State of Mozilla 2016
The State of Mozilla: 2016 Annual Report

      
  
    

    
      
        
              The State of Mozilla 2016 is our annual report. This report highlights
              activities for 2016 and is accompanied by detailed financials. This report
              is released when we submit the Mozilla non-profit tax filing for the previous
              calendar year.
            
          
            Harnessing the Power of the Internet for Public Good
          
          
            
              Billions of people depend on an open and accessible internet for knowledge,
              livelihood, and self-expression. It’s nearly impossible to imagine modern
              life without it. Billions more deserve the same chance.
            
            
              Mozilla works to harness the power of the internet for the public good.
              That’s why as a not-for-profit, Mozilla supports technologies and products,
              like Firefox, and leaders and citizens across the globe to make the internet
              healthier — easier to access, safer to use, and more empowering for
              everyone, everywhere.
            
            
              Guided by the principles of the Mozilla manifesto we focus the energy of
              thousands of Mozillians (employees, allies, volunteers) to influence the key
              issues impacting the health -- and future -- of the internet. Motivated by
              creating public benefit versus commercial gains, Mozilla is able to do the
              work that others won't, as both a guardian of the internet and an advocate
              of people's online lives.
            

          
          
            How Mozilla Operates
          
          
            
              Mozilla is not your average organization. Founded as a community open source
              project in 1998, Mozilla is structured as two organizations: the 501(c)3
              Mozilla Foundation, which backs emerging leaders and mobilizes citizens to
              create a global movement for the health of the internet; and its wholly owned
              subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, which creates products and explores new
              technologies that give people more control over their lives online and shapes
              the future of the internet for the public good. Each is governed by a separate
              board of directors. The two organizations work in close concert with each other
              and a global community of tens of thousands of volunteers under the single
              banner: Mozilla.
            
            
            
              Mozilla is deeply committed to diversity and inclusion. We want Mozilla to be a
              welcoming and productive place for everyone working towards our mission. We know
              we have a ways to go to fulfill this aspiration and we are committed to positive
              change. In 2016 and 2017 we launched programs and investments for our diverse
              employees and volunteer communities. These programs include education (how to
              understand and reduce bias, how to make it comfortable for more people to
              participate fully) and focus on reporting and enforcement. For example, Mozilla
              Corporation files an EEO-1 describing its employee base
              and voluntarily makes this document public annually.
            
            
            
              Mozilla Corporation has just over 1,000 employees worldwide. We believe that
              attracting talent that is motivated, creative and passionate is crucial to our
              success. We want to attract and retain that talent while ensuring total
              compensation is competitively reasonable and aligned with Mozilla’s culture and
              mission. While the compensation philosophy is similar between the Mozilla
              Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, the market frameworks used to benchmark
              total compensation are different given the nature of work and the talent required.
              Mozilla Corporation is benchmarked against a composite of similar-sized non-profits
              and for-profit consumer internet software companies. Mozilla seeks to align total
              compensation for its employees between individual and company performance.
            
            
              Mozilla Foundation’s programs are carried out by 80 employees and thousands of
              volunteers around the world. We also believe that attracting talent that is motivated,
              creative and passionate is crucial to the success of the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla
              Foundation is benchmarked against similar-sized nonprofit organizations and socially
              oriented technology companies. Mozilla Foundation also seeks to align total
              compensation for its employees between individual and company performance.
            
            
              This annual report provides an overview of activities from across Mozilla: including
              the social enterprise, market-based work of Mozilla Corporation; the philanthropic,
              social-movement efforts of Mozilla Foundation; and the vast and diverse activities of
              the broader Mozilla community.
            

          
          
            Mozilla Corporation: Products & Emerging Technologies
          
          
            
              Mozilla products are built to contribute to a healthy internet and deliver an amazing
              user experience. We measure our success not only by the adoption of our products, but
              also by our ability to increase the control people have in their online lives, our
              impact on the health of the internet, our contribution to standards, and how we work
              to protect and build the web that users need and want.
            
            
              With these broader aims in mind, Mozilla launched new Firefox products in 2016 across
              desktop and mobile platforms, with multi-process technology creating a faster experience
              for desktop users, as well as major updates of Firefox for iOS and Android. We also
              launched a new version of Firefox Focus for iOS (Firefox Klar in German-speaking countries)
              as a privacy focused browser that automatically blocks trackers. This work paved the way
              for the Android release of Firefox Focus in 2017.
            
