Let me pay for Firefox
(discourse.mozilla.org)703 points by csmantle 15 hours ago
703 points by csmantle 15 hours ago
I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier. It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
Like, in general, I find that any HN thread where most of the comments are just agreeing, one-upping and yes-anding while invoking the same talking points and terminology (CEO ghouls, etc.) is probably a topic we might need to chill out on.
Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs.
Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.
Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still).
The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.
It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more sense.
Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation.
So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox.
For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox.
There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.
I'm in the same boat as you. Even if there's slight issues with Firefox, being able to synchronize my profile with my phone using the Firefox app outweighs all of that. AFAIK, Chrome doesn't have that.
There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners and having your costs inflate to match these donations, rather than something, anything to help the sustainability of Mozilla.
Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come.
Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation.
I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released.
I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not.
[0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!
Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I realise that HN has different people posting different arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the years.
All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser?
In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.
These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.
The reason Mozilla is criticized on every front is because they've failed on every front. Their market share has cratered, none of their other projects have taken off, they haven't even succeeded at providing plausible cover fire for Google's illegal monopoly.
They're losers, plain and simple, in the unembellished sense that they have lost every battle they've fought; and people don't like losers. I'm sorry if that offends you.
Why don't the rest of us start a browser? Again, has that "Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing" point escaped you? Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor that would lead me to have some empathy for Mozilla, actually; but it would still be empathy for a loser.
It’s not about getting overly vitriolic. It’s simply that they said this:
“The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers”
And then, they changed it:
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduce...
Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said:
“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating”
https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/
And they changed it.
So- sure, sometimes people change their minds.
But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data.
Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”
> Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet?
So now we're at "Why are you obsessed with this? It happened so long ago."
No one is having a "flamewar". This has long been a discussion that has been appropriate on the site. Now that we've seen the consequences of the decisions it's appropriate to discuss them.
> In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.
Not until those calling it a flame war or something that shouldn't be surfaced admit it was a mistake and that kind of thing shouldn't happen. But I guess it's the kind of thing that people who are partisan/or tribal fanatics think is fine, to poison every open source project with their politics in the name of inclusivity and actually seeking a powerful monoculture.
I want internet to be free and Mozilla Firefox to be for the entire world and not have to fight the US partisan philosophy of the day, which increasingly wants to censor everything or restrict access to the Internet with the typical "feel good" excuses.
The hackers who treat information and people as equal and deserving predate a lot of the fake inclusivity which is all about power dynamics and divisions.
I will keep bringing Brendan Eich and censorship up and I will keep using firefox since it offers more freedom to the user. Both are not mutually exclusive. Mozilla as a company has been quite misguided for a long time.
> hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier
I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities.
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”
Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.
You imply it’s the hackers or Hacker News that has changed to create a negative atmosphere. From my perspective, however, it’s the direct result of a very long series of hostile-to-hackers decisions made by Mozilla.
To quote myself:
> I get why people are pissed at Mozilla
My issue is that when you try to have discourse but everyone’s on the same side, it can easily devolve into a circlejerk where everyone is trying to see who can most dramatically burn the strawman. These kinds of feedback loops are just bad—it doesn’t really matter who the target is or how malicious they are—because they cause the participants to drift further and further from the reality of the conflict.
In the best case, if the target really is bad, the participants may just look foolish when they later deploy their anti-strawman ballistic missile against someone who actually has a slightly good pro-target argument they hadn’t thought of. In the worst case, this is how mobs work themselves up to eventually justify violence against a target that’s totally harmless.
One thing’s for sure though, once a circlejerk like this starts, rational thought ends.
This was probably the day that Firefox jumped the shark for me:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theve...
I still use it, but I lost all respect for the management. This level of tone deafness should cause everyone on the board and c suite to personally write an open letter of apology to the users, but instead we got a half-hearted victim-blaming non-apology:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozi...
This is really rather telling. Here is how Mozilla articulates what they think users have a problem with:
> We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on.
Mozilla is willfully inept. They think that pre-loading third-party non-free code and ads without my knowledge or consent is not an issue! Moreover, Mozilla thinks that this doesn't conflict with Mozilla's interpretation of what opt-in means and the values it embodies.
Mozilla is looking more and more like controlled opposition. Mozilla undermined their own users' faith in Mozilla's add-on/extension capabilities and act like releasing the source after the fact resolves any issue at all regarding doing this without consulting users or receiving prior affirmative consent.
