Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox’s revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser’s default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla’s ability to keep things “business as usual.”
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company’s actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search “partners completely,” which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google’s money suddenly dried up.
It’s strange how the Internet has been flooded by this news. Like leave Google alone or Firefox gets it. Very strategic use of the media might I say.
Wtf, no? It’s saying “Hey, it’s great that you’re angry about Google search being a monopoly, but you need to be aware and ready that this ruling could further cement their browser monopoly.”
This article doesn’t even bother to explain the connection. I don’t get it if I’m honest.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership.
Obviously. Why is that threatened by this antitrust ruling ?
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices
So Mozilla will find other forms of funding. That’s how this works.
Almost hoping this somehow causes browser support to fracture again.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
Also because I’m tired of google dictating the www by being a monopoly. It’s 2024 and jpegxl is being treated as ransomware as if enabling a god damn image format is too hard for web browsers. HTTP3/QUIC was 100% google’s invention that they just threw onto the web because no one else is developing this standard anymore. Manifest v3 is an explicit attempt to limit user control over web content. They even cornered the market along with Microsoft using gmail.
If this hurts Firefox more than it hurts Chrome, that’s probably not a good thing for the health of the Internet. Google running the Internet unchecked would be bad for everyone.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
That can’t be helped. Hard to explain well without knowing how much CS you’re familiar with, but basically in order to guarantee security/user safety you have to sandbox each tab (basically running an entirely separate container program for each tab which constantly checks for illegal memory access to prevent it from being exploited), all separately running their own interpreters for javascript/typescript, HTML, CSS, all of which are very resource intensive (mainly javascript/typescript). There’s not really any getting around this, no matter how well you design your browser.
Now, theoretically, with the growing popularity/advances in WebAssembly, and increase in usage of frameworks/graphics APIs like WebGPU, you could completely get rid of that sandboxing and completely get rid of the extremely slow javascript and html/css, in favor of completely using safe, compiled Rust programs. There’s active research using versions of WASM which only accept completely safe code (mainly safe Rust code) so using memory bugs generated from user error to access data in different tabs becomes impossible (aside from potential unaddressed bugs in Rust itself obviously) and you don’t need to sandbox each tab – the program practically sandboxes itself. Then you could potentially have browsers with thousands of tabs perform perfectly fine, assuming each of the websites is programmed competently.
But that’s not going to happen, because billions of users rely on HTML/CSS and JS, and it’s not pretty to transition away from. Getting rid of it would be like getting rid of pointy shoes, or getting rid of US Customary Units in the US, it’s just not happening no matter how much benefit it would bring to users. It’s not so much of a browser company issue as it is everyone ever would complain and potentially trillions of dollars of damage would be done. Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
This is kind of true, but at the same time, I’ve also seen some pretty talented front-end devs fwiw.
I guess they read the room and this is why they started delving into the ad business
On the other hand, might also be good for Firefox to not be 86% funded by the maker of its top rival (Chrome).
Right? Great knowing there wouldn’t be an adblock killswitch waiting for us all like the sword of damocles
Fuck.
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The problem is would DDG pay them $500 million to be the default. That’s doubtful.
The problem isn’t the search engine - it’s the money.
Firefox can do without Google being the default fine. What they can’t do without is all the money that Google pays them to make Google be the default.
good. Maybe firefox will die like it should have long ago
I hope some governments and EU see the need of a foss browser engine alternative from a non-profit and stuff some Money there
Don’t worry, we have a possible replacement for Mozilla, meet Ladybird
So who’s going to fund that who can’t fund Mozilla Foundation?
At least with this project when you donate it goes to direct development.
Zuckerberg : Heyyy…
Do you mean the other software projects or the other non-software projects?
If the former, there is the Open Technology Fund (OTF), but it is affiliated with USAGM which is part of the government.
This project looks very cool, I hope it comes to be
2026 though…
That’s a pretty good date. Browsers are monstrous software projects. I just wish it was written in a memory safer language. Oh well.
Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots
Is this llamafile?
The thing about LLMs is that no one knows how to write the ultra low level optimizations/runtimes, so they port others (llamafile largely borrows from llama.cpp AFAIK, albeit with some major contributions from their own devs).
Performance is insanely critical because they’re so darn hard to run, and new models/features come out weekly which no sane dev can keep up with without massive critical mass (like HF Transformers, mainly, with llama.cpp barely keeping up with some major jank).
So… I’m not sure what Mozilla is thinking here. They don’t have many of those kind of devs, they don’t have a GPU farm, they’re not even contributing to promising webassembly projects like mlc-llm. They’re just one of a bazillion companies that was ordered to get into AI with no real purpose or advantage. And while Gemma 2B may be the “first” model that’s kinda OK on average PCs, we’re still a long way away from easy mass local deployment.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I’m a local LLM tinkerer, and I’ve never touched or even looked at anything from Mozilla. The community would have if anything of theirs was super useful.
From what I’ve heard the general idea is to run AI search on your browsing history, which is a very useful feature. I’m not deep into AI tech at all but to me it looks like that would involve local finetuning, ingesting all that history during inference sounds like a bad idea. It also wouldn’t be necessary to generate stuff, only answer “Can you find that article about how nature makes blue feathers” and it’s going to spit out previously-read links that match that kind of thing. Also, tl;dr-bot it.
Oh and there’s already AI, as in ML, in firefox, in the form of machine translation. Language detection seems to be built-in, translating requires downloading a model per language pair, 16M parameters. Trained on workstations with 8GPUs. Which is all to say: You don’t need gigantic GPU farms if you aren’t training gazillion parameter models on the whole internet.
I would pay money to keep Firefox foss for other people who can’t afford to do so.
This isn’t a new threat. This was always a threat.
The things that give google money are the reasons why we don’t want to use google. The things that firefox does to get money are basically just giving google the thing that makes them money.
Everybody forgets that if chrome and chromium breaks away from Google because of this ruling, it’s going to have the same issues as Firefox, if not worse because it’s an arguably worse product. The ruling has been pronounced, but what will happen because of it is yet to be defined.
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I feel like the real problem is Google paying Apple, since they’re both major players, not Google paying Mozilla. Firefox is not a major player at all (unluckily…)
I believe I remember reading that Apple gets a share of the money from google searches by their users, too. That’s an absurd amount of incentive to sit on your ass and never try anything different.
I’ll try to add a source here, later.
Edit: it is now later:
An expert witness for Google let slip that the company shares 36 percent of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple.
Why would Chrome/chromium break away? Isn’t this just about the search engine side of things? There’s no need to dump Chrome if all they need to do is drop themselves as the default search engine.
quite a good chunk of that goes to their ceo anyway.
I am livid over her absolutely disgraceful management over Moz. When electron was building a de facto monopoly of Chromium on the desktop she made no moves to produces equivalent tooling. While Node grew into a behemoth she totally ignored it. The only thing that has come out of Moz in the last decade that mattered was Rust, and she’s already fired the Rust team. She is poison and serves only to suck up a salary that could fund development.
Mozilla needs its wake up call and to start being the underdog that makes something worth doing. With Manifest V3 and the anti-trust case on the horizon they have a fork in the road that will define what becomes of them. Hopefully she can make one good decision and it’ll be the right one.
thats ceos for ya.
i doubt they will escape from going through some bad times.
