Mozilla revenue rose by over $40 million in 2017

Martin Brinkmann
Nov 28, 2018
Updated • Nov 28, 2018
Firefox
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44

Mozilla published the State of Mozilla 2017 report yesterday which includes financial information for the year 2017. The organization managed to increase revenue by over $40 million U.S. Dollar in 2017 and Net Assets by $88 million U.S. Dollar.

Mozilla's total unrestricted revenue and support rose to $562 million U.S. Dollar, an increase of more than $40 million U.S. Dollar over 2016. Partnership deals with companies that provide the default search engine in Mozilla's Firefox web browser made up the largest part of Mozilla's revenue.

A total of $539 million U.S. Dollar came from royalty deals with companies like Google or Yandex, the remaining $33 million U.S. Dollar from other revenue sources including donations, interest and dividend income, or subscription and advertising revenue.

Less than a tenth of Mozilla's overall revenue comes from other revenue sources.

Mozilla ended the search engine inclusion deal with Yahoo -- now part of Verizon -- prematurely in 2017 and negotiated a deal with Google instead. Google Search replaced Yahoo Search in the United States and select other countries as the default search provider in the Firefox web browser.

mozilla revenue expenses

The 2017 financial report includes Mozilla's acquisition of Pocket in February of the year. Pocket, a service to save, share and read articles found on the Web, was acquired by Mozilla for $30 million U.S. Dollar.

Mozilla's total expenses exceeded $421 million U.S. Dollar, an increase of about $80 million. Software development, branding and marketing, and general and administrative expenses rose significantly in 2017. Software development costs increased from $225 million U.S. Dollar to $252 million U.S. Dollar; the Thunderbird project received $196,000 from Mozilla in 2017.

Total assets did not rise as much as last year; Mozilla reported total assets of $495 million U.S. Dollar in 2016, an increase of $123 million U.S. Dollar over the previous year.

You can access the entire report on the Mozilla website (scroll down as it is listed at the bottom of the page).

Closing Words

In 2016, I noted that Mozilla was doing well financially, and the same can be said for the year 2018 and the 2017 financial report. Mozilla managed to increase revenue and total assets; expenses did increase as well, however. The company and organization diversified revenue slightly and increased revenue from non-search engine deals. While these revenues don't make up 10% of the total revenue yet, it highlights Mozilla's determination to diversify income streams.

In 2016, less than $17 million U.S. Dollar out of the total unrestricted revenue and support of $520 million U.S. Dollar came from non-royalty deals; about 3.2% of the total revenue.

Now You: What is your take on the 2017 financial report and Mozilla's financials?

Summary
Mozilla revenue rose by over $40 million in 2017
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Mozilla revenue rose by over $40 million in 2017
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Mozilla managed to increase revenue by over $40 million U.S. Dollar in 2017 and Net Assets by $88 million U.S. Dollar.
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Comments

  1. OnTheLipOfJonesJones'KoolAidBowlStaringIntoTheAbyssAndYeahItStaresBack said on November 30, 2018 at 11:02 am
    Reply

    “Nevertheless it’s interesting to see Mozilla increase their income in 2017, despite loss of market share”

    Why interesting? The story that you otherwise neglected to perceive is that people matter to us more than profit, your privacy is our business, and such is why we concluded a deal wherein our partner expects to earn more than the hundreds of millions of dollars that they are paying us by way of the sale of your captured data. With the cherry on top being that the very people that Mozilla is pandering to via its making Firefox more Chrome-like than ever will be the same people that Google profits from in this deal. Lastly, for the one soul who spoke to “bashing” Mozilla, sorry, nothing of the kind. We aren’t the ones who became Google’s bitch. That’s Mozilla.

