We are lucky it's even a duopoly. All it would take is the demise of Firefox, and the entire web would be defined entirely by the implementation of Chrome/Chromium.
Servo is very welcome; a third leg to the stool makes real diversity possible again.
Don't forget that pretty much 100% of iOS users and a nontrivial percentage of Mac users are on Webkit/Safari. That's not to say Safari is really leading the pack on anything at all, but Google also hasn't led Apple by the nose on pretty much anything on the web in recent years.
Yup, the split is really Blink+WebKit. Gecko marketshare is tiny these days.
What's interesting is seeing a few non-Apple WebKit browsers pop up, like Orion (Kagi) and Epiphany.
Call me cynical, but I don't see Ladybird or Servo do much beyond making a splash. Browser engines take an incredible amount of dev hours to maintain. Ladybird is hot now, but what about in a decade? Hype doesn't last that long and at that point the money and a chunk of the dev interest will have dried up.
Blink and WebKit both have massive corporations championing them, so those engines do not run that risk.
> Blink and WebKit both have massive corporations championing them, so those engines do not run that risk.
There's always risk. IE/Edge also had a massive corporation championing it, until it didn't. The US DOJ also appears to be considering actively prevent Google from backing Chrome. Which could also do for Firefox given that it's revenue comes from the same source.
No doubt that wouldn't completely kill those engine given our reliance on them, but in those kind of circumstances we might welcome the existence of some simpler engines that are cheaper/easier to maintain.
I don't see the current US DoJ doing anything that harms Big Business and doesn't cater to the petulant whims of the current Presidential Administration.
Ladybird seems to be progressing at an impressive pace also, time will tell however if their choice of C++ will be a big problem or if modern ways of doing things are safe enough.
I remember they mentioning Swift a few months ago, but currently I don’t see any swift in their github repo,
didn’t checked other branches besides main.
> all the C++ code is intended to have been replaced.
That is not their goal at all, I don't where you heard that. Swift is currently stalled due to some blockers listed on their issue tracker, but any usage of it will be in safety-critical areas first and not a complete rewrite of existing code.
Very excited for Ladybird and Servo. I wonder if a good thing that may emerge from this era of LLM code-support capabilities is that its more feasible to support alternative browser codebases even as they get into the multi-million lines of code.
Yep, but there was another post mentioning half a million lines of C++ code so far.
While the C++ interop in Swift seems sane with Clang being embedded I wonder how much time/energy they will have to actually move significant parts if it's so large already.
That doesn't really make sense to me either. Even if WebIDL is inheritance based, that is going to be processed automatically so you can easily use codegen to make the resulting interface nice in Rust, in a way that would be relatively difficult if you were hand-writing it.
I've seen a lot of criticism of Mozilla in these parts, some more fair than others. (Adtech = bad, regardless of whether you call it privacy preserving. CEO pay, not as bad as people say but don't love it.) But the notion that a trillion dollar platform company dictating web standards and Firefox are two sides of the same coin is, by my lights, the singularly most spectacular failure of comprehension that's been wrought by this era of Mozilla skepticism. It's not exactly a big lie because the people saying it seem to sincerely believe it but it's comparably disastrous as a test of information literacy.
Mozilla was sitting on a chest of cash that could have funded engineering efforts for decades. Instead they decided to inflate managers and marketers in an effort to expand market/mindshare and follow that with needs for ever increasing funding drives to fund lavish parties and events on the marketing side, while shuttering engineering efforts and even laying off swaths of engineering talent.
That doesn't even touch some of the more salient political movements or failure after failure to spin the brands off into something more/different for profit motives.
Mozilla needs to restructure as an engineering focused organization where business operations, marketting and brand management are not steering the ship.
Are non-profits in the US allowed to hoard cash long-term?
In the UK, spending on furthering their charitable purpose is expected to roughly match income over the medium term. There are carve-outs for specific types of "permanent endowment" (and even there, spending is meant to match the investment income) but it wouldn't cover anything like Mozilla's commercial agreement with Google.
