Mozilla

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Mozilla

Basic information
Founded	1998
Type	Private
Industry	Open Source Software, Advertising
Official website	https://www.mozilla.org/

Mozilla is a free software community which develops, publishes and supports open-source software. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

Consumer-impact summary

Mozilla Manifesto

Mozilla has published the community Manifesto, with 10 key principles:

1. The internet is an integral part of modern life—a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
2. The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
3. The internet must enrich the lives of individual human beings.
4. Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
5. Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on the internet.
6. The effectiveness of the internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.
7. Free and open source software promotes the development of the internet as a public resource.
8. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.
9. Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
10. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

Critiques of excessive executive pay

Mozilla has been losing market share consistently for 15 years. Despite Mozilla’s continuous decline, executive compensation at both the Mozilla non-profit and Mozilla for-profit are disproportionately high.

Industry examples

Executive Compensation vs. Revenue Comparison

Year	Company	Executive	Compensation	Total Revenue	% of Revenue	Source
2018	Google	Sundar Pichai	$1,881,066	$136,819,000,000	0.0014%
2023	Google	Sundar Pichai	$8,802,824	$307,394,000,000	0.0029%
2018	Mozilla (Foundation + Corporation)	Mitchell Baker	$2,458,350	$450,860,000	0.55%
2023	Mozilla (Foundation + Corporation)	Mitchell Baker	$6,223,660	$653,012,000	0.95%
2023	Mozilla Foundation (Non-Profit only)	Mark Surman	$661,886	$64,660,933	1.02%

Google far surpasses Mozilla in both revenue and market share, yet Google pays its executives a much lower percentage of overall revenue. In 2018, for instance, Google CEO Sundar Pichai earned $1.88 million, which was only 0.0014% of Google’s $136.8 billion in revenue. By 2023, his compensation had increased to $8.8 million, yet it still amounted to just 0.0029% of Google’s staggering $307.4 billion in revenue.

In stark contrast, Mozilla’s leadership has consistently taken home a much larger percentage of the organization's revenue, despite its financial struggles and crushing defeat in browser market share. In 2018, Mitchell Baker received $2.46 million, amounting to 0.55% of Mozilla’s total combined revenue of $450.9 million. By 2023, as Mozilla’s total combined revenue increased to $653 million, executive compensation stayed disproportionately high: Baker received $6.22 million (0.95% of total revenue). Meanwhile, Mark Surman, who only works for the Mozilla Foundation (non-profit), earned $661,886, which accounted for 1.02% of the Foundation’s $64.7 million in revenue.

The disparity between Mozilla’s executive pay and its financial performance is shocking. Google, a company with far more market success, compensates its CEO at a fraction of its revenue, while Mozilla, a failing browser in terms of market share, provides a much higher percentage of its limited revenue to executive salaries of individuals that contribute no code.

Investment Income

Mozilla Foundation's revenue comes from investments more so than donations. In 2023, Mozilla reported $37,574,982 in investment income, accounting for over 58% of the non-profit’s total revenue for the year.

The investment income comes from three primary sources:

• Publicly traded securities and other investments: Mozilla maintains a portfolio of investments that generate annual returns.
• Program-related investments and royalties: The Foundation earned $18,639,553 in royalties from licensing its intellectual property to support open-source projects.
• Dividends and interest: Mozilla also earns investment income from dividend-paying stocks and interest-bearing assets.

Mozilla's reliance on investment income rather than direct contributions has raised questions about how responsive Mozilla Foundation is to the viability and market share of Mozilla software and its mission, given its ability to survive & continue paying high executive compensation regardless of whether work towards the core mission is being performed in a competent fashion.

Incidents

Removing the "We don't sell your data" promise

In February 2025, Mozilla started to delete references to their "We don't sell your data" promise from the source code, as first reported by Haiku operating system developer waddlesplash on the forum thread for their Firefox/Iceweasel port.

They also switched the wording from "The best privacy" to "Always protected".

Introducing TOS for Firefox (2025)

Main article: Mozilla introduces TOS to Firefox

Important: This situation is ongoing so the full impact to consumers has yet to be determined

In February 2025 Mozilla introduced terms of use (TOS) for the Firefox browser for the first time as well as an updated privacy policy. The new privacy policy has caused concern among the browser's user revolving around the way the section that describes the rights Mozilla has over their data is phrased.

Privacy-preserving attribution

Privacy-preserving attribution (PPA) is an experimental feature introduced in Firefox version 128, designed to help advertising sites measure the performance of their ads while maintaining user privacy. It is marketed as an alternative method for performing attribution without relying on online tracking of users' browsing activity, which is incompatible with privacy. The functionality is explained on the Mozilla support page as follows:

1. Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
2. If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.

Browsing activity information is not sent to anyone, not even Mozilla. Users with PPA enabled, however, must rely solely on the company to honor principle number 4 in its Manifesto.

PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.

This feature does not allow users to make an informed decision and choose whether to opt in or not, as it is enabled by default and requires that the user actively opt out. This goes against principle number 8 of the Manifesto.

Anonym acquisition

In June 2024, Mozilla became an advertiser by acquiring Anonym, which went against its mission of being a proponent of privacy.

Mr Robot promotional web extension

In December 2017 Mozilla, in collaboration with the Mr Robot team, created and included by default a web extension in Firefox called Looking Glass. While the extension was disabled by default, many users were confused and worried to discover a unknown extension installed in their browser with a cryptic description "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS". This description was later expanded to include references to Mozilla's collaboration.

When activated, the extension executes code on all websites visited by the user, searching for all words matching a list. Every match is then wrapped in HTML span tags, and tooltips are injected to be displayed when the user hovers over these matches. CSS code is injected to make the words appear upside down and the tooltips work. Also three specific websites did have their headers changed to have a value "x-1057" injected.

While the extension could in rare occasion break some website with the HTML and CSS injection, it did not do anything malicious or dangerous. The extension was not collecting any personal information at all, but Mozilla admitted it had made a mistake in its response addressing the issue.

A SHIELD study must be designed to answer a specific question. We evaluated Looking Glass based on whether or not it upheld user privacy. Since it did not collect any data, we felt that it was safe. In retrospect, not capturing data was a strong indicator that this was not a good SHIELD study candidate, so we’re making sure we’re going to specifically evaluate future studies based on this criteria to ensure that we don’t repeat our mistake.

Alternatives

There are other browsers using the same browser engine as Firefox, but with the telemetry and data gathering removed and privacy-friendly preferences set by default. For desktop operating systems, these include LibreWolf and GNU Ice Cat. On Android, Fennec is available through the F-Droid store.

Completely free alternative browsers are currently under active development, some of which show promise to become viable, truly independent, open-source browser engines in the foreseeable future. These include the Ladybird browser initiated by SerenityOS creator Andreas Kling.

As for Thunderbird, some open-source soft forks such as BetterBird are available.