    I will otherwise leave it to Mozilla to explain how this deal isn’t the rankest of rank hypocrisy, when despite all its claims concerning your privacy, its partner Google indeed expects to make more from the sale of captured data than Mozilla gets from having Google as the default search engine. If some can’t grasp the obvious, the reality was and is and will likely remain, 538 of 562 comes from Mozilla serving as a player in what we might call surveillance capitalism. For how bad the thing, both Google and Mozilla know that some will do all they can to protect their data from capture, yet Google stills expects to earn more than it pays Mozilla. Puts the Mozilla line on how much you are protected from capture and sale into a rather more fitting light.

  2. ULBoom said on November 29, 2018 at 6:11 pm
    Reply

    Mozilla had no advertising revenue in 2016.They had $2.6 million in 2017 (including subscriptions to what I don’t know.)

    Their Marketing and Branding expenses from 2016 to 2017 increased $18.6 million to generate about $36 million additional revenue attributable to items usually associated with marketing.

    Great sucky marketing team, there Mozilla! Do any software companies that aren’t handed a market do well? Many seem to act like 1980, telling their customers what they want instead of delivering what the customers desire.

    Yeah, all the BS started about a year or so ago. Pocket, containers, logos for infants…at least yahoo is gone. At least most of this fat can be turned off in FF. Maybe come up with some useful features or leave FF alone and develop another product? Strip the garbage and charge for it?

  3. Rick said on November 28, 2018 at 11:49 pm
    Reply

    The most telling part of the story, not told in the revenue number:

    Over the last year, the number of people using Firefox monthly has dipped from about 300 million to about 277 million,

  4. Bill said on November 28, 2018 at 7:01 pm
    Reply

    Yet they still are looking for donations on their non-profit site.

  5. Stan said on November 28, 2018 at 4:32 pm
    Reply

    Aren’t they in a law suit with Yahoo!/Oath? (the silence is deafening)
    Like they didn’t know that selling out to a crap search engine for $$$ was going to be a ‘bad experience for users’ ..rolls eyes.

    Hopefully it will bankrupt them and they’ll have to ‘sell off’ Firefox.

    @ If you what to know what a bunch of hypocrites they are, check out the skin color of the top 21 ‘leaders’, that’s right not one black face..so much for diversity.

    These are not nice people.

    1. Lord-Lestat said on November 28, 2018 at 9:12 pm
      Reply

      @Stan

      And Mozilla dares to talk about equality and diversity – yet they do not have the tiniest bit of understanding and respect of that much valued and honorable concepts.

      If Mozilla would really care for “being different” they would not have get involved with Google and happily destroyed their own unique creations – because throwing away what was unique and inserting/replacing that with something generic – is exactly the opposite of what diversity is standing for.

      Mozilla loves to talk big, but in the end they do neither have respect of such powerful terms nor do they understand them at all.

      That is hypocrisy of the worst kind actually. Donald Trump sends his greetings to them for sure.

    2. user17843 said on November 28, 2018 at 8:59 pm
      Reply

      In this article the manager at Mozilla says that Oath is not paying them beyond 2017, which means they are withholding $750 Million that Mozilla expected to get without doing anything in return (thanks to the clever contract):

      https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/

      > “She declined to comment in detail on the Verizon lawsuit, which is in a preliminary data-discovery phase. “We feel very good about our revenue from existing partners. We have anticipated not receiving any additional revenue from Yahoo as the litigation is pending,” Dixon said.

      I don’t vouch for either side, but the dynamic is certainly interesting.

  6. Richard Allen said on November 28, 2018 at 2:51 pm
    Reply

    Que all the whiners! I love how they rarely ever suggest a better browser and then bother to explain why it’s better. They can’t pass the opportunity to cry about lost features that haven’t even reached FF stable yet, like custom search engines. It gets out that custom search engines in Nightly can’t be installed by default and people get hysterical. Or was that just another excuse to shed pretend tears? Never mind that there was almost immediately an extension available to install search engines from Mycroft. I can’t wait for v64 to be released which is when live bookmarks will be history so I can see what minuscule fraction of the FF user base actually installs the extension to restore that ability. I seriously doubt that 1/10th of 1 percent of all FF users will even use the extensions for custom search engines or for live bookmarks.

