this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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I mean "Just focus on the browser" does not generates enough money to focus on the browser. I don't want to excuse mozilla management, but they need to try some things to generate money.
Sure, but most of the projects they are criticized for (like adding the ad measurements API and AI summaries) were never going to make them money.
Yeah they’re kinda trapped into playing the capitalism game/as are we all. Find me a non-profit, non-chromium, non-fork of Firefox and I’ll eat my hat…
…and I’d love to eat my hat. Won’t someone make me eat my hat??
Even RMS gave up on curl and elinks
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
That sort of argument would be more persuasive if it weren't for the existence all the other Free Software projects that get by just fine on grants and donations.
Yeah, but then they wouldn't have the high headcount and power that they have.
And that sort of argument would be more persuasive if (a) I didn't think Mozilla was squandering the headcount they have, and (b) if I thought Mozilla actually had more power than other comparable orgs, like the Wikimedia Foundation.
Firefox is one of the most complex pieces of software on the planet at around 30 million lines of code (comparable to Chrome, WebKit and the Linux kernel). Personally, I think, it's a miracle they can maintain that with less than 700 devs. That's more than 40k lines of code per dev, most of which they won't have written themselves.
At $DAYJOB, we'll write 40k lines of code maybe in two years, with a team of 5+ devs. And having to maintain 10k lines of code is what I consider rather challenging, i.e. I'll likely start falling behind sooner or later, because the world around me moves faster than I can.
Not wrong given that browsers aren't easy to maintain, but they couls start by not paying their CEO millions.