://www.courts.wa.gov/appellate_trial_courts/supremecourt/?fa=supremecourt.mccleary_education [wa.gov]

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:46AM (#929634)

    They need to change their hiring practices to focus less on software engineers and more on African Women’s Study majors. This diversity will propel them past Chromiums engineers.

  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by yuhong on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:32AM (2 children)

    by yuhong (6517) on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:32AM (#929650) Journal

    I think I actually mention Mozilla in my essay/overview on Google.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:28AM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:28AM (#929657) Journal

      So you mean, if you mention someone in your essays/overviews, their revenue goes down?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 1) by yuhong on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:00AM

        by yuhong (6517) on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:00AM (#929665) Journal

        Talking about the history here, for example when Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004.

  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:21PM

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:21PM (#929710) Journal

    Like, if you want free money from the public, maybe you should pursue the public interest.

    And not, for instance, invalidate all of their security add-ons by surprise on a saturday and then tell everyone to just chill out in a pinned top comment meant to look like it was from the public when it was not.

    And not, for instance, have a vast hive of unnecessary yet identifying sub-programs which need to individually deactivated in a 20 step boolean-variable-altering process which should just be a one step process.

    I am going to declare that browser-making is inherently Public Interest Technology, and any attempt to have a government or corporate browser will never be in the public's best interest.

    As such Mozilla, like wikipedia, who are trying to make The Planetary Browser and The Planetary Encyclopedia, are worth studying for what works and does not work.

    And also why their corporate and government partnerships are leading them down paths where they lose public trust, duh.

    Conside stadiums, they could be 'chicago stadium' but they are 'verizon stadium', and maybe this is ok for stadiums. I don't think so, because that ruins a ton of the Public Interest functions of the stadium, but we kind of get by. This won't work for the browser, the verizon browser will always be a spy browser, and it ruins the internet.

    You end up with a thousand people who want to do something, but they don't want to have anything to do with verizon, or they want to protest verizon itself, so they don't use their stadium, they don't look up that search term even though the answer is right there. Or they do and verizon takes what they do and manipulates it to their advantage, until in the very long term everything is verizon, every building, every representative, every robot. We are halfway down this path and sadly I it is snowballing, as anyone could predict, as I predicted if 'nobody did anything about it' in 2003.

    There are things that literally retard, degenerate, degrade the entire human experience and our admittedly feeble attempts at progress, and the elimination of the public space is such a thing, and Mozilla so far has been straddling that fence and surprise, they complain about the results.

    And a complaint is nothing but an RFC, so here is mine. I hope they listen.

    thesesystemsarefailing.net

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