Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla

Payments to nonexistent companies? Funding politics? Reliance on a single customer? And that's just for starters.

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[deckardpegasus]

There is small detail you left out. The mozilla foundation CEO is a lawyer, with zero software development background. Probably most of mozilla's money comes through a back channel of holding patents, i.e. being a patent troll.
There's this joke:
"You're in a locked room with Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, and a lawyer with absolutely no way out. You have a gun with 2 bullets; what do you do?!"

"Shoot the lawyer twice, just in case"

[NomenNescio]

I believe the goals of the Mozilla foundation is a part of what is usually referred as "the long march through the institutions".

[nnaaaaaa]

this sounds like the mozilla org is kept around as a kind of tokenistic antitrust violation protector for thier "competition".

[kehet]

Well, I'm not going to switch back to Lynx

[CirkuitBreaker]

The only reason I use Firefox is because it is the last browser with an independent browser engine (that matters)

[nixielee]

Very strange indeed, but at least it explains why Firefox the browser is not what it used to be

[librequestpodcast]

Firefox is my favorite browser. It renders CSS so perfectly. They're killin' it on the CSS rendering. It's a masterpiece. I don't know what they're doing with their money but I like what they're doing with Firefox. It's super.

[punzada]

Obviously it's a left leaning organization who by the numbers presented here (~1 million dollars) of a billion dollar institution went to causes they support. This just doesn't feel like a gotcha to me, just business as usual.

The most indicting thing in the report is the discrepancy between the CEO and the other C-levels of the organization. For such a left leaning organization they should look more into a cooperative structure and research wage theft - because they don't appear to be living up to their own ideals. I know if I was a donor I'd be pissed.


We may disagree politically but I appreciate you presenting the facts, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

[le]

The Watch ID was my reaction when I finished this video.

[veganaiZe]

Say "Mottzilla" one more time... I dare you... 😁

[meatbyproducts]

Stopped using Firefox because of all this I found back in 2016

[Houshalter]

They just announced they are starting an AI startup to get into the current hot thing. But their focus is all around, well it can't be said here, but you can imagine the issues Mozilla cares about putting into AI.

[saidinesh]

To everyone reading this, what features of Firefox do you still miss in Brave (or another browser of your choice), that prevents you from switching primary browsers?

For me, it is Tree style tab. And lower memory usage. - Cant exactly do much about the latter, but given a chance / enough free time/man power we can implement the former.

Maybe lists like this give us a roadmap to a better browser that isn't held hostage by corrupt organizations.

[IrishFinalExit]

I have never donated any money to Mozilla, I've considered it way back in 2007-ish when they were more community focused, now I'm relieved that I never did.

[JessicaFEREM]

they should spend all that money in advertising. trust me if they spent $5m on advertising they wouldn't be struggling to get 2% of the browser market

[marygreen]

I’m not disputing any of the information in this video but I don’t understand why people find it shocking.

[chunkslothsloth]

Mozilla went woke, fell behind technologically, and now are irrelevant.

[FcBow]

Dang, great work, Bryan! Time to ditch this dumpster fire of a browser and install Brave I guess. Wish there were more real browser options out there...

[akahenke]

Opensource sure needs more investigative influencers like Lunduke. Btw I only use Firefox because of the tridactyl plugin.

[Cortex]

There are the same kind of weird financing going on with Wikipedia/Wikimedia.

Now the problem is… I'm pretty sure the others (Chrome, Edge, Safari)… are doing the same.
Or is it ONE usable browser that is focused only on web-browsing ? Opera or Brave maybe ?