 Mozilla and I have a really fractious relationship. We don't get along all that well. I have a lot of very negative things to say about Mozilla. And it's a shame because Mozilla is probably one of the largest open source organizations in existence. When you think of huge open source companies, you think of Mozilla, you think of Canonical, you think of Red Hat, and you think of OpenSUSA. You know, those are the companies that you think of. And Mozilla is one of the largest ones. And they're one of the huge supporters of open source. They create a ton of open source goodwill for a lot of people because Firefox is open source. It's like the only good open source browser that's out there. And people should use it, but people aren't using it. They're slowly losing users, because for reasons that we'll talk about here in a minute. And they're slowly losing the ability to make money on their own. All their money, basically all their money comes from Google. And obviously that's not something that they like. They've been searching basically in vain for the last 10 maybe even longer years for a way to make money outside of that Google payout. They've tried VPNs, they've tried asking for money, they've tried putting advertisements on the new tab page. They've tried many, many things in order to make money. And none of them have been successful. So they continue to have to rely on that $400, $500 million they get from Google every 10 years or every five years or whatever it is. And that's not a great or sustainable business model. It's not great because you're an open source company that competes with Google and you're getting most of your money from Google. It's not great. So I can understand why they've tried so many different ways of making money. All that being said, their most recent idea to make money is putting ads in the search bar. This is their idea, put ads in the place where people actually put in information. Like of all the places in the browser to put advertisements, the one place that directly takes input from the user is the search bar or the address bar. And that's where you're going to put advertisements. And it's not just gonna be just regular advertisements, it's going to be advertisements based on what people search for. So that means they're gonna be taking data from the user, passing it to the advertiser in order to get relevant advertising. That means they're gonna be taking your data and passing it to someone else. This is a privacy-respecting organization that's going to be doing this. And we can understand that they're trying to make money. As I said, they're trying to get away from that Google hand and more power to them that they keep coming up with ideas and they're not just giving up. But this is a stupid idea. You, Mozilla, are a privacy-focused organization. You're an open-source organization who is trying to say our browser is the most private browser you possibly could have. And one of your ideas to make money is to put advertising in the search bar. It makes no sense. It makes no sense. And the thing is, and this is going to be a very ranty video, so just bear with me. The thing is, is that it would be so easy for Mozilla to make money. And I say that because they don't actually need that much money. The problem with Mozilla is that the reason why they keep eating through that $400 million is because they employ too many people, okay? Mozilla employs something like 750 people. And that's like after cutting 70% of their workforce. The fact that they employ 700 people just boggles my mind. It does not, literally they have two projects. Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Those are the only two that anybody uses. I mean, you can't say, well, the VPN is there. That's a project. That's not actually a project. That's just a rebranding of a different VPN. They have a couple other open source things like the one that takes voice input or whatever and tries to train an AI or whatever. But that's just such a small project and it's superfluous. Doesn't matter. It could go away and nobody would notice it was gone. So really, they have those two that anybody use. And I mean, if we're being serious, those are the two that they have to focus on. Where are, why do they need so many people? It doesn't, I mean, it boggles my mind that they need 700 people. Cut it in half, okay? Or don't cut it in half and just pay your executives less. Every time I talk about Firefox, I have to talk about the fact that they pay their CEO over $2 million a year. And you might not even believe me that when I say they pay her over $2 million a year, but it is true. All you got to do is Google, note the irony, they're all you have to do is Google Mozilla CEO salary and you'll find out that in 2018, the CEO earned $2.458 million. And according to Wikipedia, which we all know is the most accurate thing ever, but let's just assume that it's right because it has a source that's a 400% pay raise since 2008. So in 10 years, they raised the CEO's salary 400%. And this is a corporation that makes no money. They make no money on the run. The only money they have coming in is from Google. So they take that $400 million and they pay this person over $2 million a year and they employ 700 people, over 700 people. They don't need that many people. They don't need a CEO that makes that much money. They don't need one. They need to fire her. I don't care