Mozilla is now in a state of complete decline: high overhead, declining share of Firefox users, controversial revenue streams, and now, with declining revenues, lower development costs.
Mozilla recently announced that it is laying off 250 employees. This is a quarter of its staff, which means that the dismissal will significantly reduce the amount of work performed. Victims include MDN's documentation department (which is the web standards documentation everyone likes better than w3schools), the Rust compiler, and even shortcuts in the Firefox development department. Like most people, I wish Mozilla was doing well, but these three projects were pretty much everything I think Mozilla makes sense, so the news was a big disappointment.
Mozilla's top management salaries have risen significantly despite the browser's decline.
The stated reason for the cuts was a drop in income. Mozilla's funding is heavily dependent on royalties. In exchange for payment, Mozilla allows big tech companies to choose their default search engine in Firefox - ultimately, tech companies pay for the number of searches that Firefox users make through their engines. Mozilla didn't go into great detail on why these recurring payments dropped, blaming only the coronavirus.
I'm sure the coronavirus has clearly not helped the company, but I suspect that the bigger problem is that Firefox's market share is now a tiny fraction of its previous volume, which means fewer and regular contributions - fewer users, which means fewer searches. hence less money for Mozilla.
The real problem, however, is not lowering royalties. Mozilla has already received more than enough to secure its financial independence. For many years, Mozilla has been making up to half a billion dollars a year (every year!). The real problem is that Mozilla did not use this money to achieve financial independence, but spent it every year, implementing the organizational analogue of paycheck-to-paycheck life.
Despite its somewhat artificial legal structure ("a non-profit company owning a commercial"), Mozilla, like many others, is an NGO (public organization). In this article, I want to apply the traditional criteria applied to other NGOs to Mozilla to show what is wrong with it.
These three criteria are: overhead, ethics, and results.
Overheads
One of the most popular and intuitive ways of evaluating an NGO is to calculate the proportion of funds spent on a work program (or “mission”) and other aspects such as administration and fundraising (fundraising). If you donate money to charity so that people in third world countries do not go hungry, then you hope that most of your money goes to food, and not, for example, on company cars for office management.
Mozilla looks bad in this regard. As much as 30% of all costs go to administration. The Charity Navigator, which measures NGO performance, would give Mozilla a zero out of ten on the corresponding metric . For context: to get 5/10, Mozilla should spend 25% of the cost, and to get 10/10, less than 15%.
Top management did a good job for themselves, too. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker was paid $ 2.4 million in 2018; I personally perceive this amount as an instantly acquired fortune, which will last for several generations. Baker's payout has more than doubled over the past five years.
As far as I could find out, there is no UK-based NGO whose top management earns more than £ 1 million ($ 1.3 million) a year. But the UK has a sizable proportion of large international NGOs, many of which are much larger and more significant than Mozilla.
I know that some people don't likeuse overhead as a criterion, they claim that spending on administration can improve efficiency. I find it hard to argue that Mozilla's overhead does not correlate with any efficiency improvements.
Ethics
Today Mozilla sees itself as less of a custodian of the old Netscape package and more of a "privacy-protecting NGO". One of Mozilla's internal slogans reads: "Beyond the Browser" ("More than a browser").
But no matter how the company perceives itself, its main income comes from helping to redirect traffic to Google due to the fact that this is the default search engine in Firefox. Google makes money from this traffic through a large-scale targeted advertising system that tracks people on the web, very often without their consent. Indeed, one of the reasons this revenue is dropping is that Firefox users are falling — less traffic is being redirected to Google, so Google pays less.
So far, among the philosophers of morality, there has not yet been an agreement on uniform rules of ethics. However, I believe that most people will notice the hypocrisy in Mozilla's relationship with Google. Apart from ethical issues, this connection definitely creates conflicts of interest. One would think that a privacy NGO would have built anti-surveillance measures into their browser from the start. In fact, such features were added relatively recently ( in 2019 ), after Apple ( in 2017 ) and Brave (since its release) paved the way for Mozilla . It certainly seems to me that Mozilla's status as a Google vassal has contributed to Firefox's long lack of anti-surveillance features.
Another ethical issue is Mozilla's big new VPN initiative . From a privacy point of view, this doesn't make much sense. In short: VPNs are not a useful privacy tool for web users. VPN allows you to access the Internet through a proxy so that the user's requests come from a different address than where he actually is. This does not in any way solve the main privacy problem for web users: they are passively tracked and de-anonymized on a large scale by bad people from Google and other companies. Tracking occurs regardless of the IP address.
When I tested Firefox over Mozilla VPN (rebranded Mullvad VPN), I discovered that I could be de-anonymized by browser fingerprinting, a widespread technology that explores various elements of the browser to create “fingerprints” that can then be used to re-identify a user. Firefox doesn't have as many countermeasures against this as some other browsers do ( fix - earlier I wrote that Firefox doesn't have them at all, but I was told that since the beginning of this year it blocks some of the fingerprinting techniques).
