TOR and MOSS are both extremely deserving recipients, but I'd say Mozilla is borderline unethical with their spending.
Of the millions (yes millions) of dollars they've received, little seems to have gone toward Firefox development.
Mozilla received over $121 million in 2010 from corporate sponsors. This is the same Mozilla that placed ADS in their new tab views. Really, they placed Paid Ads on the new tab screen. What were those for again?
I do understand that Mozilla's mission is to improve the web. Donating to these causes certainly helps with that. But I'm still troubled that they put ads (with aggregate user tracking) into their core product.
It's funny how Mozilla is held to such high and dare I say impossible standards, whereas all other popular corporations are not. Apparently developing an open source browser that made history and giving it away for free is not enough.
It's as if developers, hardware and location costs a lot of money and Mozilla is looking for ways to find a reliable revenue stream, because you really can't survive for long on donations at their scale.
Out of curiosity, have you ever donated money to Mozilla and if so how much?
Yes, I saw those ads. Nothing terrible and they were not sending my browsing history to some server or whatever. I don't get why you're so upset about it. Like, you're so upset that you created a new account to say it. Now that says something.
No, we've reached a point where the browser developer placing ads is called unethical. It's a very, very strong signal that 1) you don't own this piece of your computer 2) our interests do not align with yours.
And that is a scary proposition for auto-updated remote software. At least with websites theres the illusion of separation.
It was very, very, easy to turn the ads off -- there was an explicit option for it. Given that you didn't have to go out of your way to do that, (1) is false.
Ads evolve and their fitness function is the effect they have on people. An inconspicuous ad is an ineffective ad (unless you count subliminal advertising which is both ineffective and illegal)
Developing high-quality software, which runs on as many devices and is compatible with as much content as Firefox is is a hell of a lot of work. And Mozilla isn't just working on Firefox; there's Thunderbird, though that's in the process of being spun off, Firefox OS (also in the process of pivoting), Mozilla Research (Rust, Servo, Emscripten, asm.js, and more). There are continuous integration systems to test all of this against dozens of combinations of platforms and versions, and huge numbers of tests on each (https://treeherder.mozilla.org/, http://buildbot.rust-lang.org/waterfall, http://build.servo.org/console), all of which needs to be maintained and triaged. There's standards work, to negotiate new standards in standards bodies with users, other browser vendors, and the like. There's advocacy work, of times when you find bugs that are simply due to broken websites that happen to be relying on other browser's bugs, to reach out to developers and try to get them to change in a more compatible or standards compliant manner.
$385,000 is, what, the yearly salary, benefits, and overhead of maybe two full time engineers in SFO? Complaining about $385,000 given to deserving projects, given the amount of investment and energy Mozilla is actually putting into Firefox and other substantial, valuable projects, is a bit of a stretch.
Are there really around 600 people all working on Firefox? If so, why in bloody hell has it taken them so long to make it multi-process? There wasn't even a 64 bit [Windows] version until relatively recently... what the fuck are they doing?
Building a modern browser takes a large team. For example, there is a team on each of the following:
* Layout (HTML, CSS)
* JavaScript
* Graphics: HTML, 2D canvas, 3D WebGL
* Platform integration (windows, os x, gtk, etc.)
* Audio
* New web APIs
* Security
* QA
* Release engineering
* Testing
* Optimization / low-level tooling
* And others I can't think of right now.
All major browsers have teams of hundreds of people or more. The other browsers than Firefox probably have larger ones, in fact, since their budgets are much larger (for example, just Chrome's ad budget was larger than Firefox's entire budget for everything).
As for why multi-process took a while, it was working several years ago already and shipped in mobile firefox, but the hard part for desktop specifically was addons. That took several years, since it's both a technical issue and an ecosystem issue.
e10s (multiprocess) is currently rolling out. It's probably the biggest single architectural change in the browser's history and requires coordination with huge numbers of extension authors. Lots of people have put a lot of work into this project; it's not like you can just flick a magic multiprocess switch on a giant application like Firefox.
I really wish they would have made parallel releases of GTK2 and GTK3 versions for Linux. I am basically stuck on ESR as getting GTK3 going is not an option, and ESR is unlikely to see e10s.
Note that this is with over 13 million lines of code, that in the long past used to be the Netscape browser. I can't imagine adding multiprocess support to such a codebase being very easy, even with significant modernisation of the code.
There's over 1000 employees working at Mozilla Corp. Bear in mind that, beyond the basic backoffice services of running a company, they have the following on their plate:
Do you have a source on that?
To my knowledge, the ads were specifically designed with all clients downloading all possible ad-tiles and then locally deciding what to show, so that no user tracking was possible, from neither Mozilla, nor the 3rd-party advertisers.
Feature with hundreds of requests gets shunned away. And things that people heavily opposes gets in just to be like chrome.
All the last features on firefox were corporate driven. Bookmark system by pocket. Video chat by Telefonica. Sync goals was probably to make their ad share revenue grow as now you are a logged in user. etc etc etc
Their most well paid dev is a javascript advocate!
Chrome gives you much less control of the web, but everyone uses not because it is fast, but because firefox is getting behind on everything. While the owners arguee about UI changes instead of doing what was successful in the past: put the patch someone already provided as an option and release!
the only interesting thing coming out mozilla nowadays that can change the world is fennec. the mobile version. But last builds on android cannot be completed without google proprietary apis anymore. and usability is crap now that they are trying to "fix" image viewing, which mind you, wasn't broken, it was just different than chrome.
> the only interesting thing coming out mozilla nowadays that can change the world is fennec.
A couple other interesting things they're working on: Servo[0] is a browser engine written from the ground up to take better advantage of multi-core computers. Rust[1] is a programming language that was originally created to help Servo achieve its goal of building a fast, concurrent, but secure browser, and has grown into a very interesting project in its own right.
> Sync goals was probably to make their ad share revenue grow as now you are a logged in user.
No, it was in response to user feedback. The portion of the userbase that wanted it to just work like a traditional account system was greater than the portion that wanted to mess around with syncing codes. I don't know where you got the idea that this change had anything to do with ads.
> Really, they placed Paid Ads on the new tab screen
You're also forgetting when they changed default search providers to Yahoo! for big money (even though practically nobody wants Yahoo! as a search engine anymore).
If it was really some noble cause to respect user's privacy, or to make a statement about such, they would have chosen DuckDuckGo or similar. Not Yahoo!...
Think of it whatever you want - I for example would have also preferred DuckDuckGo as the default - but presumably, Mozilla can utilize money to do good. Therefore, it's perfectly possible that they figured they could do more good with the money from the Yahoo!-deal than they would have done by instead making DuckDuckGo the default.
Of the millions (yes millions) of dollars they've received, little seems to have gone toward Firefox development.
Mozilla received over $121 million in 2010 from corporate sponsors. This is the same Mozilla that placed ADS in their new tab views. Really, they placed Paid Ads on the new tab screen. What were those for again?
I do understand that Mozilla's mission is to improve the web. Donating to these causes certainly helps with that. But I'm still troubled that they put ads (with aggregate user tracking) into their core product.