`Git can be a right git` is a valid sentence here.

(Which leads me to a ponderous question: if I had the wherewithal to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of my money into a non-Chromium FOSS browser, supported by 1700+ staff and 1000+ volunteers, would that browser have merely a ~2.17% market share? Hmmm... As a comparative analogy, Samsung Internet browser has barely had any improvements in years and it is surviving due to it being the default browser on the millions of Samsung smartphones & tablets worldwide, but its market share is ~1.86%. I don't think Samsung is spending half a billion a year keeping this browser alive, nor paying its browser departmental heads millions of dollars to keep the browsing chugging along.)

Since it is evident that Mozilla is a for-profit organisation funded by its biggest competitor, then we must wonder: do the Mozilla volunteers get their fair share of all that profit? If not, why not?

But since we all know Mozilla is always crying for more money, then where are the hundreds of millions of revenue going every year? I suspect it is neither going deep for improvements to the Firefox browser (I mean, come on! "tab groups" are relatively new feature in Firefox, but Firefox users have been demanding this feature for years, and Firefox's major rivals have had tab grouping feature for years, so what took Firefox so long to to do this bare needful?!), or to the many hardworking volunteers doing their best for a supposedly good (but losing) cause (Firefox's market share is eroding, and I assume Google is not sad about that trend).

Those salaries actually seem pretty normal, and I don't think anything other than ordinary information literacy is necessary to understand they have a non-profit foundation side by side with the corporation, it's not a hidden conspiracy.

Also, on HN I think people are largely familiar with these data, so sharing numbers with an air of dramatic revelation seems tonally inappropriate. Though I love that, of the random accusations thrown at Mozilla, one of them is constantly pingponging back and forth between claiming they're running out of money or that they are awash in profits.

I do think there are real issues: killing Servo was a tragedy, "privacy protecting ads" I think is conceptually fallacious, it seems like with Android forcing developer certification that the world could have used a FirefoxOS right about now which they unfortunately abandoned many years ago. But the community phenomenon of reeling off ordinary pay figures like they're a conspiracy feels more like an inadvertent confession of functional illiteracy when interpreting financial data.

I wish we talked about the real stuff (pushing back on their dabbling in ads) instead of breathlessly sharing misunderstood graphs of browser market share to try and imply that side bets made from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015.

Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.

Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/

I rest my case.

Mozilla maintains 32 million lines of code, roughly the same amount as Chromium, with by some estimates, less than a tenth of the resources Google dedicates to Chrome. That return on investment spans everything from leading on development of major new web standards, e.g. WebAssembly, WebRTC, DNS over HTTPs, limiting cookies, profile sandboxing. It also includes Rust, key to their major "Quantum" project which by itself was a monumental achievement which rebuilt the browser on a stable, secure, memory safe foundation. Even Chrome is now starting to use Rust, Mozilla's language, for parts of its browser.

They have a rapid patch cadence for security fixes, and their browser is the heart of an ecosystem including Tor, Waterfox, LiberWolf, Mull, and others for niche, hardened or performance tuned variations that depend on Gecko. Tor, in particular, is relied on to get around censorship in parts of the world that try to control internet traffic.

And there's the monopoly issue, which is that if we lost Firefox, every active browser engine would be owned by two trillion dollar platform companies, Google and Apple, who could write the rules of the internet on their own. Which includes, among other things, trying to dismantle ad blockers and lock you into their ecosystems.

The totality of its return on investment across security, open standards and browser independence has been irreplaceable, and overlooking that because they didn't roll out a tab feature fast enough is mind-boggling lack of comprehension of the full scale of what Mozilla produces from beginning to end.

First and foremost, Mozilla didn't invent Tab Grouping, nor did it invent or pioneer Tabs for that matter.

James Newton Gunn (1867–1927) invented Tabs (patented in 1897) as a new way to access the contents of a set of index cards, separating them with other cards distinguished by projections marked with letters of the alphabet, dates, or other information.

In 1982, Wordvision for DOS was perhaps the first commercially available product with a tabbed interface. In 1992 Borland's Quattro Pro popularized tabs for spreadsheets; Microsoft Word in 1993 used them to simplify submenus. In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks (most likely the first internet browser to feature tabs). That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell SimulBrowse in 1997, which was later renamed to NetCaptor. Opera was one of the earliest browsers with tabbed browsing and private browsing.

In fact, the company that pioneered Tabs for Internet Browser was BookLink Technologies for its browser InternetWorks in 1994 (BookLink's technology was later licensed by Microsoft to bring Internet capabilities to MS Word).

And no, neither did Mozilla nor Chrome invent or pioneer Extensions either.

