Here are Mozilla’s financials (PDF, covers 2022 and 2023), and skme highlights:

• “royalties” (Google) - ~$500M
• investment income - $10-50M ($1B in investments)
• SW dev expenses - $220-260M

They’re putting quite a lot of that Google money into investments, probably in case the gravy train dries up.

Mozilla has ~750 employees, about 700 of which work on Firefox in some capacity.

So, if we take $260M/700, we get $370k per employee. That’s pretty high, though I guess it makes more sense in SF. If they moved their operations to a less expensive state, they could cut that in half or more.

However, if the Google money ends, they would need to drastically cut their workforce, like by more than half, or raise a ton of cash some other way.

Google pays them hundreds of millions annually. That’s not the kind of money you find lying around or can quickly make by spinning up another branded service like a VPN.

Their only realistic hope for getting that kind of money is another search provider and the only ones who are big enough and might pay that I can think of off the top of my head would be:

Bing (Microsoft) who’d probably pay less,

Yandex (people would whine they’re Russian even though they’re a multinational and admittedly their market in the west is pretty weak so their incentive to pay for something like this low unless they’re trying to expand, again they’d likely pay less),

I don’t think there is a third. There are lots of other search engines but few that can afford to casually toss away a few hundred million a year to be set as default on a browser with less than 5% market share. If a third existed it would probably be some Chinese search company trying to break into the western market and again people would whine about their character for geopolitical reasons and accuse Mozilla of being bought by them.

Apple could also afford to do this but they themselves take Google’s money to set Google as a default search engine in safari and are too interested in bundling software with hardware to ever offer something to everyone like that.

They should try and trim costs it’s true. Start with CEO pay (though at 7 million it’s only a small piece of the costs that need to be cut to be safe should they lose this money) and work on through. The problem I think is Mozilla doesn’t consider Firefox the end all, be all of their mission and that’s unfortunate because at this point it’s the only thing they do of any worth. We think of Mozilla as Firefox but they think of Firefox as just another big project that if it gets cut isn’t the end, the CEO will still have their job, there will still be busy-working pretending to be an advocacy body and soliciting money for that despite the fact that Firefox existing is the only reason anyone still cares what they have to say as they’re part of the web development consortium.

There’s no quick and easy way out from their relationship with Google. The government could force a quick divorce but that would lead to Firefox imploding. Assuming that doesn’t happen it’ll be a long, slow slog of a process and I don’t see any easy solutions. They’ve tried branded VPN, they’ve tried things like pocket and fakespot. They don’t have any services they can offer the corporate world which is unfortunate as many companies sustain free public offerings off of charging corporations fees.

Google funds probably 95% of Mozilla. Hundreds of millions a year.

Be sure and tell them how they’ll replace the funds while you’re at it.

I keep telling myself to donate to them, but I still haven’t.