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September 23, 2020 03:27 pm

Firefox Usage is Down 85% Despite Mozilla's Top Exec Pay Going Up 400%

Software engineer Cal Paterson writes: Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people. That's a quarter of their workforce so there are some deep cuts to their work too. The victims include: the MDN docs (those are the web standards docs everyone likes better than w3schools), the Rust compiler and even some cuts to Firefox development. Like most people I want to see Mozilla do well but those three projects comprise pretty much what I think of as the whole point of Mozilla, so this news is a a big let down. The stated reason for the cuts is falling income. Mozilla largely relies on "royalties" for funding. In return for payment, Mozilla allows big technology companies to choose the default search engine in Firefox - the technology companies are ultimately paying to increase the number of searches Firefox users make with them. Mozilla haven't been particularly transparent about why these royalties are being reduced, except to blame the coronavirus. I'm sure the coronavirus is not a great help but I suspect the bigger problem is that Firefox's market share is now a tiny fraction of its previous size and so the royalties will be smaller too - fewer users, so fewer searches and therefore less money for Mozilla. The real problem is not the royalty cuts, though. Mozilla has already received more than enough money to set themselves up for financial independence. Mozilla received up to half a billion dollars a year (each year!) for many years. The real problem is that Mozilla didn't use that money to achieve financial independence and instead just spent it each year, doing the organisational equivalent of living hand-to-mouth. Despite their slightly contrived legal structure as a non-profit that owns a for-profit, Mozilla are an NGO just like any other. In this article I want to apply the traditional measures that are applied to other NGOs to Mozilla in order to show what's wrong. These three measures are: overheads, ethics and results.

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