The EconomistJuly 20th 2019 Business 57T
he greatestfear of an ambitious technology firm is to be con-
demned to “legacy”, tech speak for irrelevance. Its products
may still be used, but out of inertia. The damning judgment could
apply to Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser. Even on perso-
nal computers, where it used to excel, its market share has
dropped steeply over the past ten years, from 30% to 10%, at a time
when browsers have been losing ground to apps on smartphones.
You could argue that Mozilla is kept alive by its main competitor,
Google, whose Chrome browser accounts for 60% of the market
and which provides most of Mozilla’s revenue in exchange for the
privilege of being Firefox’s default search engine.
Put all this to Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s intense but approach-
able chairwoman and spiritual leader, and she is unfazed. Quite
the opposite: more than ever, she counters, the digital realm needs
an organisation that “puts people first and doesn’t squeeze every
last penny out of the system”—unlike most of today’s tech giants.
Is Ms Baker right? And if she is, what does the 20-year Mozilla ex-
periment mean for the penny-squeezing parts of Big Tech?
Mozilla has always been a strange beast. It began life in 1998
after the “browser war” of the first dotcom boom, between Micro-
soft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator. Even though the
fight got Microsoft into deep trouble with competition authorities,
which nearly broke it up, Netscape, an internet pioneer, had to ca-
pitulate. But as a parting shot it released the Navigator’s source
code, so that an alliance of volunteer developers could keep the
browser alive—and fight the “borg”, as Microsoft was called then,
referring to a universe-conquering alien group from “Star Trek”.
Even compared with other such open-source projects, Mozilla
remains an unusual hybrid. It boasts a volunteer workforce of
nearly 23,000 that contributes about half of the company’s com-
puter code in exchange for little more than recognition from their
peers and the satisfaction of chipping in to a project they believe
in. But it also has 1,100 paid employees, two-thirds of them pro-
grammers. It chiefly develops software, but offers services, too, in-
cluding things like file transfer. And it is two organisations in one:
the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, both based in
Silicon Valley. The first is a charity, which owns the second and
makes sure that it does not stray from its mission. The corporate
armisincharge of products and gets the cash that search engines
pay for appearing on Firefox’s start page. Together Google, China’s
Baidu, Russia’s Yandex and a host of smaller firms forked out
$542m for the traffic they got from Firefox in 2017, the last year for
which data are available, more than Mozilla’s expenses of $422m.
The set-up is less than optimal. Firefox’s falling market share is
partly down to slow decision-making, which must involve the vol-
unteers. It took years to begin collecting data about how its soft-
ware is used, which helps improve it but raised privacy concerns
that were only allayed recently. Mozilla was slow to kill an ill-fated
mobile operating system, which cost it hundreds of millions of
dollars. It has yet to find sources of revenue beyond the browser;
details of plans to charge for add-on services, such as secure stor-
age or virtual private networks, are scarce. And, in an echo of foun-
der-dominated tech firms, too much responsibility rests on Ms
Baker, who chairs both the foundation and the corporation.
Yet Mozilla turns out to be much more consequential than its
mixed record and middling numbers would have you believe.
There are three reasons for this.
For one thing, Mozilla has shown that the open-source ap-
proach can work in consumer software, which even its champions
doubted when the outfit got going. Some studies have shown that
Firefox now beats Chrome in terms of speed, for instance. Second,
an oversight board that looks beyond the narrow business can help
tech firms live up to Google’s original credo, abandoned last year,
of “Don’t be evil”—potentially useful when the likes of Google and
Facebook stand accused of monopolising markets, playing fast
and loose with user data, even undermining democracy.
Lastly, like Linux, an open-source operating system, and to an
extent Android, Google’s semi-open software that powers mobile
devices, Mozilla has demonstrated that a non-commercial alterna-
tive minded to defend users’ interests is good for consumers in
digital markets. Although Mozilla is not solely responsible for the
widespread adoption of open standards for browsers, even rival
firms concede that it helped to chivvy them along. Firefox was the
first browser to block pop-up ads and allow users to surf anony-
mously, prompting commercial browsers to offer similar features.
Google’s plans to make it harder for other firms to track Chrome us-
ers on the web may have been precipitated by Firefox’s decision
last month to turn on anti-tracking features as the default setting.
Don’t expect Silicon Valley to transform itself into an agglomer-
ation of Mozillas anytime soon. But tech giants are toying with
some Mozilla-esque ideas. Last month Facebook announced an-
other step towards an independent “oversight board”—not unlike
the board of the Mozilla Foundation—to make the tough calls on
what content should be allowed on the site. Earlier this year Google
convened an expert group to ponder the ethics of its artificial-in-
telligence endeavours (it was disbanded after employee protests
over its composition).Outfoxing Big Tech
To rivals and critics of dominant tech firms Mozilla shows a way to
keep them honest. Hints of what it has done to browsers can be dis-
cerned in other corners of cyberspace, from open-source wallets
where people can keep their digital identities to social networks
that are not controlled by one company. Mozilla itself is working
on Common Voice, a rival to digital assistants like Amazon’s Echo
and Apple’s Siri. Breaking up the tech giants is a satisfying war
cry—but probably futile. Perhaps it would be better to breed more
Firefoxes instead. 7Schumpeter Firefox and friends
What open-source ways of the web can teach the tech titans—and their critics