It's comments like this that concern me. It's extrapolating on a worst case hypothetical, and setting it equal to a present day reality of Google's hundred billion dollar advertising empire.

It doesn't mean there's nothing to be concerned about, but I think you need to understand the difference between possible bad thing, and fanning the flames of mob mentality.

Remember how Google wasn’t always evil?

You know who also also wasn't always evil? VLC. And guess what, they're still not evil! Even though they have turned town tens of millions of dollars that would have compromised their software. So, what does that prove? Maybe that measured concern should be combined with an ability to be nuanced on a case by case basis.

But it means we’re probably more susceptible to propaganda that accuses corporations of corporate bullshit, whether the accusation has merit or not.

Exactly. It's a different variation. I think the Mozilla stuff is more a sleepwalking echo chamber than an intentional campaign, but at a certain point the difference doesn't matter.

I still don’t want to see any unsolicited ads and this feels like the initial steps to try to make it more palatable to eventually try to force users to accept ads back into their lives.

Right, there's still a slippery slope issue here. I actually think it was a good thing that Mozilla was coming up with add-on products to create a revenue stream. I would love to, for instance, pay for a 2TB Mozilla Drive over Google Drive. I would rather do that than the ads.

Thank you for breathing a bit of sanity into this thread. Same here. Some commenters were like "oh there's already too many adds" and I was like wait, what? They're not adding more adds to Firefox, are they? The article doesn't suggest that.

The "Mozilla bad" crowd echo chamber has gotten completely out of control in my opinion, and it's an avalanche of low effort comments, dozens of upvotes, and it's kind of a self sustaining echo chamber that exists because it exists.

I think the only real path forward is for a developer to figure out a way to decentralize video hosting

That's what Peertube is all about. It's like the Lemmy version of Youtube. And it seems to have real funding and development mojo.

I would emphatically reject that any progress is being made. I'll be moving on to other conversations.

I was using them interchangeably. I guess one is understood to be kind of a general foundation or overall company, whereas Firefox is just the browser itself

I would say you're basically right. I think Mozilla can try to grab a slice of the pie, the Q is if it's enough, and fast enough, to replace revenue from the search partnership.

Yeah, I don't love Manifest V3 adoption, just for what it implies about Google's ability to push standards it wants. (Is google even pretending it's not purposely targeting ad blockers with V3?) But if you have to, this is the way to go.

Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all.

That's my argument? I don't recall supporting the CEO pay. Pretty sure I said I don't like it. And just to be clear, I am finding it hard to justify that much for a CEO. So that's not turning my argument against me, because that was never my argument.

What it would really look like to, as you say, "turn my argument against me" would be something that speaks to Google's search monopoly, ads monopoly, and hundredfold advantage in revenue, and why, in light of those facts, they would imply that Mozilla should have more market share. Like if I forgot to carry a two somewhere in my math, or why they are actually proof of a synergy that Mozilla is benefiting from that I'm not accounting for. Those would be examples of turning the arg against me, and I'm happy to hear it if there is one.

Non-profit doesn't mean that there's no employees. They're still organizations that have a cash flow, seek to raise funds, and employ people to serve their mission. Most non-profits have paid employees.

I don't see how eating their lunch would happen. Something like 85-90% of Mozilla's income every year is from their Google search partnership. Google does some sort of revenue sharing thing where a portion of the value of search ads clicked through Firefox goes back to Mozilla, but the payment for search partnership itself, well, if that goes away, there's no lunch to eat, metaphorically. There's nothing to replace it with. Maybe Bing takes it's place but I'm not sure that would happen.

I think the elephant in the room here is that Mozilla has 0.2% of the revenue that Google has, but is sustaining market share orders of magnitude higher than that. But unfortunately, at this point there's a growing echo chamber of extremely low effort comments assuming that if you could just run back the clock, and not focus on "distractions" like their VPN or Mozilla.social, or the Mr. Robot Easter egg, that they would have overtaken Chrome in market share.

Like it was this easily achievable thing that just slipped through their fingers, rather than an inevitable consequence of Google's disproportionate finances and monopoly power.

Right and that has existed long before today. And I can't find anything in this article suggesting that the start page, or anywhere else, is going to be reallocated towards new ads which is what it sounds like the commenter above me was suggesting.

They also are rolling out a modified version of Manifest V3 that restores the ad blocker capability that Google was disabling.

Right, I think people forget that Opera used to be funded by a subscription. But they had to move away from it because it just didn't work. I think the golden age of Opera was shortly after they dropped that. And I dearly miss Opera as they were before they switched over to Chromium.

I think the history of early to mid Opera is the perfect example of actually wise and interesting and innovative software choices. They were in very early on things like browser extensions, and they had incredible innovations like Opera Unite, Opera Turbo, and all kinds of incredible customization. But I suppose in some ways they're also a chilling tale of what could happen, because I'm pretty sure they sold to a Chinese company, switched to developing on Chromium, and seem to have abandoned the ethos of innovating. I know that some of the original developers from Opera went on to create Vivaldi but that too is based on Chromium.

It's 1.16%. I don't love it but claiming it's bleeding them to death is, I think, not what we're looking at. I think they just recognize their exposure because any given year 80 to 90% of the revenue is coming from their agreement with Google, and they're screwed if they can't diversify their income a bit more.

I mean I don't love it, but I'm also not sure what the argument is supposed to be about how this ties to browser market share. Mozilla made $593 million from their most recently released financials. The CEO made $6.9 million. My calculator tells me that's 1.16%.

So is the argument that Mozilla that if they set the CEO salary to $0, used it all on more developers, that would spin up a browser experience that's so improved it would lead to more market share? A 1% change in Mozilla's spending will bring them to 50% market share? 40%? 20%?

What's the cause and effect here? Do we even actually know that that's true, that it even has anything whatsoever to do with development choices at all? I get that the CEO is an easy target but I think assuming that is explaining market share ignores things like Google's dominance of search and ads, and how those piles of cash drive initiatives like Android and Chromebooks, which helps propel Chrome to dominant market share. Those are the drivers of market share. I don't even think people have even tried to begin to think through this argument in real terms, it's just a lot of knee-jerk reaction to news stories disconnected from any specific idea of cause and effect.

Did I miss something? I don't think the browser is going to be full of ads?

I'm honestly not sure.