This comment is getting long enough as it is. I'll just leave this here.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-col...
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising!
That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.
> … Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness
It literally was not.
The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale.
Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades.
Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
Using Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully settled on the name Firefox— the days of "Firebird" and the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages like about:mozilla. Firefox is dear to me and it has been for a very long time now.
Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about.
(That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)
I don't really agree. By sitting at the big tech table you give up a lot of ethics.
I think it's similar to NGOs like Greenpeace. I respected them when they were using rubber boats to blockade toxic waste dumping. Now they have a millions earning CEO rubbing shoulders with the pollutors and ostensibly "changing the system from within". Which creates watered down measures and too much dependency on the industry. Just like Reagan's "trickle down" fallacy this doesn't work. Money and power corrupts.
Also yes a lot of us use Firefox but not because we still love it so much. But because it's the least worst option. Kinda the only option if you want to run the real Ublock Origin now.
As someone who spends a lot of time on HN, I fully agree with you. I am beyond bored of seeing the same things just continually reposted and take over some good threads. I actually got to a point where I would not click on comment threads that had anything to do with anything that Elon touches, because it just got ridiculous.
On the flip side though, I know there are a ton of readers who only occasionally Read the interesting story, who are part of today's lucky thousand who haven't heard yet. For that reason, my position has become somewhat moderate in that I think the hyperbolic hate posts are still ridiculous, including some informative and reasonable comments is probably good. To be clear though, The majority of this thread is not that :-D
It’s not just Mozilla. HN in general has become quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.
It's not so black and white. Firefox is my daily driver, this doesn't mean that I can't have concerns about the direction of the Mozilla Foundation or express them online with others who share those concerns.
I think the reason for that is that we are still using the Firefox that was made 5 years ago. Then the whole team that was working on making the browser more modern and speedier was fired (as I understand it anyway).
I love Firefox, and I’m happy that there’s a foundation working on it that magically gets funded, but I see that money going to things I don’t care about far too often to be comfortable with it. It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
> It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
I'll bet if Mozilla thought they could get away with canceling Firefox, they would.
It feels like Firefox is treated as lead generation for whatever new boat Mozilla builds to sell Firefox users down the river on next time. It's "finished" in that regard; it is a widget that passes network traffic to Mozilla and third parties, and in exchange, Mozilla gets a pittance from Google. How any of this is supposed to be accepted with a straight face is beyond me.
Or maybe we are genuinely upset that a browser we've supported and watch grow for decades at this point has fallen so low. Market share matters a ton, and Mozilla has been a very poor steward of Firefox's market share.
Maybe stop ascribing incorrect motivations to those of us who are angry but also care very deeply. I'm so tired of others assuming some sort of ill intent or virtue signaling or whatever, and using that as a way to derail a conversation.
I love Firefox and will keep supporting it but I hate the Mozilla that fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, that become all about US woke partisan culture and decided that instead of everyone being equal, they had to discriminate based on their exclusionary ideology "to compensate". In a space that was super hippie and equal and free, they had to make it corporate and fake.
They even went absolutely against the freedom of the Internet with posts claiming for censorship of wrongthink. Which one could easily tie to the Republican vs Democrat bullshit.
Open source, Linux and a free Internet are not about those petty Western centric politics.
I don't care if you don't like it. Many of us have lived it and used Mozilla from 1.x/2.x versions.
He wasn't fired. He stepped down because of the uproar not in Mozilla itself but in the user communities. Because that's what the shareholders care about, disgruntled employees don't affect the share value but a dark shadow over the brand does.
I was personally also happy to see him go. You can't be inclusive when you try to deny people you have nothing to do with their equality.
The sheer volume of sidequest projects they've put resources into that were clearly self-indulgence projects from internal staff, that had no obvious market need or target user-base put me off years ago.
They're kept in existence as a cost of doing business for the likes of Google, purely to ward off browser monopoly claims, and absolutely do not deserve to be taken seriously, or be given private funding.
I‘d argue you don‘t need a C-suite to develop firefox and that‘s the root of the problem.
They're trying to diversify their revenue so it doesn't all come from Google. All these 'self-indulgent projects' are attempts to actually make enough money to compete with a multi-trillion dollar company's resources because they know they can't compete long-term.
The parent is referring to things like Coop (social media), SkyWriter (IDE), Persona, Solo (website builder), “data futures”, Servo [1], “big blue button”, most of them have little to no potential for revenue.
