“Right now we have hundreds of millions of users, and that gives us a certain influence,” Beard says. “Maybe [membership] would be more powerful to say we represent the concerns of our members, and these are the issues we want to advance.”

Mozilla has long used Firefox to pursue priorities bridging technology, politics and society like programming literacy and net neutrality. But it’s more serious now. Dixon leads a team of eight people who spend their day lobbying politicians and their staff in Europe and the US.

In the recent US debate over net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally so big players can’t dominate, Mozilla delivered more than 42,000 signatures defending the idea. Mozilla is also trying to stop government efforts to weaken privacy-protecting encryption, reverse what it sees as overly broad copyright restrictions in Europe and speak against President Donald Trump’s immigration ban efforts, which “impacted everything we do as an organization and everything we care about,” Dixon says.

“We are tiny but mighty,” says Dixon, speaking in Mozilla’s San Francisco offices, which are tucked into the historic Hills Brothers Coffee building by the Bay Bridge. Pedestrians walking in the entrance see a column with Firefox’s glossy logo at the top and thousands of names of Firefox contributors and volunteers, engraved below.

Mozilla is willing to buy influence, too — particularly in mobile, where it’s so weak. One option is paying partners to distribute Firefox on their phones. “We’re going to have to put money toward it,” Dixon says, but she expects it’ll pay off when Mozilla can share revenue from the resulting search traffic.

But her colleague Mayo thinks it's time to rethink the mobile web more profoundly. “The existential threat on mobile is that you don't need a browser,” Mayo says. “We’re no longer motivated by replacing the default browser. We’re more motivated by how the hell do you surf web pages on a mobile device?”



Flexing muscle

If you were launching a tech startup, you’d kill for more than 100 million people using your product daily, eight million of them on phones. But for Mozilla and Firefox, it’s a step backward.

Net Applications’ NetMarketShare service shows a decline in the percentage of individuals using Firefox: Over the last three years, it dropped from 16 percent to 12 percent on PCs — though to be fair, it also recovered from an 8 percent low point last August.

