Google's Shadow Over Firefox 385
eldavojohn writes "The Mozilla Foundation's chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google's cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash."
Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:5, Informative)
Opera doesn't need add-ons to do everything useful. For some reason they figured they might as well integrate them.
Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea that the Mozilla Foundation *appears* to be dependent on Google's advertising revenue, and I can see how that *could* impact decision making, but I dont see a whole lot of alternative funding streams, nor a threat that could not be overcome, that is after all why we like open standards and open code, no one person or group truly has 100% control and it is nearly impossible to take something that is free and open and turn it into something proprietary and closed..
Beyond FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Mitchell (Mozilla's "chief lizard wrangler") wrote a fairly large blog post [mozillazine.org], not only about the numbers as published, but also saying some things on the directions Mozilla is moving.
Far more interesting reading than the fluff news.com article, let alone the random FUD spouting by the submitter.
File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
First, the Firefox CPU bug you've been complaining about (Firefox consumers lots of CPU after the computer wakes up from standby or hibernate) was fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.8 [mozillazine.org]. If you're still having any problems with the latest release of Firefox, let developers know by filing a proper bug report, including steps to reproduce the problem.
Second, there is no sign of any "memory gobbling bug" that I can see, just a few little leaks here and there and some memory fragmentation [pavlov.net]. If you're still having any problems with the latest release of Firefox, let developers know by filing a proper bug report, including steps to reproduce the problem.
Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Beyond FUD (Score:3, Informative)
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/10/firefox_finance.html [mozillazine.org]
Worth a read.
Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. (Score:3, Informative)
Rightclick on page with annoying flash ad -> Block Content..
Click the offending ad -> it disappears with "Content Blocked" across it
(Opera 9+)
Re:Money spent on R&D (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what the "less than $300,000" thing refers to. Maybe it refers to monetary grants to other open-source projects, or maybe it refers to things like buying laptops for volunteers so they can contribute more effectively.
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
Now that said things are improving, the developers are paying attention, and I look forward to improvements in FF3. But it has been people insisting that there aren't bugs are everything is fine for years while that was plainly not the case that made this situation so much more unpleasant than it had to be. FF works for you on your system with your habits (and I'm happy that's great!). For others it is barely functional between crashes and performance degradation. But like I said, now that the problems are being recognized they are starting to be fixed, and that is as it should be. Just stop pretending that because things are fine for you they must be for everyone.
Re:The Bigger Point (Score:5, Informative)
It's really hard to say if the CEOs pay was worth it. Really, really hard. If the foundation knew it wasn't, I bet they would find a different CEO. Apparently, they have less than perfect information yet still find the arrangement acceptable.
Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
There are no "minimalist browser" roots. Firefox was always meant to be a web browser with 'right set' of features. Check the roadmap [mozilla.org].
Re:Google wanted Thunderbird killed? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What is REALLY bothersome (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Google wanted Thunderbird killed? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. (Score:2, Informative)
Filterset.G is deprecated with Adblock Plus (Score:5, Informative)
From Adblock Plus FAQs [adblockplus.org]:
In short, the Filterset.G extension duplicates functionality already in the Adblock Plus extension, it's slow, and it's harder to use. The filter subscriptions supplied by Adblock Plus are the recommended alternative.
Re:Other Revenue Sources? (Score:4, Informative)
This is incorrect. Mitchell received $300K/year salary, not half a million. If you doubt it, read the actual financial statement rather than second (or third) hand commentary.
As for the question you raise, this amount is well below the average and even slightly below the median salary for CEOs of other non-profits I've looked at, though I haven't found a breakdown between private foundations and public-benefit foundations so there could be some disparity there. Also, CEO pay in the non-profit sector is about 1/10 of what they could be making in traditional for-profit businesses so it's a safe bet that non-profit CEOs aren't in it for the compensation alone.
Add into that the costs of living in the Bay Area, where Mozilla is headquartered, and the ridiculously competitive employment landscape there, and reasonable people will surely mostly agree that this is reasonable compensation.
- A
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Open up digg.com (without your noscript extension running).
Open the first 20 or 30 pages in new tabs.
Close them, repeat.
Firefox will now be using in excess of 500MB of memory.
Close firefox and re-open (with the same session), and FireFox will drop to between 100-200MB.
Let it sit or browse again, watch it inflate memory use again.
Close all the tabs except one, go to about:blank (or whatever firefox calls it).
Notice how the memory use doesnt go down?
These are pretty much textbook definitions of memory leaking, firefox is consuming memory when it needs it, but then not giving the memory back when its done.
It's quite easy to get FF to grow up to 1GB or so of memory usage, standby and hibernate helps.
It's trivially reproducible.
The only way you dont encounter this is if you use very few tabs, and you close and restart firefox often.
Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Would it make you feel better... (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, this wouldn't happen as Mozilla would likely look to Yahoo before it looked for Microsoft, and even then Microsoft would have to actually look back, which it probably wouldn't, but the idea remains the same. It is the key reason Google gives the money. In turn, it allows Google to stand off against Microsoft.
That said, Mozilla doesn't have much to worry about as far as becoming over-dependent on Google. Mozilla is actually the one holding the leash and could easily tell Microsoft/Yahoo that they will make Microsoft/Yahoo's search the default for the right price if Google decided to stop paying/has financial trouble.
