I love Mozilla, I love its mission, and I love its core product, Firefox. It absolutely sucks as a business though.
I suspected this for many years, re-realizing it every time [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336) or some other story reminded me of its umbilica cord to Google. Relying on one contract to provide over 80% of its revenue[^1] every year is bad enough. Forcing itself onto a tightrope walk—privacy as a business model on one side, reliance on your _chief competitor_ (an _ad company_ no less!) to make payroll on the other—is critically negligent. Despite Firefox Quantum's significant improvements over the past three years, I've felt for a while that Mozilla has been on a self-inflicted downward spiral and that the number of its eggs in one basket was symptomatic of some yet-unidentified-to-me structural issues. Its [recent blog post by CEO Mitchell Baker](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-mozilla/) and corresponding [internal memo laying off _25% of its worforce_](https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-to-Employees-Change-in-Difficult-Times.pdf) were so resoundingly misguided, though, that **I feared for the first time the organization is all but dead**. It's unclear to me how a message designed to rally the troops and its userbase in a time of crisis could create so much confusion. It appears to be perfectly emblematic, however, of Mozilla's poor leadership over the last decade, repeated failures at _the business side_ of software development, loss of identity, and inability to innovate while staying [true to its mission](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/). I use Firefox all day and recommend it. I pay for their limited VPN offering to encourage its development. **I want Mozilla to succeed so badly and deliver on its mission, which is why it's so painful to feel this way about them.** These are also very hard things to do and as the champion of the "free and open Internet" Mozilla is admittedly held to a very high standard. Its repeated own goals are frustrating and inexcusable, though, and a company of its size and with its brand and trust could succeed with a better direction. ## Mozilla is bad at business {#business}After over 2 decades as one of the founding Internet companies, Mozilla has shipped essentially one profitable product: Firefox.
In that time it also [lost about 80% of Firefox's browser market share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers)[^2] and abandoned its only two other potentially profitable ones, Thunderbird[^3] and Firefox OS. While it is certainly not required for nonprofits and purpose-driven organizations to sell, they do need to focus on their bottom line if they hope to continue existing. At [$14MM in 2018](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf), Mozilla's donations barely scratchd the surface of its $444MM expenses that year. Without a fundraising machine, it's foolish to think Mozilla can continue to develop interesting open source software without any attempts at monetizing it or other endeavors. **It's also misguided to think that monetizing software means Mozilla has given up on its mission.** Selling software and services is its only path forward and is indeed what it wants to be doing as a mature open source software organization today. Unfortunately, instead of realizing this and leveraging its early advantage and market share in a software space _where the product is used every day all day by every human being_, Mozilla hired consistently bad leaders who set a bad direction, got lazy, and focused on the wrong things. ### Mozilla sat on Firefox's lead, allowing it to get slow and bloated {#slow} I was _excited_ to switch away from Firefox in 2009 when Google Chrome became a bit more established. At that point Firefox was much, much better than Internet Explorer 7 and I took advantage of its deep extension ecosystem, but browsing still was slow, the app was very resource intensive, and like all browsers, one tab crashing nuked the whole window. Chrome came out of nowhere and completely reset the expectation on browser speed and footprint. Indeed, it reset the idea of what a good browser even is. * **It was very light and fresh**, and its minimalistic interface helped make it _feel_ faster. Tabs moving to the title bar and the removal of anything extra helped the browser get out of the way as much as possible so that I could do what I wanted to do online. * **The omnibox made search faster.** Combining the dedicated search box and URL bar created huge and unexpected performance gains for me. There was one place to do things—the universal address bar—and I didn't need to make a decision between URL and search. Firefox did help autocomplete URLs from browsing history, but it still had a dedicated search input. The omnibox removed a big step. * **Each tab had its own process.** Not only did this prevent the entire browser from crashing when one tab had a problem, it helped speed up browsing even more as there wasn't one big process for everything. * **Incognito Mode was very useful.** Safari had apparently had this for years but I wasn't on a Mac then and Safari wasn't popular for a lot of other reasons on Windows. While very basic, Incognito windows were my first foray into Internet privacy and became an easy way to load a fresh copy of a website.
There's a shockingly simple solution to all of the non-leadership problems Mozilla has: make Firefox the best browser in the world and sell privacy-first, open source software-as-a-service that respects our integrity.
