A new CEO for Mozilla

Including the subsidiaries, Mozilla in 2022 had revenue of roughly $510M in royalties (from default/optional search engines), plus $75M in subscriptions (Pocket Premium and VPN) and advertising (sponsored content on the new tab page, etc). Their expenses were $220M for software development, plus another $200M for administration and marketing etc. They made a net gain of $145M, with cash reserves of $510M.

They say "81% ... of Mozilla's revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer", which presumably means Google.

(Source: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-... via https://stateof.mozilla.org/)

So I think the problem is, Mozilla is almost entirely dependent on Google - that's at least $400M of revenue if I'm interpreting it correctly. If they lost that $400M (and couldn't find another search engine to replace it), they'd run out of cash in about two years.

Also, total royalties were $300M back in 2012 (when Firefox had ~20% browser market share, according to Statcounter), $500M in 2016 (~8% market share), and have stayed around $500M until now (~3% market share) (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/). Google's funding has increased or remained stable despite Firefox's substantial drop in market share, which suggests Google might be being somewhat charitable and supporting Mozilla with more funding than their search engine placement is really worth. If Google decides to stop being that charitable, because they no longer see a strategic benefit in Firefox's continued existence, Mozilla will be in deep trouble.

That seems a good reason to attempt to diversify their sources of revenue, to provide more confidence that Firefox can survive longer than just the next couple of years.