this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Most of your money goes to CEO salary and not towards developing Firefox.
I've donated in November after I switched back to Firefox as my main browser. I read about the search deal dependency and wanted to contribute to what Mozilla called "reclaim the internet". Feel something akin to 'buyer's remorse' when I now read how little goes to development of Firefox/Gecko (the only multi-platform alternative engine for rendering the internet) and how much goes into CEO salaries.
Your donation money does not go towards the salary of the Mozilla Corporation CEO. But yes, it does not go to Firefox development either. The Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, needs to have enough money independent of donations, because the devs' livelihoods depend on that. Well, and the donation money isn't nearly enough to cover those costs anyways.
So, the Mozilla Foundation (which owns the Mozilla Corporation and which you donate to) uses the donation money instead for political activism, for community work (which may lead to more contributors to Firefox) and sometimes they award some of that money to other open-source projects, which are also vital for an open web, but which are not visible enough to collect donations.
CEO salary is paid mostly from default search engine deals. But the same holds true for Firefox development, so you're right that the money doesn't go towards developing Firefox.
What’s weird to me is that Mozilla Foundation can probably sustain Firefox development from it’s investment income alone (e.g. $37.5M in 2023): https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozilla_Foundation_-_Full_Filing_-_Nonprofit_Explorer_-_ProPublica.pdf
It might be possible to build Firefox for less than the IIRC ~$500M that's currently budgeted, but $37.5M seems optimistic.
It's more like $260M, from their financials. Salaries in SF are expensive.
And keep in mind that there's also a big part that's not in SF.
We don’t need to build Firefox though. Keeping up with the web standards and general maintenance does require a lot of work, but the base is there already.
Also, with a $100k salary, $37.5M/yr is 375 developers. If we allow EU devs where 50k€ would be a reasonable salary, that’s 690 developers now.
I understand there’s also admin work and a lot of marketing (which Firefox so desperately needs), and altogether it’s a stretch, but I believe that it is possible to pull it off.
Mozilla today also has that base, but it still has about 1000 employees IIRC. It also pays more than $100k, even for EU devs, and of course also has to pay taxes and what not on top of that. And don't forget the infrastructure, for running builds, distributing the software, running Firefox Sync, etc., which does not come cheap.
750 employees, but the point stands.
50k would be reasonable because the company then pays a big percentage to social security both for pensions and health service. I'm around that number currently, but if I account the amount the company pays to the government, not the money they withhold from be for taxes the money THEY pay to get for my salary, I would be around 75k easily. This is something a lot of people don't understand when comparing US vs EU salaries, then go to the US and get taxed plus made to pay insurance and shit until they end up with less disposable income than me.
Please remove the shitty EU salary interpolation. Thanks.