Having worked for a non-profit many years ago as an office monkey who, among other things, took notes on finance committee meetings, it's typical to have some operating reserves that you can measure in terms of how many months or years of your operating expenses they could cover. This is a common financial stress test used to assess the financial health of organizations. Given Mozilla's singular dependence on Google search and pressure to diversify income streams, it's their firewall in case of emergency. And frankly the simple return on investment from their endowment year to year is one of the strongest non-Google revenue streams at their disposal right now.
If armageddon came and they no longer had their search revenue, they could cover 2 years of their operational costs. Many organizations have endowments that cover them for anywhere from 5 to 20 years. What I understand off the top of my head is that their major spending categories are software development, "operations" which is largely infrastructure to support that development, legal, and marketing.
I could see the case for not spending so much on marketing, but it would be organizational suicide to deficit spend away their endowment, their one firewall against existential threats, on "engineering" without a credible road map to long-term sustainable income that's better than what they're already doing. In fact if you catch the HN comment section on the right say, such behavior would probably be pointed to as yet another example of wasting money on unfocused side bets, because at the end of the day the mob truly can't decide what it wants.
And who knows maybe this "spend it all down on engineering + ??? + profit" plan could work, but that would be extremely risky and would hinge on the details of a plan. But I don't feel like I'm hearing a plan so much as vibes. I would actually turn the tables on this whole entire interpretation and say what they spend relative to their market share, they're actually punching above their weight compared to Google, and that this criticism of "hoarding" is not grounded in financial literacy.
The whole argument is that Mozilla is using their money incredibly inefficiently, and a good chunk of that is putting money into the pockets of the people managing it.
They claim to be putting $220 M/year into software development, but can't sponsor Servo even at $1 M/year? I call bullshit.
Well I did just give you four paragraphs extensively elaborating on the strategic value of having an endowment, and how strategically fundamental it is to the long-term health, health of any organization and how it's consistent with financial management you see at typical Western non-profit institutions.
I actually think you're right that they should have kept Servo, but that doesn't sustain the charge that is smart to not have an endowment or spend down their endowment for no reason. Most of your questions are financial literacy issues in response to standard non-profit disclosures rather than legitimate critique of strategy.
They're maintaining 32 million lines of code, same as Chrome, on dramatically less resources. So if the question is how they manage to be so much more efficient in terms of ratio of resources invested to production capability (or insert preferred metric, LoC, market share, code line commits, security updates etc), I think it likely comes down to the breakthrough efficiencies of Rust, which they developed.
Rust was the backbone of Quantum, their monumental overhaul and modernization of the Gecko engine. Mozilla is way ahead of competitors in shipping production Rust code. Google is in C++, but taking baby steps toward also implementing Rust in bits and parts but with lots of security containering and interfacing with C++.
This is not correct. Servo predated Quantum. Quantum was never abandoned, it was completed and integrated into Firefox. Quoting from their page on Quantum:
>Firefox Quantum was a revolution in Firefox development. In 2017, we created a new, lightning fast browser that constantly improves. Firefox Quantum is the Firefox Browser.
Quantum took modernizations that were started as part of Servo but integrated them into Gecko, where they continue to live today. They include Stylo as you noted, but also WebRender, Quantum DOM, Quantum Compositor, Quantum Flow, as well as a host of rust libraries and tooling.
Firefox’s responsiveness, GPU acceleration, and memory-safety improvements are directly attributable to Servo's research being folded in.
So it is in fact getting the benefits I stated. In fact it demonstrates that Servo succeeded after all: the fruits of it were harvested, brought into Firefox and are a key demonstration of Mozilla punching above its weight with smart investments allowing them to be more efficient than Google.
Edit: The reply below is largely unresponsive, not acknowledging factual inaccuracies, and repeating points that have already been addressed. As I already explained, Firefox benefits from Servo to this day. The end of its support is regrettable but not a scandal nor even a demonstration of inefficient use of resources. Its benefits were rolled into the core browser which is maintained at a fraction of the cost of its competition.
