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242

Mozilla: DOJ's Plan for Chrome Risks Hurting Smaller Browsers (uk.pcmag.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Justice Department's proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.

In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering "something of value" to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.

The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.

"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”

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[–] [email protected] 224 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

May I be frank? I suspect that, in the long run, Mozilla not getting this money will actually benefit Firefox. Sure, so exec will get pissed as they won't get 5.6 million dollars a year, and Firefox won't get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that'll be ditched some time later; but I think that they'll focus better on the browser this way. Specially because whoever is paying the dinner is the one picking the dish, and with a higher proportion of their effective income coming from donations, what users want will stop being so neglected.

Just my two cents.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Firefox won’t get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that’ll be ditched some time later

Nah, the features nobody asked for will just be limited to ones that will provide a revenue stream.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

However once they lose the googlebux, a meaningful part of the revenue stream will be donations. And features implemented because of donators asking for them are, typically, things that we users desire.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

Donations are not sustainable. Many open-source projects tried them, and the only thing they can cover are server costs or conferences, developers are still working for free on their own time.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 3 weeks ago

I totally agree.

Frankly, Mozilla should be embarrassed to have released this statement.

It's basically 'Please don't harm our competitor for corruptly bribing rivals! We like those bribes very much!'

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Yeah but in the short term the company will literally go out of business

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets -- roughly half a billion dollars of which was in "cash and cash equivalents" -- in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago

Y'know, you're right & that's wild. I guess I should have known, but didn't assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not Mozilla. The software is open source and will persist.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The way Mozilla can advocate for web standards will be sorely missed.

[–] Pika 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

To my knowledge they don't though, Chrome has had the overall market share for years. Most of the time the mozilla project is tailing behind Chrome, because anything that they add to Chrome if the other browsers didn't follow suit they were left in the dust. I haven't seen the Mozilla project as a Trailblazer in years

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Perhaps.

Worst hypothesis the company gets completely bankrupt, but someone takes up the torch.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

The thing is it's never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it's bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn't even close, despite relying on Apple's webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

If Google is the only thing holding up the non-Apple web browsers, maybe then this will lead to scaling down the insane scope of the web standards so it becomes reasonable to implement and maintain a browser for non-megacorps.

Wishful thinking, but hey.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Bigger scope than a kernel? That’s a bold statement.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago

Not sure it's that bold even. Chrome has approx. 10% more lines of code than Linux, and even for Linux 60% is just drivers.

Flawed metric, sure, but it at least shows that they're probably similar in complexity.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that's a different layer that the kernel historically didn't worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there's shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management... A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

WTF‽

"The head of Mozilla earned roughly $5.6 Million during 2021."

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Excuse me, where do I fill out the form to have the first $30,696 of my salary processed as non taxable benefit? Please and thank you

[–] [email protected] 139 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

what Mozilla is really afraid of is losing the over inflated bonus the execs get paid.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Mozilla needs to ditch their CEO and maybe even their board. They’ve lost their way all because the leadership is greedy

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

That’s mistaking a structural problem for a personal one. Zeynep Tufekci has a great argument about why that wouldn’t work:

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

That's unfortunate, but it still needs to happen. Mozilla will adapt.

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[–] Dariusmiles2123 62 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I understand why Mozilla would want to keep the money coming from Google, but it might also be good for them to be less dependent from Google.

Nothing is preventing them from cutting deals with other search engines if they want to keep doing that.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I feel like Mozilla is a big money laundering scheme at this point. It only exist so chrome isn't a monopoly, and I pretty sure the CEO and several other workers are getting paid an obscene amount to do nothing all day while only 20% of the money actually goes toward working on the browser.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Just out of curiosity, where does the 20% estimate come from?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's half exaggerated and half true.

Last year, there was some breakdown of Mozilla earnings circulating on the web and I vaguely remember them gaining like 600 or 800 millions (mostly from Google) while only spending something around 200 millions for software dev, and this was in 2022 (their revenue from Google increases each year for some reason). That's 33% to 25%, so it's either 66% or 75% of Mozilla revenue used for god knows what.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

Thank you for that breakdown. I'm a big fan of Firefox, but have been aware of there being issues with Mozilla for some time now (albeit from the periphery). I figured when these cases came against Google, that even though I generally supported the breakup of the monopoly, I knew that a story like this one would eventually land.

If Mozilla is indeed burning money instead of putting the majority of it towards Firefox and, to a lesser extent, Thunderbird, then yeah, they're going to need to reassess their budget and where to allocate their assets as without big moneybags Google forking over the funds, it'd be within their best interests to really invest hard into making their browser better.

Thanks again.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

"Listen, making the entire market dependent on one corporate benefactor just sothey aren't a 100% monopoly and only a 99% one is important"

Jesus Christ Mozilla, do you hear yourself?

[–] ayyy 20 points 3 weeks ago

Remember, Mozilla spends more on executives and their “outreach” programs than they spend on Firefox developers.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 weeks ago

tldr: but muh paycheck!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

There are other search engines. Maybe Firefox can partner with them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm guessing that once Google is prohibited from providing incentives, the bottom will fall out of that particular market and those other search engines will likely pay less, if anything, for the privilege.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Would other search engines be able to “pay to be default”? My understanding is if this went through then browsers wouldn’t be able to take money from any search engine to be the default.

[–] RmDebArc_5 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As I understand google is only prohibited from doing so because they are a monopoly and this would be abuse of their position, so smaller engines should be unaffected. For example, if I recall correctly, bing pays Vivaldi to be the default.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's certainly better than the status quo. Sure, Mozilla will hurt at first because they've put their revenue source in the same basket, but it's an opportunity to grow back.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

You've just given a great summary of the history of breaking monopolies, really. History says you are correct. For example, AT&T is still kicking.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago

Oh my fucking god Servo cannot get here soon enough.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, I don't care. Just do it.

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[–] nicomachus 7 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Mozilla will be fine. I'll literally pay them annually if worst comes to worst and I bet others would too.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Not sure I would. Though I probably would for some high quality fork. At this point I don't have much faith in Mozilla.

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[–] interurbain1er 7 points 3 weeks ago

Give them money so they can pay their CEO 83 times my salary ? Fuck no, never.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Before or after they fire 90% of their staff?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Maybe force them to give it to Mozilla since they are the primary ones that are hurting from googlopoly?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

How will Mozilla fund development? Firefox only survives because Google pays them.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago

I guess they could start saving money by not paying their CEO millions/year.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

I guess google would pay for search on chrome too, which is extra funny.

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