Mozilla bins 'Tiles' ads plan in Firefox The Mozilla Foundation's decided not to pursue advertising sales in its Firefox browser after all. Mozilla floated the idea of ads in Firefox back in early 2014, when it imagined “sponsored Tiles” would appear when you open a new tab in the browser. By May of the same year, the organisation admitted that idea had gone down …
In 2010, Mozilla's income was $123 million and in 2012 it was $163.5 million. (cf. Wikipedia). Then a billion dollars over three years (2012-2014) from Google for making Google the default search engine. That's a lot of money. I'm not sure how much they're getting from Yahoo but be sure that it's not peanuts.
But you can continue to think that they're living a hand-to-mouth existence, no matter how far from reality such quaint and naive notions actually are.
"Mozilla will continue to explore ways to bring a better balance to the advertising ecosystem for everyone’s benefit, and to build successful products that respect user privacy and deliver experiences based upon transparency, choice and control."
And not pissing people off would be pretty much near the top of the list too.
Once the Mozilla Foundation was trying to create a modern version of the Netscape suite. Then a side project consisting of just the browser took off in popularity, became the main focus, and the suite was sidelined. Now:
The full suite, Current version - SeaMonkey 2.39 - 38 MB
Just the browser, Current version - Firefox 42.0 - 48.6 MB
Just... WTF are they doing with Firefox?
That's how big modern browsers are.
Because of course they're not just browsers, but app platforms with 2D/webGL/vector graphics, video, sockets, database, JavaScript worker threads, real-time audio channel mixing, animation timing framework, flexbox layout, drag/drop/touchscreen, crypto, etc. Web specs are still rapidly evolving, and a relatively recent addition ServiceWorker is amazing because it allows advanced caching for an "offline first experience".
Now you can argue that this is terrible because you just want to view HTML + Images. There are one or two minimalist "browsers" such as Dillo which clock in around 1MB.
But I like the modern stuff. And I like developing on an open platform, because the alternative is Apple or Google's walled gardens.
SeaMonkey can do everything Firefox can do apart from stuff like Pocket and Hello, it uses the same rendering engine.
But Firefox/Gecko is bloating once again after previously going on a diet. In my Dad's case, around version 30 it managed run on an XP machine with 768MB, now on version 42 it brings the same machine to its knees. Chrome out of all things works better than FF.
Yeah, I know, Mint. It's a step too far for him though.
I've just had a quick look at Mozilla's last financial report. We all know they received $323M from the purple palace (et al), but how did they spend some of this money? Let's see:
* $200 Million on "Software Development".
* Branding and Marketing: $40Million.
* Administration: $38 Million.
Now I know that good programmers aren't cheap, but $200 Million in one year? And what is that $40Million in marketing being spent on?
My theory: They got so much money from their first Google contract that they just didn't know what to do with it and are just frittering it away on pointless projects. (FirefoxOS)
Isn't there some theory that when a company makes too much profit it will inevitably crash and burn as it gets lazy, arrogant and looses sight of what got it that money in the first place?
"$200 million on development"
I don't know how it works in America, but there must be some sort of fraud going on. No browser in the world costs that much to develop per year. I think it's time to put pressure on Mozilla to fess up to what they're actually doing. If they do spend that on development then the devs either need a serious pay cut or be shown the door. Firefox is bloated, slow and shite.
They need to sort this crap out. Now.
$200M
I tried to do some estimating.
Programmers in the USA seem to get a mean of under $100K; the median in 2013 was $76k (Min seemed to be about 70, high was about 125)
So, $200M/100000 equates to at least 2000 programmers or equivalent jobs in the development team. On costs may eat into that, of course so the team may be only 1800, including administrative staff, bean counters and so on.
I'm not a developer, so I don't know - but a 1500 to 2000 seems a rather big development staff team for developing a browser, especially one that is already up and working.
It's starting to sound like the world's biggest lightbulb joke.
So, $200M/100000 equates to at least 2000 programmers or equivalent jobs in the development team
Not really. Employee costs are, dependent upon country, twice their nominal salary due to contributions to healthcare, pensions, social security, etc. Buildings and capital expenditure will also be not negligible.
I'm not suggesting that Mozilla doesn't have a bloated development budget: things like Firefox OS will certainly have sucked up all kinds of resources. But accounting for these things is not as we sometimes think.
"$200 million on development"
I'm not sure which is more egregious: The Firefox money-pit, or Wikipedia, which collects $20 million per year (if I correctly recall) to run a site which costs $2 million to operate (and I believe that that's pretty accurate).
"I'm not sure which is more egregious: The Firefox money-pit, or Wikipedia, which collects $20 million per year (if I correctly recall) to run a site which costs $2 million to operate (and I believe that that's pretty accurate)."
True, but Wikipedia isn't a bloated mess of a browser.
“Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users.”
A corollary to the quoted statement would be "it will be the right business for us at another time*".
* ... and "another time" translates to "as soon as we can manage it"
The final straw with online advertising for me was when a full blown British Gas video with sound started playing on my mobile browser. I'd always tried to support the websites I frequently visit up until that point by not having an ad-blocker installed. Now I block everything. I don't like doing it but until websites start being sensible about displaying ads that non-intrusive, non-tracking and stop using plugins that are full of security holes (I'm looking at you Flash!), they aren't getting anything out of me.
Look,
In order to take back the Internet, the World has to revert from an "advertising based revenue model" to a "service based" model. That means, you and I are going to have to fork over to Moizilla $10 bucks or so annually to surf on their browser. Not willing to do that? Then realize the implications.
And if Firefox loses half their base by charging $10. I say, good riddance to these folks.
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"I'll pay for software. A reasonable cost. I'll be damned if I'll rent it though."
"Software as a service" and "DLC" - two of the biggest blights of current computing. But then, how could I neglect to mention "in-app purchases" and "any advertising on my computer screen"?
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