Given Firefox's growth, Yahoo would not say no, so at least Mozilla has one fall back.
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
There is, sort of.
Stuart Parmenter [pavlov.net] has found memory fragmentation happening which makes it look like FF is consuming lots of RAM.
Basically, because FF loads many components, including Javascript, strings, sqlite, CSS parsing, HTML parsing, etc, the RAM between each used block may be unavailable as contiguous memory even if FF isn't using it. The problem is showing up mainly on Windows because the 2.6 and above kernels have built-in RAM defragging, but it could catch a Linux user if an app requests more RAM before the kernel can make it available..
Re:Bullshit! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm probably naively misjudging, but I'm going to assume you're not trolling and reply.
Actually, that would be "along with about 130 to 140 million others".
If you define need as very short term, then you could possibly have a point. I don't, and the rest of the people making Mozilla and Firefox don't think about things only in the short term. Mozilla's mission to promote choice and innovation on the Internet and to advocate for people using the web, is a long-term mission that still has not demonstrated sustainability beyond a few short years.
I'd wager that the percentage of Firefox's 130+ million users who even know what open source is falls somewhere south of 10%. Those who "believe in the open source community" are far from making up double digit percentages, much less a majority. That doesn't change the fact that our mission is dependent on the support and participation of a large community of contributors, but our mission is much larger than open source and cannot be considered anything of a success if it's limited to those "who believe in the open source community."
From the way you phrase this, it sounds like you're suggesting that the Mozilla project is not "open source community". I take issue with this. Mozilla is one of the most important communities in the entire open source ecosystem and I think it's completely reasonable that the money that Mozilla generates go first and foremost into forwarding Mozilla's mission. Beyond that, we're building a grants program for other projects with strong alignment that's already giving out hundreds of thousands of dollars. But a grants program requires a lot of work, work that we think is important to do but that we don't have all of the right people for today. We're working on it. You can throw stones at slashdot or you can help us make things better.You could do better than that. You could work with your favorite OSS programs developing and writing grant proposals. You could work with OSS projects to help them develop revenue streams. You could contribute in so many positive ways that going out of your way to remove resources from an open source project seems misguided. That is, unless I was being far too generous in assuming you weren't just a troll.
Actually, we're not 90 people. We're thousands of people working to further the Mozilla Mission. The overwhelming majority of Mozilla's full-time staff are organizing and managing a much larger area than simply their direct reports or their code modules. If you want to make comparisons with more traditional organizations, I'd wager that Mozilla is operating much more like a company of about 1000 employees than a company of 100.
If you think there exists a competent CEO who could lead Mozilla effectively for less than a six figure salary, you're living on a different planet. If you think there's a CEO that would lead any non-profit company with 10s of millions in annual revenue, for less than six figures, you're living in a fantasy land.
If you really care about open source software, you'll seek out positive ways to contribute and bashing a project that's delivered open source software to the desktops of more people than any other project in the history of OSS will fall way down on your list of priorities.
-A
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
The original phoenix work came from Blake, me, Joe, Dave, Bryner, Pch, and a couple of others later on and the motivation was not to create a minimalist browser. I was there. I was a part of it from the first checkin to mozilla/browser and the goal was not to create a minimalist browser, it was to create a good browser. Viewer.exe was a minimalist browser but it was not a good browser. Chimera, the cocoa Mac browser, something we modeled some of the early m/b work on (but, in our case, using XUL) was not a minimalist browser. Ben's short-lived c# Manticore browser that pre-dated Firefox, was not intended to be a minimalist browser either, though it didn't get much past that.
Yes, it was called m/b for about three months of early active development. The people were the same as when we named it Phoenix and the goals were the same.
And that bullshit about telling users not to download Mozilla is just that, bullshit. You're remembering pre Mozilla 1.0 days. I was responsible for those pages and when I shipped 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7,and all of the dot releases in between, all of them messaged the Suite as a strong and community supported end-user offering. Claiming otherwise is simply lying.
I was there. I was responsible for every single Suite release going back to M17 and all the way up to the 1.7 release. I was responsible for every Firefox release from the first binary of m/b posted at my blog all the way up until Firefox 1.5. I shipped those products and wrote much of the user-facing content on release pages. Don't come in here and tell me I'm re-writing history unless you're going to cite some one or some documentation from someone more authority than me.
- A
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sold out (Score:5, Informative)
We made these decisions because it was the right thing for users, not because it was a revenue opportunity. If we ever have to decide between doing what's right for users and a revenue opportunity, we'll put the users first every time. The nice thing about the current situation is that it's both the right thing for users and a revenue opportunity.
And this is just about the "defaults" in Firefox. If you don't like Google, switch it to Yahoo. If you don't like Yahoo, you can add any one of more than 13,000 additional search services to the Firefox search toolbar with just a click or two at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]
- A
Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. (Score:2, Informative)
Dude, lay off the caffeine or pop a Xanax or two.
He was talking about Adblock [mozilla.org] and not Adblock plus [mozilla.org]. They are two seperate applications.
Filterset G works just fine with Adblock.