There was a time when Mozilla worked on what is being now pushed forward under the Servo umbrella. 2017 was 8 years ago. Then in 2020 Mozilla laid off 250 employees, including pretty much all of the developers of Servo/Quantum and their security team.
And now Mozilla is sitting on that cool $1.3 B, burning $220-500 M/year on "software development" without telling anyone what it actually is doing with that money, and putting $0 into Servo.
But the Mozilla Foundation's purpose is "protect and improve the Internet as a public resource, open and accessible to all".
It's not clear to me why that requires a sizeable team of developers - surely they'd be better off working for MoCo (the commercial subsidiary who make the browser and who provide a large portion of the MoFo's income)?
MoFo's activities are centred on philanthropy and advocacy. You'd expect most of their staff to be experts in things like community engagement, policy research and development, grant-making, campaign strategy, volunteer welfare, reporting & transparency, and management of investments.
Sure, there'll be some engineering needed to support that, but it shouldn't be their core focus.
Why is it that the Mozilla Foundation was set up in such a way that it cannot fund the core browser development activity? Other foundations do fund software development for their respective projects, e.g. the FreeBSD Foundation [1] and the Python Software Foundation [2].
The MoCo/MoFo split happened for a reason: a non-profit couldn't do the big commercial deals that became available to MoCo.
If you went back to the pre-2005 situation, in which MoFo was all there was, it would have at most low single-digit millions in the bank rather than a billion. The AOL dowry was only intended to last a couple of years, and there's simply no way it could have sustained development of the browser beyond that. The Phoenix would have been consumed by the flames, and we'd be left with a stagnant IE/Chrome duopoly.
On the linked report above I'm seeing software development as about 52% of their expenses. And many of the other expenses, eg "General and administrative", I understand to be support infrastructure for software development. This would seem to fit the meaning of "most" on my read.
Saying "Mozilla doesn’t itemize expenses" is like saying a university's annual financial report is hiding cafeteria costs because it doesn’t list fruit cups separately.
Large nonprofits publish consolidated, high-level statements that group expenses by broad function, not by department or line item because that's the correct level of financial reporting for external audiences.
If they misrepresented their spending that would be flagged by the independent auditor. It's deeply responsible to accuse them of hiding something when you have no baseline concept of standard disclosures.
>we'd actually benefit more from refocusing it into software (like it used to be).
Firefox was spending $40MM on software and development in 2009. Adjusted for inflation that would be ~ $60MM today. They're spending upwards of $262MM today. So they're spending more than quadruple what they used, to directly on software + development.
Worth noting that Mozilla Corporation (which I believe is the entity that has the contract with Google) is a for-profit organisation wholely owned by Mozilla Foundation which is the non-profit.
In theory, it feels like that ought not to change anything regarding the legal situation, but I bet it does.
Are you sure that you have your numbers right? It seems pretty common in the hn comment section for people to come in and randomly claim that Mozilla either spent all of their money or are losing all of their money. But the last figure I saw for their cash and investments was around $1.2 billion from late 2022, and everything I can find on their data spanning from the 2010s through the 2020s through today is that it's been a steady trend line up.
They had $91 million in 2009. 105 million and 2010, $193 million by the end of 2011, $372 million by the end of 2015, and I don't have every number for every year, but it all seems to indicate a steady upward trend.
I'm not sure how to look at those data and interpret them as squandering of cash and those are pretty specific claims that I would hope could be articulated in a clear cause and effect way if they were true.
There's some serious Mozilla Derangement Syndrome in online spaces, I see it on Reddit, too. A lot of people seem to want to hold them to standards they hold no other company to, some discontents seem to be driven into a frothing rage by some of CEOs uh.. traits? too.
I feel like I just want to keep a running list of the most egregious criticisms, or alternatively write an article along the lines of "Mozilla Criticisms, Ranked by Sanity".
Some are fair! But many aren't. But it may help temper MDS to put it all in one place.
I think a lot of the people who remember Phoenix and were part of the push to install Firefox and unseat IE are very sour about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing.
>about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing.