Even with Mozilla's "secure and private" VPN, Firefox can be tracked using browser fingerprinting, as demonstrated by the EFF Panopticlick tool . Other browsers use randomized fingerprints as a countermeasure against this kind of tracking.
Another cause for concern is that many of these privacy-minded VPNs have the nasty habit of keeping vast logs of user behavior. Several months ago, several VPNs claiming no logging due to a massive leakinadvertently published terabytes of private user data that they promised not to collect. VPNs have great opportunities for eavesdropping on users, and even if they promise not to, you can only take their word for it.
results
I've already talked about the impressive revenue of Mozilla's management: $ 2.4 million a year. Surely such a huge salary is justified by the equally impressive results that Mozilla has achieved? Alas, in any qualitative and quantitative results, Mozilla is an outsider.
Firefox has become so niche now that there is a danger of creating a cult following: it has only 4% of the market, and ten years ago it had 30%. Mobile browser performance is not impressive: Firefox is almost non-existent on smartphones, with a market share of less than half a percent. This is confusing, because mobile Firefox has a rare feature for a mobile browser: it can install extensions and therefore block ads.
However, despite problems with its core business, Mozilla began to diversify quickly instead of saving. In recent years, Mozilla has created:
- Mobile application for website development
- Federated Identity System
- Major file transfer service
- Password manager
- Framework / standard for the "Internet of Things"
- Email Relay Service
- Brand new operating system for phones
- AI development department (but of course ...)
- Spent $ 25 million buying a startup developing Pocket Reading List Management App
Much of the above is now abandoned.
Unfortunately, Mozilla's annual report does not provide a detailed breakdown of costs by project, so it is impossible to know how much of a program Mozilla spends on Firefox and how much on these other side projects.
But at least we can assume that these side projects are costly. Software development is always costly. Each of the projects listed above (and all others that have never been announced or I am not aware of) require business analysts, designers, user behavior researchers, developers, testers, and other people needed to build a consumer web project.
Of course, the biggest cost is the loss of the opportunity to simply spend this money on something else, or for nothing: it could have simply been invested to create a savings fund. Now Mozilla is in a situation where it appears to lack the money to fully fund Firefox development.
What's next?
Mozilla simply cannot keep going. At the very least, she needs to keep costs down to match her income. Probably, this income is still quite huge: about hundreds of millions a year.
I'm a Firefox user (and obviously one of the few who use it on a mobile device) and I wish Mozilla well. So I hope Mozilla can cut its administrative costs. I also hope that she will increase the cost of Firefox to make it faster and implement the privacy features found in other browsers. And most importantly, I would like the company to start building up the proper financial independence.
But I doubt all of this will happen. Instead, she will likely retain costly leadership. It has already cut costs on Firefox. What the company hopes most is experimenting with new features, such as using its brand to sell VPN services, which, as I said, do not solve a user problem.
Rather than diversifying further into more Mozilla products and services, it may be worth asking for money from your users. For many years, the Guardian newspaper (an organization comparable to Mozilla in the number of employees) was financially on the verge of collapse. The Guardian began asking its readers for money a few years ago , and it looks like it has been much more confident since then.
Receiving money directly also helped align the motivation of the organization and users. This will probably work with Mozilla as well. But the Guardian has a different situation. Its chief executive receives only £ 360,000 a year.
Additionally
Other charities with spending control issues
Another notable technology NGO with huge costs is the Wikimedia
foundation. You can read about her problems in the article Wikipedia has Cancer ("Wikipedia has cancer"); the title is dubious, but overall it's a good study of the incredible cost growth of an organization. Wikimedia has an advantage over Mozilla - the work of all people contributing to the main project is unpaid, which makes the costs seem even more daunting. Wikimedia, like Mozilla, has many third-party projects. She once secretly tried to create a completely new search engine . Kids Company
is a good example of a charity closed due to poor cost control.- British charitable foundation for socially vulnerable children. The failure of the Kids Company demonstrates that the closure can be quite sudden. The main funding was provided by the British government, but it (over time) lost hope and canceled its annual grant, which led to the instant liquidation of the fund. The House of Commons committee has issued a good report on this.
The sources I used
Mozilla's legal structure is that the non-profit organization owns a commercial unit, which makes their reporting to the government ("Form 990") useless to us because it is not consolidated and does not contain any information about most aspects of Mozilla's business. The most useful thing about these documents is that the people running the parent organization must disclose the payments made by the subsidiary (in Part IX, background information on page 10). On Propublica have a full set of documents.
More useful is Mozilla's annual report, which is consolidated. I could not find its index, but you can access it through the State of Mozilla pages- to view reports for previous years, you need to change the year in the URL.
I used statcounter usage data . Data for 2020 is not included because it is not over yet, but for Firefox it will be even worse than 2019.
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