Mozilla's failures and a path to profitability

Written by Andrew Gioia on August 8, 2020  ·  23 minute read

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 or some other story reminded me of its umbilica cord to Google. Relying on one contract to provide over 80% of its revenue¹ 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.