I don't know if you ever saw the movie Dark City, but one aspect of the plot was that everyone thought they knew the way to Shell Beach, but could never actually tell you how to get there if you asked [0]:
>Murdoch learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach, which everyone knows, though no one remembers how to get there and Murdoch's attempts to visit fail.
And, look at this thread! 90% of the time it's young adults with no financial literacy misinterpreting non-profit filings.
Which, again, it's not to say there's no issues. Adtech is bad. CEO pay is bad-ish. But most of the time the best anyone can manage is sweet nothings like "you know... all the... stuff they're doing!" It's filed away in the Shell Beach part of their brains.
Are you implying that people are imagining that Mozilla strategy is awful?
Because I disagree. Mozilla has a shockingly long string of poor decisions: the mobile OS no one wanted, acquiring Pocket, parting with Servo, starting Lockwise, the whole VPN thing, the VR browser, the IoT gateway, the extension debacle with the Android version refactoring.
Honestly, there is plenty to criticise independently of the financial thing.
>Are you implying that people are imagining that Mozilla strategy is awful?
Yes! It's mostly embarrassingly wrong nonsense, full of confidently wrong Shell Beach-isms. It's frustrating to repeat myself but as I said already, look at all the mischaracterizations of Mozilla's finances in this thread. To be fair I don't think the average person should have to know how to interpret nonprofit filings, but you should if you're pointing to them to make an argument. That's the short version. But for the longer version...
ITT we've had people incorrectly claiming they "spent all their money" (not true, their endowment is the largest it's ever been), that they format the reports to "hide" true spending (obviously not true to anyone who's familiar with independent auditing process non-profit disclosures), that they aren't spending a "majority" on software development (even the most conservative estimate of their latest filing would put it at 52-53% but that's excluding important spending categories), that they're spending less than they used to (not true even after you adjust for inflation). And that's just from this thread!
So, I'm just going to pause and take a breath. In a reasonable conversation, those points would have registered. In a words-mean-things conversation, someone would read the above paragraph and say something like "goodness, that was a list of real examples of spurious criticisms, pertinent to this conversation." But it's a vibes and echo chambers based conversation, playing out in the backwaters of internet comment sections, losing signal and gaining confidence with every next regurgitation. Most people who make these points never read the financials until they already made up their mind that they could be used to prove a point.
Moreover, a lot of the complaints are "floaters" detached from any coherent unified narrative, or even openly contradictory. Depending on the day, the VPN was a problem because it's was losing gobs of money (sincerely argued not but true), or a good thing because it's diversifying revenue sources. Or the VPN is supposedly a distraction that caused loss in market share, which also isn't accurate because it gets history of market share wrong. The market share losses were from 2010-2015, they were not from the side-bets era of 2020-2025. Again, that would matter if this was a words-mean-things conversation.
Pocket, depending on the person, was a good decision because it broadened revenue streams (people lamenting not being able to donate to the corp directly would at least note you could get a pocket subscription), or a sky-is-falling failure. In truth it doesn't seem like it budged anything market share wise, and the cost to acquire and the revenue it raised was likely a modest lost or a wash in the grand scheme of things.
Depending on the day, the mobile OS was a good thing or not a good thing (a recent article from the Register criticizing Mozilla said the mobile OS was an example of a good bet, and I think an Android alternative would be great right about now with their forced developer certification coming.)
And generally speaking, if we treat the 2020-2025 era as the "side bets" era, they collectively have practically nothing to do with market share issues, which happened from 2010-2015 and was more about the rise of Chromium than Mozilla missteps.
It's not that nothing was wrong; again I repeat myself but I'd love to have Servo around still, and I don't love the CEO pay, or the rationalizations for ad-tech, but they are needles in a haystack of confidently misstated nonsense. And there's no pattern of accountability for the nonsense that's proportionate to the volume and the velocity at which it's expressed.
Firefox isn't a part of any duopoly, with market share numbers as low as they are these days. Chrome + Safari, perhaps? (Or Chrome + Edge if you exclude mobile, though Edge of course uses the same rendering engine as Chome.)
