Mozilla made 530M in 2016 - they're a company. Firefox is is a strategical business decision. Their interest in the web is the exact same interest as Google's in the web. $$$.
It gets a fixed amount of money from Google for using them as the default search engine. But what I meant was Firefox has no means to actual generate an income in its own right. Mozilla have tried. The reactions have not been good.
The money from Google is practically a donation at this point. It's not exactly an altruistic one but it's not exactly a pure business transaction either given Firefox's current market share.
530M out of 600M of their revenue is from royalties, so from a certain perspective Mozilla's primary business is actually serving Google to FF users :/
They spend 111M out of 340M on managerial overhead, or about a third. This is on the higher side, but not too much out of line with the general industry (not saying that it's a good thing, but that's how the world works).
I have to wonder though, how much of that money is actually spent on Firefox? 530M in royalties, how much is that per FF user?
"One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue[0]."
Remember that there are things we don't have any control over in life. You have no control over the success or failure of Firefox because its financial means of survival are controlled by people who are not you (unless you feel like signing up for a VPN).
This is totally incorrect. The majority of Mozilla's current funding comes from a deal with Google to make them the default search engine in Firefox. Google pays for this because search traffic is valuable.
Stupid question, but doesn't Mozilla make around $500MM revenue a year, and have a little over 1000 employees.
That seems like it should be profitable.
It's in their absolute best interest to market Firefox as much as possible.
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