    And then of course we have the “Privacy Hardened Fork of Firefox, aka Waterfox” LMAO. I’m not even going to spend any time explaining how ignorant of a claim that is.

    And then there are the malware fairy tales and the users that have moved to Vivaldi because it uses less memory. I honest to God laughed when I saw that. My experience shows Vivaldi uses more memory than Chrome which uses more memory than FF. Last time I looked, a few days ago, Vivaldi was using 35-40% more memory (5 tabs open) than FF was even though site isolation was disabled, otherwise the difference would have been even bigger. I can repeat it with screenshots showing the Task Manager. I guess not everyone is aware that chromium browsers use a process for every single extension and a process for every single tab and with site isolation enabled it will also use an additional process for every instance of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram… on every single tab that has embedded content from any of those sites. When I open Vivaldi to one tab (Startpage search) I see 11 processes, and I can open 5 tabs and see 26 processes, without site isolation, with my install, but sure, let’s claim that Vivaldi uses less memory, that makes perfect sense.

    And as usual we have the FF is a clone of Chrome despots. ;)
    We can ignore that Chrome is copying the old Australis FF UI, and has “future plans” to “possibly” include tab groups and a scrollable tab bar. What Google needs to do is copy FF’s font rendering and smoothscroll performance, and I wish it was as easy to copy text, images and video without an extension. I wish the startup time for Chrome and Vivaldi was as fast as FF and I wish that Chrome did a more consistent job of fully loading extensions at startup, it’s obvious when uBO (element hiding), Stylus and No-Script aren’t working or how long it takes for them to start working. I’ve had Chrome Dev installed for a long time now and have had Chrome Stable installed for years but recently kicked Stable to the curb when the Goolag decided in their omniscience to remove “trivial” portions of the URL. Only the uninformed and those in denial can actually believe that FF is a Chrome clone. But… just like the Earth being flat, there will be believers. :)

    I think maybe I should start trolling all the Chrome, Vivaldi and Waterfox articles with the username “Anonymous”. That’s funny! Pobrecitas! ;)

    1. Lord-Lestat said on November 28, 2018 at 4:49 pm
      Reply

      @Richard Allen

      Actually there are 2 kinds of companies and 2 kinds of possible reactions to such an incident with that far reaching consequences:

      1) The company which admits it has been beaten, outsmarted, overrun and humiliated – which repairs the damage taken and grows much stronger in the process from such an experience

      2) The company which defiantly ignores the fact that they have been outwitted in the worst kind of way, who is afraid of admitting mistakes and no matter what goes forward with ignoring the problematic consequences which happened and will going to happen if following the road taken. The company who tells you “that they are so close to defeating their enemy” – when asked why they still doing what they doing.

      I really wonder which kind of company earns more respect, is more honest and should be seen as more serious.

    2. Lord-Lestat said on November 28, 2018 at 3:19 pm
      Reply

      @Richard Allen

      That is Google – influencing and assuring others that giving up different design and different features is essential for “becoming as powerful and influential like Google Chrome” … and what happens… Once the competition follows Googles lead and “essential good-willed advice” – they adopt it on their own and the competition is losing steam and users.

      The whole browser competition of “Big G” – and that includes also Mozilla and Opera – can… and SHOULD be blamed for falling for the oldest trick in the world.. persuade others that something is bad and adopt it then on your own to increase your own reputation.

      In the end people should use whatever they want. For a person who is using x it is of course no wrong decision – for their own reasons, whatever they may be. That should not be condemned.

      What SHOULD be condemned is the utterly stupidity of the whole browser market (excluding Google of course) who fall for the devious mind-games, developed and executed by one single company with almost unlimited amount of money and influence – who managed it in pretty short time that the competition destroys itself or is on the best way to destroy itself.

      People who see Mozilla as totally flawless and as “knight in shiny white armor” – do of course not get that at all.