Browser extensions predate even tabbed browsing! Ironically, it was Microsoft that introduced extensions with Internet Explorer 5 in 1999.

And three years before Google popularized private browsing with Incognito Mode, Safari already had a feature for temporary suspension of cookies and cache. Even Opera had private browsing long before Firefox and Chrome got the feature.

So Tabs, Extensions and Private/Incognito Browsing -- which people tend to think were pioneered by Firefox and Chrome -- were actually invented/pioneered years earlier by other companies for other browsers/editors. Firefox and Chrome simply adopted these nice ideas and made them popular because of their huge user base.

If we want to argue that Firefox's support for Tab Grouping through some extensions was a pioneering act, then that's incorrect roo. It is like saying Microsoft invented Antivirus because it allowed the first Antivirus software to run on its OSes.

Sure, Tab Groups were allowed to be created via Extensions supported by Firefox and Chrome, but the Tabbed Grouping feature was adopted in these browsers as native feature only years later.

I recall that MyIE2 (an IE shell browser in 2002) (MyIE2 later got sold and renamed as Maxthon), featured tabbed browsing, ad blocking, support for Internet Explorer plugins, skins/themes, forms autofilling, customizable toolbar, whois queries, variable keyword searching from address bar (very useful for intranet sites), translation and a highly customizable user interface.

Tab Groups and Sync Tab Groups are probably the Extensions you remember that gave the Tab Grouping feature as add-ons to Firefox. But these extensions (like thousands of other extensions) were created and maintained just by one person or a handful of volunteers.

As you can see, Mozilla Firefox (even with half a billion dollars as annual revenue (thanks to Google) and thousands of staff & volunteers) has not been giving basic features that even old browsers and one-person/one-small-team driven browser extensions have done so admirably for a long time.

Do you really think the average internet user is bothered more about WebAssembly, WebRTC, DNS over HTTPs, limiting cookies, profile sandboxing? Or would the average user be more interested in tabs, tab grouping, themes, customizations, private browsing and other user friendly features in a browser?

But you are right..

> there's the monopoly issue, which is that if we lost Firefox, every active browser engine would be owned by two trillion dollar platform companies, Google and Apple, who could write the rules of the internet on their own. Which includes, among other things, trying to dismantle ad blockers and lock you into their ecosystems.

That is precisely my point. Why is Google in total control of its third biggest rival in the browser market? How is that beneficial for end users?

Do you know why Chrome and Firefox typically ace any latest web standards tests? It's because Google will think forward on proposed web standards, and choose whichever of those ideas it likes and it will implement them in its own ways as new features in dev builds of Chrome and then release them as stable releases later. So by the time these proposed web standards (WebRTC, etc.) even come up for any solid discussions by W3C and other partners of the industry, it is already a moot point, because Google has already interpreted and implemented it in some particular way which is already in vogue (popular use) across many millions of Chrome (and Chromium forked browsers) users across the world. Invariably then, it is Google's interpretation and implemented approach that then becomes the agreed web standard specification. And sooner, rather than later, Firefox also follows suit with almost the same thing, because it is Google pulling the strings of Mozilla behind the scenes. And usually Apple & Safari are not far behind doing the same, because it is already a lost battle when Google's way of that web standard is what the industry is forced to adopt.

So yeah, the internet is already monopoly, thanks to Google, and its far-reaching, far-thinking clout and sheer tenacity to do whatever it wants.

Case in point? Google and Apple have been hit with antitrust lawsuits in EU and USA, accused of monopoly of their products (especially all store) and advertising services on the internet and Android & iOS ecosystem. Google and Apple have been fined several millions or few billions in several such lawsuits, but that's merely a slap on the revenue wrist of these tech giants.

And that arrogance can have profound impacts, as Google can use its clout for more sinister reasons:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is...

The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.

The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:

1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations

2. breaks even

3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.

In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.

CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.

Mozilla has a staff of around 1700 employees in USA, but it has 1000+ volunteers. Are those volunteers getting a fair share of the profits of this non-profit company? If not, why not?

And even with all that half a billion dollars of revenue every year, why is Mozilla Firefox have a barely ~2% market share?

OK, Let's talk basics and real stuff..

Why has Firefox failed or deliberately delayed to give basic features for years that its major competitors have had for years?

Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.

e.g., Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/

Or is that the implicit deal between Google and Mozilla. "Hey puppet, if you want the carrot, then just keep your head down, and just tick along doing barely anything new, and let me control the world as I see fit."

I'm genuinely wondering: if any other decent non-Chromium FOSS browser got half a billion dollars every year, would it give some tough competition to Chrome and Safari?