It's simply because I've been immersed in the open-source community for a long time and have received a lot of help from others' open-source projects. I think open-sourcing my own work is a really cool thing to do. Moreover, I genuinely hope to gain more visibility through open source and access new ideas and opportunities.
Before doing anything, shut down the "AI browser" thing as anything other than an optional experiment that can be installed as an extension, issue an apology and explanation for past misuses of trust, show how they'll be avoided in the future (see the next paragraph), and give people confidence that they have a clue why people trust and care about Firefox.
Have some internal council of users who serve the function of "if anyone could have told you in ten seconds that something is a bad idea, don't do it". Set up internal policies so that the next bad idea, like the Mr Robot thing, goes through that council, and that evaluations of those things get passed around the company so that everyone understands what not to do. Because right now, the solution to most of Mozilla's substantial trust failures has been "that thing you did, just don't do that thing", not anything more complicated than that.
Also, throw more resources at Firefox development, parity, and market share, at the expense of anything else that's not that. Yes, Mozilla has done some incredibly amazing things that aren't the browser, such as Rust, but right now Firefox is in critical condition and needs to be rescued.
Ask for donations, and support directed donations specifically towards Firefox development.
To the extent reasonably possible, reduce some of the expenses that grew out of "we have an absurd budget coming from Google and don't have to justify anything". Mozilla reputedly had a kind of absurd budget for travel and other large expenses, and it might be possible to go a long way by applying the 80/20 rule (in this case, you may be able to get 80% of the value with 20% of the cost, and I'm counting "great place to work" in that 80% of the value). (Assuming this hasn't already been fixed.)
Offer a premium version of Firefox Sync, whose fee is primarily to fund Firefox development, and tell people honestly that that's what it's for.
Integrate donation/payment as a trivial in-app purchase on mobile platforms, because that's extremely low friction for many people.
Hire the author of uBlock Origin and the maintainers of EasyList and similar, integrate it first-party (disabled by default at first for the sole reason of gauging compatibility), and gear up to do a big push to enable it by default, conditional on not losing Google revenue sooner than expected. Make a big publicity push around it, showing people screenshots of what the web looks like with and without ads; capitalize on the primary competitor weakening ad blockers. Start preparing legal for the inevitable lawsuits from advertisers. Plan on getting piles of free publicity from the inevitable lawsuits (for which there is settled case law in many jurisdictions), with the expectation that the vast majority of the public will very happily come down on their side.
Provide substantial support for the Servo project, if they're still willing.
Provide a better alternative to Electron, based on some combination of Servo and possibly some parts of the Gecko engine, whose primary goal is "suck less than Electron". It's a low bar. Demonstrate, through user studies, what people don't like about Electron apps, and how this alternative does better and users like it. Charge for it, for proprietary applications.
That's the five-minute list. I'm sure more than five minutes would produce a much longer list. The most important property: make sure it's all aimed towards making Firefox better and more competitive while preserving trust.
> Ask for donations, and support directed donations specifically towards Firefox development.
Donations to for profit organizations are fraught with problems. I imagine Mozilla Corp doesn’t accept them for this reason.
> integrate [ad block] first-party … and gear up to do a big push to enable it by default, conditional on not losing Google revenue sooner than expected. Make a big publicity push …
Is there a realistic way that they could do this without losing Google revenue? Maybe the existing terms would keep Google from backing out immediately but if Mozilla decided to start a war over this could they replace at least most of the revenue before the next opportunity for Google to cut them off?
Selfishly I also am concerned that if this became a big enough issue the government would step in and side with advertisers.
> Is there a realistic way that they could do this without losing Google revenue?
Very much an unknown. The point would be to line it up and have it ready to turn on the moment that revenue goes away, or the moment there's enough replacement revenue, whichever comes first. And until then, make it one checkbox away.
Donations to for profit organizations are not tax deductible and have to be reported as income. If the Mozilla Corp accepted donations there would likely be a lot of confusion about whether the donations could be written off for taxes as donations to Mozilla Foundation. There’s also potentially complications with state laws around solicitation.
If they wanted to allow donations they would have to be really clear that it’s not tax deductible. They would also have to give a cut to Apple and Google if they accepted donations on their mobile platforms.
There is a hidden assumption that it takes $500 million a year to keep a browser up to date.
It might eventually be interesting to figure out how to build a model that serves the user instead of the model trainer, but the model trainers haven't figured out how to enshittify their models yet, so spending all the money needed to build a competitive model is premature.
Part of the "problem" is that people don't care about any of those products, except Firefox.
Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.
If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.
Yeap. It's mentioned in their financial reports that user donations represent more than 99.9% of our annual revenue[0]. Also seems their staff is mainly engineers/developers, and all the expenses are concentrated to their product*. Thunderbird doing what Firefox should.
As of right now Thunderbird doesn't make any money, it relies on 'Donations' which isn't at all sustainable.
I can see Thunderbird is planning to do a pro plan, but it is behind a waitlist so the total sum of revenue Thunderbird is making relative to Google's $500M deal is close to zero.
I'm sure the new leader of the trojan horse (fox?) is not going to pivot to AI...
"...Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions..."
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser"
and there it is, the most "trusted" software company pivoting to AI.
Although this is in 2021, it's great to see that Sam Zeloof also made Atomic Semi [0].
A display of "just doing things", no permission needed and no need for barriers and red tape.
It is another reason why I have huge promise for Substrate [1] founded by James Proud (UK native moved to US) another display of "just doing things".
However in Europe and the UK, it's "this law allows you to do this, this and this", "we've changed the law, here is a massive immediate fine", "ban encryption" (this nearly happened), "ban maths", "we are the first to regulate and ban this".
It is no wonder the US will continue to be great at building things.
> Regulations can be bad but they can also stop environmental disasters from happening.
It makes me wonder how bad the situation is, when you feel the need to start your sentence with 'regulations can be bad', while corporations fight you for their right to release PFAS into your drinking water sources.
This is the price of privacy from not using Google.
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