  7. Yuliya said on November 28, 2018 at 2:08 pm
    Reply

    I wonder how much of this is due to the data they gathered a few months ago and eventually sold, about its user base. Or maybe they were mining cryptocurrency through those telemetry addons. Hard to explain why Firefox with that telemetry addons installed was utilising two cores of my 6950x at 100%. I guess it really pais off to screew your userbase.

    Karma will hit them back hard though: imgur.com/byN8e5i
    Assuming such a thing like “karma” even exists. If not the reality will do it anyway.

    1. John Fenderson said on November 28, 2018 at 7:11 pm
      Reply

      @Yuliya: “Assuming such a thing like “karma” even exists.”

      Karma exists, although people usually misunderstand it. Essentially, the concept of Karma can be restated as “you will have to live in the world that you create”.

    2. Anonymous said on November 28, 2018 at 5:53 pm
      Reply

      No data that Mozilla collects is sold. The revenue sources are clearly labeled, why is that not clear?

      1. Yuliya said on November 28, 2018 at 7:19 pm
        Reply

        Anonymous 28.11.2018 17:53,
        I’m sorry, but I don’t trust a company which forces telemetry ON regardless of user choice, WHILE CLAMING THEY CARE ABOUT USER PRIVACY; a company which pushes tracking extensions despite the fact that the user opted out of all tests and telemetry, WHILE CLAMING THEY CARE ABOUT USER PRIVACY; a company which takes the user choice away, forcing autoupdates and constant pinging to their servers with no option to turn the damned thing OFF, WHILE CLAMING THEY CARE ABOUT USER PRIVACY; a company which forces promotional addons on people’s browser; a company which takes your data, processes it, so they can shove ads into your new tab page via their malware service called Pocket, WHILE STILL SHAMELESSLY CLAMING THEY CARE ABOUT USER PRIVACY!
        A company which believes only in diversity hire, neglecting a person’s time spent on learning, life achievements, knowledge, and experience – ultimately having a bunch of self-proclaimed “coders” working on the browser and breaking it more than “fixing “what was not necessary in the first place due to their lack of knowledge.
        How bad is Chromium? Pretty damn horrible. In of itself, just. Because I think Firefox just overtaken it in horribleness. Word has it the Chromium team is working on implementing scrolling tabs. The chromium team… Working on user-requested features… The Chromium team…

  8. Anonymous said on November 28, 2018 at 1:55 pm
    Reply

    Depend on a society like Google that does not want to pay its contribution practicing tax evasion is absolutely immoral.

  9. gwacks said on November 28, 2018 at 1:42 pm
    Reply

    @Flotsam

    Just for reference:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

    Some people here who criticize Mozilla beacause they’re very old school users and don’t like some bad moves Firefox takes recently, they will give constructive advices and hope Firefox become better. The rest are trolls who hate Mozilla and users’ concern for privacy, they hope nobody uses Firefox and Mozilla be dead in the end then all web users lose their final defense (i.e. paid trolls by EvilCorps).

    I don’t have evidence, but this is what I’m feeling and guessing.

  10. Lord-Lestat said on November 28, 2018 at 1:11 pm
    Reply

    They have become like Google a “for-profit-only-developer” – Additional money is fine, but selling their own user-base who loved geek features and customization – just to lure the Chrome crowd over to use Firefox – this is not fine.

    Especially if you have to realize your new darling user group (Chrome users) do not appreciate your “effort” to make the browser a Chrome user’s dream. Well Mozilla, enjoy your money and enjoy your shrinking market share – until you are weak enough for Google to swallow you with one simple bit.

  11. Flotsam said on November 28, 2018 at 12:29 pm
    Reply

    Why do people come here just to slag off Mozilla? It’s free software so if you think you can do a better job just fork it and release your own browser. Or fork off.

    1. insanelyapple said on November 29, 2018 at 9:39 am
      Reply

      There are people – myself included who doesn’t like the decisions that were made by Mozilla and they have every right to be unsatisfied and express themselves. That’s what opinions are – a variety of voices; not just mindless praising “the brand” but bashing as well.