            
            
              We also invested in major experiments through programs like Firefox Test Pilot and Mozilla
              Emerging Technologies. These efforts help us to develop our new products in alignment with
              what our users seek, and help us to foster web technologies along with the technology
              community to further evolve the open web. These developments led to new features like
              Firefox Screenshots, with over 16 million screenshots created every month, and Activity
              Stream, which were all launched in the fastest Firefox yet,
              Firefox Quantum in November 2017.
            
            
            
              Project Quantum powers the new Firefox, and was initiated in 2016 by combining the hard
              work of Quantum Flow with a new interface, Photon, and technologies like the Rust
              programming language and components of Servo such as Stylo and Webrender. Both Rust and
              Servo result from our long-term R&D investments for safety, performance, and
              interoperability in the web ecosystem.
            
            
              The web platform took a major step forward in 2016 with new versions of WebAssembly and
              WebGL 2 released, enabling unheard of performance for web applications. Additional
              progress was made with AV1 and the Open Media Alliance to achieve a video codec that
              performs better than existing solutions. In addition, with A-Frame as a platform for
              developers & WebVR released in Firefox Nightly in 2016 and then in 2017 to all users,
              Mozilla contributed to a growing ecosystem that supports content creation that works
              across multiple platforms.
            
            
            
              In 2016 Mozilla Corporation continued its relationship with Read It Later, Inc. the
              developers of Pocket. Pocket began as a Firefox Add-on
              nearly a decade ago and has become known as the world’s leading “save and read it
              later” solution across devices and platforms. Pocket currently has more than 10
              million active monthly registered  users and is integrated into hundreds of leading
              apps. The relationship deepened resulting in Mozilla Corporation acquiring Read It
              Later, Inc. in 2017. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Corporation with
              roughly 30 employees.
            
            
            
            
              In all of our work in product and technology, transparency is a key part of how Mozilla
              gains and maintains trust in the global environment in which we work. As an open source
              project that relies on open development, we build transparency into the way we write our
              code - even working to open source the code that was acquired when Mozilla Corporation
              completed the acquisition of Read It Later, Inc. Additionally, we focus on describing
              how we handle user data not just in our privacy policy, but through “in context notices”
              to users as a way to create deeper opportunities for understanding and choice. With this
              transparency in mind, we publish bi­-annual transparency reports
              that help provide additional transparency to government disclosures and takedown requests.
            
            

          
          
            Mozilla Foundation: Investing in Leaders and Mobilizing Citizens
          
          
            
              As a complement to Mozilla's work in the market, Mozilla Foundation leads a
              series of philanthropic efforts to ensure the internet remains a force for
              public good. These efforts are  driven by a global community of employees,
              volunteers, partners, allies, donors and supporters. In many ways, this community
              is akin to the early environmental movement: promoting the idea that the digital
              environment we live in should be open, accessible and healthy for all of us.
            
            
              At the core of this work is Mozilla Foundation’s efforts to find, support and
              connect leaders with the talent, resources, drive and deep social connections to
              each other that are necessary to keep the internet healthy. Some of these leaders
              shape the world through code – they are engineers, data scientists, designers.
              Many are educators, journalists, scientists, activists or policy makers. All are
              using their craft to protect and enrich the health of the internet. In 2016,
              Mozilla invested $2.5M in fellowships and grants to leaders like these. This
              number will double to $5M in 2017.
            
            
            
              The Mozilla Foundation is also focused on simplifying and humanizing issues related
              to digital life and making the concept of ‘a healthy internet’ mainstream. During
              late 2016 and early 2017, we developed the alpha version of the
              Internet Health Report as an initial beachhead for this
              effort. Designed as an open source, community project, we invited people to work with
              us on curating research, framing and writing the report. Grassroots leaders and
              researchers from around the world – as well as colleagues in the Mozilla Corporation
              policy and issue marketing teams – play a central role in this and other efforts to
              define and explain the most important internet issues of our day.
            
