Thunderbird is doing pretty good. They actually have a surplus in donations they have to get rid of. Yet Mozilla abandoned it and refuses still to accept donation for Firefox.
Linux kernel is backed by Linux Foundation, Servo web engine is backed by Linux Foundation Europe and both are making a great progress. Why can't Firefox be funded by companies like Linux is?
I think it absolutely would be great if a Wikipedia-like model were viable, but Wikipedia is like the extreme high watermark for that, and they get five billion visits a month, which I think is an order of magnitude higher than what Firefox has access to. Ramping up to Wikipedia scale levels of donations would be a serious project and a significant gamble.
Wikipedia has also been around as long as the internet itself and its current fundraising drives are the culmination of decades of momentum and cultivating a perception of the compact that exists between them and their users.
Also, I believe that even in the best of times Wikipedia is raising about half as much as it costs to run Firefox.
There's probably important caveats that relate to comparing software development projects with resources and content, because I think the most successful donation-driven examples are Wikipedia, NPR, and The Guardian. And what they seem to have in common is generating content to be consumed.
In terms of software development projects, to me the most natural analogy is something like VLC, which does indeed rely on donations and is orders of magnitudes smaller. Or maybe the Tor project which does rely on donations, but I think they're at the order of like 10 million or so, which is certainly promising, but not a like for like substitution for the revenue they get from Google.
Similar to Mozilla & Firefox, there isn't an exact breakdown for Wikimedia expenditures to know the costs associated with Wikipedia. For Firefox, it's often stated its costs are ~200m but those are all expenses Mozilla categorizes under software development. For Wikimedia, within their operation expenses, ~3m were in hosting and ~84m in salaries (related to programs). The salaries are stated to be for multiple initiatives, among which platform development is mentioned*.
*Although arguably the most important part of Wikipedia, and their other collaborative projects, are the volunteers maintaining and contributing to it, rather the developers.
Note that $15 million is nowhere near enough to pay the number of employees who work on Firefox. As a for-profit (unlike the foundation), Mozilla the corporation has to pay folks market rates, and if you're paying an employee in the US, you're paying that same amount on top as taxes, insurance, benefits, etc. etc. so $15 million gets you a few dozen people at most. Mozilla employs a few hundred. So you'll have to add a zero to that number before it's in the same ballpark (e.g. wikipedia would be a good example).
Is the AI coming at a prohibitive cost? I'm not sure I understand what is going to come of those bets, and I'm not a fan of AI everything so I hope it's only used in measured ways that are beneficial, but I certainly would rather them continue innovating.
I don't think they did a whole lot with blockchain beyond some very preliminary dabbling in decentralized web stuff which if it could have gained traction I absolutely would have supported but it certainly doesn't seem like it was a significant drag on developer resources or finances so far as I could tell.
And wouldn't that have to be the argument for any of this to matter?
So you made this claim about the blockchain and I did a little bit of Googling to learn more. And so far as I can tell they barely did anything beyond some like papers and very preliminary demo implementations of stuff like IPFS and dabbling with Web3.
Those were very preliminary ventures and not anything that commanded substantial developer resources, so I don't know what you're talking about. And look. I obviously disagree with people who claim that side bets compromised Mozilla, but the arguments sort into different tiers with some being understandable (issues with adtech, CEO pay), some in the middle (the non profit Mozilla Foundation is bloated!), some that are one step up from utter nonsense because they're at least expressed in coherent sentences but have little to no supporting evidence or theory of cause and effect (e.g. "Mozilla lost all its market share due to their side bets being prohibitively expensive").
But we're at a point where apparently these arguments have been seen and repeated so many times that there's a new class of commenters who have been making the lowest effort versions of these arguments that I've yet seen, and are the least interested in anything like evidence or logic or responsiveness to questions or anything that I would associate with coherent thought. Which is where I would put the blockchain argument.
> Those were very preliminary ventures and not anything that commanded substantial developer resources, so I don't know what you're talking about.
Are you sure they intended them to be preliminary? Maybe they backed off when they saw their users' opinion about Web 3-4-5 or whatever number the blockchain "evangelists" picked out.
In 3-5 years if Firefox will still be around are you going to tell me their "AI" initiative was just preliminary too?
What I'm talking about is trust again. Easily lost, hard to gain back. As I said elsewhere, I want a guarantee that my money is only spent on the actual browser before I donate.
> everything I said about the relative quality of different Mozilla arguments
You see "they're trying this promising new technology" i see "they're running around like a headless chicken, trampling the poor browser's body with their boots in the process".
I'm not going to look for mitigating circumstances until I see a pattern of news that the Mozilla org is at least admitting to working on the browser and not whatever is evangelized this week.
All they need is to accept donations that go strictly to the browser and not to the latest blockchain/AI hysteria.