Southern Wolf 🐧🦀Aug 6, 2023

Bryan Lunduke did a deep dive into the financials of the #Mozilla Corp and its associated entities. The article just unlocked for all and can be read here, and I highly suggest you do so.

A TL;DR is Mozilla is a financial mess:

  • It's a billion dollar Corp that earns ~85% from "one customer" (Google)
  • A claimed Not-for-Profit so deeply intertwined with its two For-Profit subsidiaries that they are reported as one entity
  • Whose CEO annual salary is roughly equivalent to the contributions (user donations) that they beg for,
  • That cut their spending on software development while seeing increased revenue and cash flow
  • Where exceptionally large sums of money flow to political groups & activist orgs that have nothing to do with software development or Firefox
  • Where more large sums of flow to (what can only be described as) shell entities

Mozilla is a joke. Support #Firefox if you wish, but don't give Mozilla a cent of your money.

Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla

Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community

Show threadSouthern Wolf 🐧🦀Aug 17, 2023

Ah, here's a great summary of the whole #Mozilla issue in one video. Absolutely worth watching!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugnOM2mzgNU

How Mozilla Ruined Firefox

YouTube
Show threadjaxwxboss Aug 17, 2023

@southernwolf For those of us who embraced Mozilla during it's inception and heydays, it's difficult to accept that they have accepted practices that are contrary to what made them so initially attractive and well received.

Fortunately, today there are options like #librewolf and #mullvad which do a good job of recapturing what the essence of what made #firefox so popular back in the day.

Edit: #Linux distros need to stop shipping FF as their default browser.

Show threadSouthern Wolf 🐧🦀Aug 18, 2023

@jaxwxboss Yeah, Mozilla really has fallen a long way from its heydays. It really does seem that (whether you agree, disagree, or flat out hate him) Mozilla never truly recovered from firing Brendan Eich. They should have been able to, yet instead they've gone down a pretty terrible path since then. Heck, Brave is already at ~60 million MAU's, so it's not impossible that eventually Firefox will dip below the MAU's for Brave.

But yes, for the FIrefox ecosystem, I'd definitely recommend Librewolf. It's significantly faster than regular Firefox, and actually has the privacy and security features that FIrefox *should* have by default. Mullvad is definitely a good Chromium option, as is Brave too. Vivaldi isn't terrible either, great UI, but it's less open than either Mullvad or Brave, and lacks privacy features by default.

And yes, they should have already stopped, honestly. But as it is, Librewolf should be the goto now for distros to ship with.

Show threadJohannes Silverfox 🦊
@southernwolf Mullvad is based on Firefox, ftr.
Aug 18, 2023 at 3:15pmWeb
Show threadSouthern Wolf 🐧🦀Aug 18, 2023
@Johannes_Silverfox Wait really? I was thinking Mullvad was based on Chromium? Well regardless, it's definitely a good alternative, though I'd argue it's less so than Librewolf knowing that now.