### Mozilla should first focus on its core product: Firefox {#firefox} The primary all-hands-on-deck imperative should be to decouple Firefox from Mother Google. Mozilla's chief competitor and an ad company toxic to the web—one that needs user data to build tracking profiles for Mozilla's users—is diametrically opposed to its mission and ethos. And for some reason _that's_ totally fine but Eich's past isn't? Google is the only one paying Mozilla's bills right now and that lifeline cannot be understated, but everything the company does needs to move it away from Google or any search sponsor by 2025. This is primarily for business reasons and diversification, but just as important it fixes Mozilla's hypocrisy and gets it some trust back. Related to this, Mozilla just needs to pump more resources into Firefox itself. Make it so fast and light that it's a "no brainer" for even the layman to switch to over Chrome. Release polished, vetted, useful extensions and pay the best community developers donating their time. Even better: build [uBlock Origin](https://ublockorigin.com/)-style ad blocking as a native feature. Apple realized this advantage years ago and as Chrome's parent forces it to whittle away at tracking prevention and privacy features, Firefox can gain an even bigger competitive advantage. In 2 years Firefox should again become the obvious browser on speed, performance, memory management, privacy, and customization/user control. Mozilla should double down on the tech enthusiasts and family IT support specialists who formed its base; they're the ones who often recommend and install browsers for many others. Building up the userbase again via a free powerful Firefox creates a bigger captive audience for services. ### Mozilla should then release rock-solid privacy-first data services that people already want to pay for {#saas} Mozilla's primary source of revenue in 5 years should be from services. Apple saw this years ago and built up their services segment to about $14B per quarter now, over 20% of its total revenue. It did this due to, in no small part, its focus on privacy. Mozilla is perfectly positioned to do this even better, selling data services that people are already paying for, at scale, and with a massive privacy focus. Mozilla should release services in all of these areas: * **Password management:** beef up Lockwise into a full-fledged service, dedicated apps, and Firefox integration. **$5/month.** * **Email:** it boggles my mind that Mozilla has not done this yet, considering they had the best original email client. Sell a privacy-focused email delivery service like Mailfence or Fastmail. Bonus points if it supports IMAP flags fully and correctly 😜. **$10/month or more, depending on accounts.** * **VPN:** create an actual VPN service with apps cross-platform! I'm already paying for this and would pay more for region switching or even related DNS features. **$5/month.** * **Document sync and sharing:** I will no longer install Dropbox on any machine and have been begging for a service like this. Integrate it with Firefox Send! Integrate it with Thunderbird and your new email service! Sell upgraded filesize or persistence tiers for Send. **$5-10/month.** * **S3-compatible storage:** I pay Backblaze right now for large S3 storage to backup my documents and home media from my Synology NAS. Backblaze is great but I would pay Mozilla for this to support them and their mission. **$10-20/month.** * **Video hosting:** this is going to cost a ton of money to do correctly but I would love a Vimeo-style video hosting service by Mozilla. I like Vimeo but I want to support Mozilla more, and if this integrated with S3 buckets to share media, even better. **$10/month.** All of these need to be built privacy-first, backed by Mozilla's brand and mission statement. My family would move about $50/month we're already spending and probably more for document sync as I'm not using anything for that right now. After this, Mozilla should leverage its new experience in delivering services and the other tools that it's built and develop a full-fledged business service offering to pull people away from GSuite. I hate using GSuite every day but it's right for our use case and it does its job well. I would move to Mozilla's suite in a heartbeat and feel great about that lengthy transition! Collaboration software built on Rust/WebAssembly as a principal use case would be incredible. ### Mozilla's north star should be "the Internet's much-needed infrastructure" to fully execute on its mission {#northstar} Gmail should not synonymous with email, YouTube should not be "where videos are stored," and [Twitter and Facebook should definitely not be where public discourse takes place](/posts/facebook). All of these services are "core infrastructural" web services that should not be controlled or dominated by private for-profit ad companies with zero competition. It's a complete misalignment of importance and trust and Mozilla should take this on just as Wikipedia has with knowledge. Mozilla's "final form" should ultimately be the primary builder and steward of our decentralized and federated Internet infrastructure—the counter to the private ones that are currently de facto. I can think of no higher accomplishment that would completely "ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.""Oh yeah, just make a social network 🙄" or "lose $10B per year on hosting 5 trillion cat videos" is not the idea. The idea is to make a more purposeful, federated content host to provide a viable alternative to the private ad-supported monopolies. Supporting the mission and/or paying for power features or additional storage can offset this, as could building in a creator-first revenue sharing arrangement.