how good or bad she is. She's not worth that kind of money. Not when your browser is slowly and surely approaching zero when it comes to the number of users. Eventually, the only people who are gonna use Firefox are going to be the Linux guys. They're, I mean, it's basically that way right now. Yeah, they have millions of users, but eventually it's just gonna be the people who are diehard open source fans. And that's not enough to sustain you. You're never going to be able to make money on your own with just that audience. You have to have an audience that is broader if you're going to make money and still employ hundreds of people and pay your CEO that kind of money, which again, they don't actually need to do, but they seem to think that they need to do it. It's horrendous. And that's why their continued efforts to make money are so stupid because it's never gonna work. Putting advertisements in the search bar isn't gonna bring in money enough to replace that Google handout. It's not going to. All it's gonna do is piss off the people that are supporting you. That's all it's going to do. It's not going to go through and endear people to you. That's for damn sure. And I think that the vast majority of Firefox users probably wouldn't care if they found ads in their start pages or whatever. I mean, there'd be a small segment that would bitch about it, but as long as they were actually privacy respecting, you know, most people wouldn't care because the vast majority of people who support Firefox understand that Firefox and Mozilla needs to make money. They understand this. The problem is that the ways that Mozilla has gone about it have been dumb. Whether it's the VPN that's not actually their VPN, so they don't even get to keep all that money, that's not even a good VPN. They actually took a good VPN and made it worse according to several studies or there are multiple attempts of putting ads in weird places. These are just dumb ideas. Now I said it earlier that it would be so easy for them to make money. The only way that statement is true is if they hired or they fired a lot of people and paid their executive team less. And the reason why I say that it would be easy for them to make money is because they have the money in their coffers. They get paid from Google a lot of money. They could take that $400 million or whatever it is and stretch that thing out for a long time. They could go through and invest that money into Firefox and make it just so good that Chrome couldn't compete. But that's not what they're doing. Like in the audience, in the comments below, can you tell me one thing, like that's user-facing that Firefox has done in the last four or five years that has dramatically improved your browsing? Maybe, I mean, maybe there's one or two things. I couldn't name anything in Firefox right now that improves my browsing that has come out in the last couple of years. It feels like Firefox is standing still. I mean, they've made their password manager better. Great. Don't use your browser for password manager. It's a horrible idea. Use something that's standalone, something that you can either host yourself or that's at least third-party audited. You know what I mean? Don't use a browser password manager. It's not a good idea because that's owned by a company that even Firefox now sells your data. Okay? I don't think that you should trust them. But that's beside the point. So, I mean, what other features out there what other features can you mention that have been put into Firefox in the last couple of years that have made it better? I don't think there are any. And if there are a couple, you know, I haven't noticed them. And I use Firefox every single day. They've redone the UI a couple of times. And while I'm all for changing your user interface a lot. I love change. I think it's cool. As long as the UI is not terrible, I'm all for change. But I'm very, very rare in that most people don't want their stuff to change that often. So, most of what they've done in terms of UI improvements over the last couple of years has just pissed people off. You know, and people don't like it at all. They want to go back to the way it used to be. You know, they want it to look like Chrome for the most part. I mean, or more, I think they just want them to choose a design and, you know, kind of stick with it. You know, they've changed the UI of Firefox at least twice in the last three years. And that's not something that is probably all that great because most people don't enjoy that kind of thing. So, I mean, is that what all those people at Firefox are working on is new UI designs? I mean, I don't understand. I don't get it. Now, the original point of this video was to talk about the advertisements in the search bar. And I think that I would just be laboring the point. You know, it's not a good idea, privacy-wise, because they're gonna be sending data to advertisements and stuff like that. Yeah, it pisses me off, too. But there are so many other, I mean, the underlying issue here is that Firefox doesn't know how to spend money. You know, they get this handout, which is probably not a good idea, but they get this handout and they just spend it on a ton of people that they don't need. You know, I mean, I always feel like it's such a douchebag when I say fired a lot of people. Like, those are people that, you know, get paid and have to feed their families, but