      I was a long Firefox user but in the last years I was forced by “geniuses” at Mozilla to adjust lots of settings in configuration registry which were introduced to hurt my privacy because the company wanted additional gains in form of data. Not mention the gradual removal UI customization and in next step idiot-proofing and making it look similar to Chrome one and last but not least – abandoning the vast and amazing XUL extension platform. That plus destroyed profile after upgrading to one of Quantum builds made me switch to Vivaldi which is maybe not as configurable as Firefox, but at least doesn’t try to satisfy me by force.

      The Mozilla that cared about its users and opinions is long gone – the one that exist right now it’s just a sad joke of what it originally was.

      1. Lord-Lestat said on November 29, 2018 at 3:26 pm
        Reply

        @insanelyapple If i would have the option between only Firefox or any Chromium based browser.. Even if i would hate Mozilla too i would pick them – bc picking Chromium based browser just leads to more and more Google dominated web.

        Nobody should want or support that. As the consequences of this are no good ones.

      2. John Fenderson said on November 30, 2018 at 8:01 pm
        Reply

        @Lord-Lestat:

        If I could only choose between Chromium based browsers and Quantum, I’d stop using the web unless absolutely necessary. Fortunately, we have other options!

      3. Lord-Lestat said on December 1, 2018 at 4:26 pm
        Reply

        @John Fenderson Ok, agreed, i have forgot about that option. Seen from available options in such a worst-case-scenario giving up on the web does not sound unreasonable.

      4. insanelyapple said on November 29, 2018 at 5:47 pm
        Reply

        And that’s the saddest thing, the choice is now between Firefox and Chrome or variety Chromium-Blink based browsers which are only different by their customized features. There’s no competition since Opera abandoned Presto and sold itself to the Chinese company. Sure, there’s still Edge but really – what sane and aware of Microsoft shady tactics cares about it.

        The Chrome browser market share gain and thus in the end, dominance isn’t a fair one because Google itself was and still uses guerrilla tactics in promoting their browser. They dumped it aggressively as additional offer inside various software installers on Windows.

    2. Langly said on November 28, 2018 at 11:37 pm
      Reply

      Because Mozilla is trying so hard to be like Chrome with none of the advantages it used to have. I no longer recommend Firefox to anyone anymore. Vivaldi is where it’s at now. Highly recommend it to any old Firefox users.

      1. John Fenderson said on November 30, 2018 at 7:58 pm
        Reply

        @Langly:

        I no longer recommend Firefox either — not because there’s something wrong with it, but because I no longer use it and I am not comfortable recommending something that I’m not willing to use.

        I have a different opinion than you about Vivaldi, though, and don’t recommend that (or any other Chromium-based browser) either.

      2. Lord-Lestat said on November 29, 2018 at 3:23 pm
        Reply

        @langly Before i would go so far and recommend a Chromium based browser i rather would recommend everything NOT Chromium. Includes Waterfox, Seamonkey, Pale Moon, Otter-Browser with QTWebkit… and even Edge or Safari on MacOS*

        Supporting Google’s browser monopoly is clearly the utterly worst thing one can do, no matter which re-branded Chromium variant no matter of which name, may they call it “Brave” or “Vivaldi” – All those are just Chromium with very minor own code. Results in something which can every moment brake or be made impossible once Google decides it does not like what other companies are doing with their code.

    3. John Fenderson said on November 28, 2018 at 5:53 pm
      Reply

      @Flotsam:

      I don’t come here to slag on Firefox. I have a long history with Firefox and Mozilla, going back to the very earliest days. I have contributed a lot of money, time, and code to Mozilla and Firefox. I have a rather large affection for them both.

      That’s what made the release of Quantum so very painful for me, as with that, Firefox turned into a browser that I find painful and a nervous-making to use. Effectively, Mozilla chased me out of the community, and I still feel hurt and a bit betrayed by that.

      So, although I don’t use Quantum, I can’t help but follow the developments of it and occasionally I can’t resist pointing out things that I find particularly egregious. I suppose, in the back of my mind, I hope that Mozilla will take up an interest in improving the situation (although I know intellectually that they won’t).