This should sound crazy because it _is_ crazy—this is the long term goal and would be an unbelievable coup. Having an actual, tangible north star like this can also serve to rally and direct the team and its users. Currently Mozilla has no real definition of success or anything tangible to point to. ## A moderate warning: Mozilla _is_ losing necessary trust with the libre world, its core demographic {#trust}Mitchell Baker's unfocused blog post on Mozilla's focus ended by saying they're "fortunate that Firefox and Mozilla retain a high degree of trust in the world." This is true to a certain extent and I very much would trust Mozilla to deliver privacy-focused services and software, but there's a limit to it and Mozilla is actually approaching that.
Mozilla only has so many chances before its core base gives up and the whole organization unravels. On its current trajectory—firing important teams like Servo and MDN and promoting the aimless VR stuff—this trust will begin waning and someone else will take up the cause. ### Baker's blog post unfortunately left me feeling that they _still don't get this_, and their "focuses" are worrying. **Talking about the new focus on product**, Baker says that to start, this means "products that mitigate harms or address the kinds of the problems that people face today. Over the longer run, our goal is to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products." I have no idea what this actually means but I suspect it's everything except for Firefox and useful web services. Why is this the initial focus?! **When talking about the "new mindset,"** she starts by describing everything great about the Internet ("the decentralization, ... open source underpinnings, and the standards") and then immediately goes into a "but." Why must Mozilla shift anything to enable these? Why is she saying Mozilla won't be "trying to keep a piece of what we love" anymore, is it no longer defending decentralization? Why is she again talking about "advocacy"? **When talking about community** and their volunteer developers, why does Baker link to a video on "transforming prison communities" as an example of what they need to be doing? This is great but how about their _developer community_ first? The **focus on economics** is about the only thing I agree with in this manifesto. "Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges." This is correct and they do need to experiment with their business model. I'm very curious to see how they begin to put this into practice. #### Mozilla needs a visionary leader with a strong technical background and Baker isn't it. Her blog post, the layoffs, and the internal memo did more to worry me about Mozilla's future than any other decision or event in Mozilla's long history. Mozilla still does have our trust now, but it's on a path to losing it and its current CEO will almost assuredly take it there if left unchecked and without better technical and business leadership. [^1]: This is tough to estimate and [official numbers stop at 2011](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google) where it was 85% of all revenue. We do know that Yahoo paid Mozilla $375MM annually from 2015 to 2017 to become the default search engine in Firefox, and that Mozilla exercised its right to terminate that contract when Oath bought Yahoo, at which point Google became the default again. Presumably the new Google deal was around this amount, though it's arguable either way given Firefox's declining userbase on one hand, and on the other that it was so eager to nuke the Yahoo deal and that Yahoo fought back. Assuming the same annual revenue from Google, its share of [Mozilla's total $451MM 2018 revenue](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/) would be 83% and its share of the [$391MM in search royalties](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-trouble-2018-revenue-fell-20-expenses-exceed-income-for-first-time.html) would be a whopping 96%! [^2]: I rounded this to account for the mix of desktop and mobile over this timeframe. At the beginning of 2009 Firefox held about 30% of the browser market share, with mobile representing less than 1% overall. As of this summer, it has about 8% of the desktop market and 4% overall, or loss of about 73.3% and 86.7% respectively. [^3]: Mozilla didn't technically abandon Thunderbird, but up until January 2020 it was essentially abandonware. It announced that month that [Thunderbird would move to a new wholly-owned subsidiary](https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/), MZLA Technologies, so that it could "explore offering [its] users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation" and "collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations." Thunderbird has had [one release since then in July 2020](https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/07/whats-new-in-thunderbird-78/) that adds dark mode, a redesigned compose window, new folder icons, a cleaner account setup wizard, and OpenPGP support. While I would love to use it as my daily driver, there is very little hope that it will ever be more than even a community labor of love.