I feel like a douchebag saying they should lose their jobs and I'm not talking about all of them. Like, seriously, employ 500 people, you know? Surely you can make a browser with 500 people, you know? And your CEO doesn't need to make $2 million a year. Let them make a million dollars a year. Spread that $400 million out over the next 10 years. And, you know, or focus so much of your work. I mean, keep everybody, pay them what you want, but focus on making a good browser. Focus on making Firefox so good, everyone wants to use it. Right now, you can't say that Firefox is the best browser. You can't say that because it's not. It's a good browser, it's not horrible, it has flaws. I mean, but Google Chrome has flaws. If you boil it down, what makes Google Chrome good is the fact that it's from Google, you know? People use Google Chrome because it's become the default. You know, it's become a household name. And that's not something that Firefox can really compete with and probably can never would be able to compete with. The only way Firefox survives is by slimming down to the point where they can make enough money from the open source community itself and maintain a browser that is going to always be a niche browser. It's never going to go through and be 50, 60% of the market. It's just never gonna be there. If it's like Linux. Linux is never going to be 60, 70% of the desktop market. It's never going to be there. They have to be happy with one or 2%. And you can't run a company with 700 people and a CEO that makes that kind of money and only serve one or 2% of the market and expect to ever be profitable. You just, it's just economics. You can't do it. So they have to slim down. They have to refocus their energy on being what they can be which is a browser that serves a very small market and make it good. Then over time, possibly they can start building up name recognition and start taking back some of the market share. I don't think that they're ever going to be big again but that's the only way they're going to do it. It has to be a good, fantastic browser first before they can ever go about doing that because right now people are leaving because it has issues. It has problems rendering some pages. It has, it's not as fast as Google Chrome in a lot of cases. It doesn't work well with things like Google Docs. It works okay but it's not full featured. And that's mostly Google's problem because they deliberately, you know, make it so that Google Docs and stuff works better in Google browser. But Firefox has to have a solution for that kind of thing because people use those tools so much. This has been a very rambly video and I could probably go on for goodness, another 20 minutes if I wanted to but I think that it would probably just start repeating myself over and over again. I use Firefox on a daily basis. I want Firefox to be successful. I want Mozilla to be profitable. I want them to be, to make money. And, you know, because I want them to exist in 10 years. I would love it if Firefox and Mozilla was still around 10 years, 20 years from now and was still kicking out an awesome open source browser. One that wasn't based on a Chrome web engine. Because Firefox is literally the only one. There's not another browser out there that doesn't use Blink. I mean, unless it's already based on Firefox. I mean, there's a few Firefox-based browsers but I mean, without Firefox those would go away. I mean, things like Ice Wolf and Waterfox or whatever, those would go away without Firefox because they don't actually develop those browsers. They just take the privacy stuff out. Do better things with privacy. It's just Firefox underneath. Now it's possible that somebody would fork Firefox and actually start developing the browser bits of it. If Firefox was actually going to die, I mean, that's possible, but it does take a lot of people to do an actual browser. I don't know that it requires 700 people but we've already covered that, you know? So, I come back to the fact that I want them to succeed but I don't think that they will. I don't know what their problem is and it's just, it's demoralizing and sad and every idea they come up with to make money just seems more desperate than the last and none of them will work. This new ads thing will eventually get pulled out because it's just gonna piss so many people off. And even if it does stay in there, it's not gonna make them a lot of money. It's not gonna replace that Google hand out. The way open source makes money is through support. Maybe the way they make money is by getting enterprise to use Firefox. But again, in order for that to happen, it's gotta be good. You know, it's gotta be able to compete with Edge and Chrome and stuff like that. It's gotta be good. And they don't seem to be focused on the browser at all. Like they just keep focusing on coming up with weird ass ways of making money and redesigning the UI every two years. Why it takes 700 people to do that, I don't know. All right, so that's the end of this video. I'm sorry about the rambling nature of it. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go. I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Devon, Chris, East Coast Web, Jen2s12, Patrick L, Marcus, Meglens, Finn, Jackson, Nathan, Jules, D.Vay, Mitchell, Art, Sinner, Merrick, Kent, Joshua Lee, J-Dog, and the BSCs Rock. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.