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.
jfc do you have any idea how fast the web evolves? Firefox already struggles to keep up with changing web standards and operating system features. It took them until December 2019 to implement one particular feature Chrome had since 2010 with a vendor prefix and since early 2016 as a fully-released feature. It took them until 4 weeks ago to implement an OS feature that existed since 2019 and which Chrome added that same year, and Edge had by 2022 at the latest.
You cut their budget, they'll necessarily lose developers. Yes, maybe they can minimise how many developers they lose by becoming more lean, but it's a fantasy to think that becoming "more lean" could actually prevent them from losing paid developers. And any volunteer developers are also necessarily going to be spending less time and effort on their contributions than a full-time paid employee would.
Cut their budget by 86% and they go from "barely keeping up" to "utterly falling behind".
Can we just redistribute the CEO's salary
That'll give you about twenty-five engineers, give or take.