      So, I suppose, chalk my comments up to simply expressing my opinion about something I care a lot about. There’s nothing any more wrong with that than there is with people who like Quantum expressing their opinions.

      1. Jody Thornton said on November 28, 2018 at 6:23 pm
        Reply

        You should be able to make whatever comments you like @John Fenderson. No differently than I make digs at Pale Moon (really just the team). Hey I’m very interested in the new Interlink mail project. If I was really a Pale Moon troll, would I fess up to that? And like you do with Firefox, I continue to follow the Moon past my abandoning it. Hey, what if don’t like the next Quantum ESR? I may have to look at other options right?

        Everyone’s viewpoints should be welcome here. And the my friend includes yours.
        :)

    4. Klaas Vaak said on November 28, 2018 at 12:54 pm
      Reply

      @Flotsam: true, the browser is free but that does not mean one is not allowed to criticise. I think the main gripe Firefox users have with Mozilla is that the company is not what it purports to be: a privacy-oriented browser.

      That is not what it used to be because Mozilla has embedded ever more telemetry in Firefox. And to have Yahoo or Google as default search engines does not make sense in this context.

      Furthermore, Mozilla have recently been making changes that are against users’ wishes and best interests, contrary to what they say in their explanations.

      So, at this stage the browser is still the most customisable one out there, but if Mozilla continue along their current path, and it seems like they will, then eventually Firefox could end being nothing more than snake oil.

    5. crambie said on November 28, 2018 at 12:48 pm
      Reply

      For me, even though I haven’t slagged them off except in my head, partly because of the dumbing down to be a me too chrome clone and partly because they make a big song and dance about being non-profit and beg for donations when they’re anything but. Then there’s this pretence of being all about privacy then get in to bed with Yahoo/Google, non-privacy defaults, lots of things now hidden in about:config and their “experiments” like cliqz. All of that plus some of the unsavoury organisations that they give money to makes me really not like them these days.

  12. user17843 said on November 28, 2018 at 12:28 pm
    Reply

    Couple of observations:

    – Pocket and other ad sources only bring in around $2.5 million. Pocket was acquired for 30 Million and it has a hard time being profitable.

    – If you take away dividents, interest, donations, etc. (income that doesn’t really count as revenue diversity due to it’s passive nature) then Mozilla has not in any way diversified their active revenue. Not even 1% comes from “Subscription and advertising revenue” which is the second pillar of Mozilla’s monetization. The only difference is that this year foreign currency exchange was a gain and not a loss, and interest was higher due to unforeseen events. Thus when the article says Mozilla increased “revenue from non-search engine deals” that’s not entirely true, as I wouldn’t count dividents and donations as deals.

    – The $540 Million include $375 million from Yahoo for the exclusive U.S. deal. That means Mozilla earned $165 million globally excluding the U.S. that year. That’s certainly strange. Only 10-15% of the entire user base comes from the U.S., which shows that Yahoo has broadly overpaid Mozilla.

    Nevertheless it’s interesting to see Mozilla increase their income in 2017, despite loss of market share:

    https://i.imgur.com/YUXvOcD.png

    So when you look at the above chart – you can see the increase in revenue thanks to the Yahoo deal. But why did Yahoo pay Mozilla 375M to be default search engine basically in the U.S. alone- when Google had paid Mozilla only 280 Million for the entire western world the year before?

    Unfortunately it is not entirely clear how the situation would have looked without this deal.

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on November 28, 2018 at 12:45 pm
      Reply

      I can’t say if Mozilla did overpay for Pocket; it is clear that Mozilla was interested in the data that Pocket had and integration of it in the Firefox browser. It would be interesting to know by how much Pocket’s revenue increased since the integration of the service in Firefox.
      Also note that Mozilla concluded the acquisition in February (I think). It is not clear if revenue from Pocket is for the whole year.