            
            
              Finally, the Mozilla Foundation runs campaigns to educate and empower citizens across
              the web. In 2016, this included an education campaign on the critical role encryption
              plays in everyday internet life. Launched amidst the February 2016 Apple v. FBI case,
              campaign videos simplified complex online security issues for the public and the media.
              Over the course of 2016 and 2017, Mozilla also ran campaigns around the need for more
              creative, internet-friendly copyright in the European Union and on the continued
              importance of protecting net neutrality in the United States. In late 2017, Mozilla
              launched a ‘privacy not included’ holiday shopping guide reviewing toys and other
              electronics – this was a first step in a large scale plan for consumer engagement
              on data and privacy issues.
            

          
          
            Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation: Maintaining Sustainability
          
          
            
              This annual report includes links to the detailed audited 2016 financial statements
              for Mozilla.  Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla
              Corporation and all subsidiaries) for CY 2016 was $520M (US), as compared to $421M
              in 2015.
            
            
              Mozilla Foundation philanthropic programs and activities are funded by public support
              from individual donors and foundations ($13.8M), as well as from royalties earned
              that are paid by the Mozilla Corporation ($8.3M). Total revenue and income support to
              the Mozilla Foundation in CY 2016 was $23.4M. Funds from individual donors and
              foundations are used to support agenda setting work like the Internet Health Report,
              campaigns such as ‘privacy not included’ and fellowships and awards for internet
              health leaders from around the world.
            
          
              
                
                  Mozilla Foundation and Subsidiary
                  Consolidating Statement of Activities and Change in Net Assets, Year ended December 31, 2016.
                
                
                  
                    Unrestricted Net Assets
                    Mozilla Foundation
                    Mozilla Corporation
                    Eliminations
                    Consolidated
                  
                
                
                  
                    Revenue and other support:
                  
                  
                    Royalties
                    $8,349
                    $504,145
                    ($8,817)
                    $503,677
                  
                  
                    Interest and dividend income
                    $353
                    $2,665
                    
                    $3,018
                  
                  
                    Net realized and unrelealized gain from investments
                    $778
                    $72
                    $226
                    $1,076
                  
                  
                    Contributions
                    $5,440
                    
                    
                    $5,440
                  
                  
                    Other
                    $191
                    
                    
                    $191
                  
                  
                    Foreign currency exchange gain (loss)
                    $48
                    ($488)
                    ($801)
                    ($1,241)
                  
                  
                    Loss of sale assets
                    
                    ($124)
                    
                    ($124)
                  
                
                
                  
                    Net assets released from restrictions
                    $8,336
                    
                    
                    $8,336
                  
                
                
                  
                    Total unrestricted revenue and support
                    $23,495
                    $506,270
                    ($9,392)
                    $520,373
                  
                
              
            

          

            
            
              The majority of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue is from royalties earned through Firefox
              web browser search partnerships and distribution deals around the world. Mozilla
              Corporation’s revenue and income support for CY 2016 was $506M, as compared to $414M in
              CY 2015. Over the past several years, Mozilla has shifted from having one global search
              default in Firefox to a more local and flexible approach by country to offer users more
              choice and to enable innovation and competition in search. In 2015 and 2016, we expanded
              this new global search strategy and secured new partnerships with DuckDuckGo, Google and
              Yahoo 1. In 2016, Mozilla Corporation began
              making strategic investments and acquisitions to further innovation by making a
              strategic investment in Cliqz GmbH (German-based provider of
              search and privacy tools) to enable innovation of privacy-focused search experiences.
              Mozilla Corporation continues this collaboration today with even more developments in 2017.
            
            
            
              Revenue from Mozilla Corporation and donations to Mozilla Foundation are reinvested into
              advancing the Mozilla mission and protecting internet health, which means that all of our
              resources at Mozilla contribute to the overall sustainability and health of the internet.
            

            
            
              1 In November 2017, Mozilla announced Google as the
              Firefox default search provider in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan. This
              decision was made as part of our ongoing search strategy,
              announced in 2014 to evaluate and select the best search
              experience in each region as opposed to having a single global default.
            
            

          
          
            Join Mozilla
          
          
            
              Our mission is to ensure the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.
              This mission is as important now as it has ever been. We urge everyone who is interested to
              find a way to contribute to protecting the internet. We invite you to
              download Firefox  or volunteer
              to be part of Mozilla or donate to support the work of internet
              health leaders around the world. Learn more at mozilla.org.
            
            


      

  
        






      


      
      
    