      1. user17843 said on November 28, 2018 at 3:03 pm
        Reply

        Here’s a nbew article which has a couple of quotes about the 2017 financials:

        https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/

        Not much about Pocket, except “Mozilla garnered nearly $3 million in revenue from Pocket, Dixon said.” But it seems Mozilla did only start to experiment with Pocket Ads in 2018, so that kind of revenue may not be included in the 2017 financials.

  13. ard said on November 28, 2018 at 12:19 pm
    Reply

    the comment from “Account unknown” looks a lot like fake news, without any facts nor references.

    -sold user base to who? never read something on this.
    -hit low in installations? not true as Firefox is growing over the last years. any other info I missed?

    1. P said on November 28, 2018 at 4:39 pm
      Reply

      Yeah mo$illa probably gets their stats from ‘unnamed sources’ just like fake news does. I block all of mo$illa’s ip addys and delete all unnecessary applications in the folder on each computer I install it on. Heck why use it at all, just install chrome.

      1. John Fenderson said on December 3, 2018 at 5:15 pm
        Reply

        @P:

        For all its faults, if privacy and security are issues that are important to you, Firefox still beats the pants off of Chrome.

    2. crambie said on November 28, 2018 at 3:32 pm
      Reply

      Apart from Mozilla saying Firefox is growing, but not coming up with any numbers to back that up, every report is showing they’re losing users.

    3. Jody Thornton said on November 28, 2018 at 3:01 pm
      Reply

      No @ard, he just means that since they abandoned XUL and went Quantum with webextensions, they forfeited their power user base. I’ve become used to no status bar or progress bar. Yes Pale Moon allowed me to use add-ons I really like – and yes there was CTR for those that hated Australis. But really, Quantum ESR 60 is such a damned good performer.

      If you look at it, Firefox now looks like a flat version of a “classic browser”, that looks really good in 2018.

      1. sl said on November 30, 2018 at 6:15 am
        Reply

        @Jody and @Lestat. You are missing something. The userbase you are talking about was not “the userbase”. It was a PART of the userbase not “the userbase”. It was very loud but not the majority of Firefox’s userbase. If it was “the userbase” Firefox would be now on 1%. It’s not. And there are stats showing it, no matter if some people want to ignore them.

        https://news.softpedia.com/news/google-chrome-s-market-share-15-times-bigger-than-microsoft-edge-s-523561.shtml

      2. Lord-Lestat said on December 1, 2018 at 12:08 am
        Reply

        @sl if you believe feature and customization removal will save Firefox, look again, this is not going to happen.

        So no, if Mozilla would have stayed with their own strength, flavor and character it had, they would be now in a much better place than the place in which they are now.

        Seems you are one of the guys who believes that they will become number one market share wise soon. Sorry, also that is not going to happen and it will not happen.

        Deciding for simplicity and speed only has not saved nor will it save Firefox. Only a dreamer is going to believe that it will.

      3. John Fenderson said on November 30, 2018 at 7:55 pm
        Reply

        @sl

        Subjectively, none of that matters. If Firefox no longer meets the needs of “legacy” user base, then it doesn’t matter to them even a little how much marketshare Firefox has — market share won’t make Firefox a better browser for them, and they have to find a different solution.

        Firefox deciding to jettison their legacy users in order to gain marketshare may (or may not — we’ll see) be a good business decision for them, but it’s still a decision that hurts those users. That’s why they complain.

    4. Lord-Lestat said on November 28, 2018 at 2:06 pm
      Reply

      @ard i guess they meant “sold” users who loved customization features and unique features against users who love mainstream features and speed only.

      This is no fake news, that is actually a fact – if you compare Mozilla Firefox between versions 1-28 and 29-x

      The only users who have drawn a benefit from all that are simple and Chrome users. All others who loved Firefox for uniqueness and creativity got nothing at all.

  14. Account unknown said on November 28, 2018 at 11:55 am
    Reply

    Well, they sold their user base and this is the result. Good for them, they also hit the new low in installations around the world.

  15. Malte said on November 28, 2018 at 11:38 am
    Reply

    It pays off to be a sell out.

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