Meanwhile you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing, and it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
[1] including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF, making it more of a vanity project - it’s already thirteen years old at this point
> including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF
They integrated at least a couple of components from Servo into Firefox before they cancelled it, so I don't think that's fair.
> it’s already thirteen years old at this point
Mozilla only developed it for 8 years.
I think that would be believable if a massive portion wasn't spent in venture capitalism based gambling, where they put 90% of their eggs in the AI basket, of which, 70% are small unknown groups, 30% is just hugging face which really doesn't need their money, but at least that was a good bet.
Because they are a non-profit, they have to spend their money every year. That’s why Mozilla is/was over employed and following all these projects that die, because they need these engineers to work on something.
My friend worked at Mozilla 15 years ago, arguably during their golden years and he said it was a joke how much money they wasted because they had to spend it.
That’s not how NFPs work. I’m on the board of a NFP, we absolutely are able to save money year to year. The big difference between us and a regular corp is we don’t have shareholders or paid board members.
Charitably, I'd like to believe that all these side quests were in search of actual, real, substantial, alternative revenue streams, in order to reduce dependency on Google.
The problem, of course, is that all of these side projects just flat out failed. Maybe they were self-indulgence projects or maybe they were pursued in earnest, but either way, they failed.
They have cut back on those a lot now, haven't they?
I maintain Waterfox, so I recognise this isn’t a great look criticising another fork. But there’s a contradiction in abandoning Mozilla over spending and leadership concerns whilst supporting Floorp, which initially used open source extensions to build up their USP, then switched to a non-open licence to prevent others from doing what they had done.
They only reverted after community backlash (or being “inspired” if I recall correctly). You’re comfortable supporting a project that actively betrayed open source principles, whilst writing off Mozilla for issues like executive compensation.
It doesn’t strike me as more morally consistent than supporting the organisation that actually develops the underlying engine?
It's kind of disheartening to see what happened to the Mozilla Foundation. And it makes me kind of afraid of what's going to happen to linux once Linus is out. It seems that a great project requires a great BDFL, otherwise it will be taken over by ghouls.
Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized than Mozilla? We're so so blessed with Linus and everyone is afraid of the moment the project has to stand without him. But I'm confident he's aware and working towards that point in time. I'm not too much into it though, so this is more or less assumptions.
Same with e.g. PostgreSQL.
But these are fundamentally different type of projects. Many businesses and products run on top of Linux and/or PostgreSQL. There is a very clear and obvious incentive to contribute, because that will help you run your business better.
With user-oriented software such as a browser, this is a lot less clear-cut. Organisations like Slack, or Etsy, or Dropbox: sure, they've contributed resources to stuff they use like Linux, PosgreSQL, PHP, Python, etc. But what do they get out of contributing to Firefox? Not so obvious.
I think this is one reason (among others) that Open Source has long been the norm in some fields oriented towards servers and programmers, and a lot less so in others.
I did a quick search. Names were named by him here [1] in 2024 - but not as successors per se. More like candidates for important roles in the future. This [2] interview from 2020 touches the subject as well.
I interpret it in a way that he tries to cultivate an environment where a good leader/successor/main-whatever emerges somewhat naturally.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/990534/ [2] https://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/torvalds-say...
(Prime example of my personal behavior which I really don't like: Put a half-baked assumption/hearsay on the internet. Get 2 replies. Start actually researching the topic only afterwards.)
GHOULS doesn't even begin to describe the people who take over these foundations. They are parasites who seek out nonprofits to infiltrate, and once they gain a position of power they bring in their pals and set up shop. Suddenly the CoC is weaponized to crush dissent, the decisions are made behind closed doors, and the organization starts contributing to political organizations that help their class of parasites spread. And there are WAY more of them than there are good-hearted honest people starting foundations. When a new foundation is created, these parasites line up to see who can corrupt it first.
There is a sad parallel to Wikimedia Foundation, rooted in the same argument: We don't know the correct price. These entities are effectively monopolies with no competitors, and there is no public negotiation on what the annual budget of these entities should be.
So once they get away with nag screens on the world's biggest billboards, CEO pay is suddenly 'justified'.
But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
> But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
Certainly when it comes to Wikipedia: there is oversight. I know people don't like the fact that Wikipedia spends money on things other than server racks, but spending money on developing the community is a pretty legitimate thing to do! How else can you maintain such an encylopedia? You need to attract knowledgeable people to write and review articles!
I don't think there are objections to Wikipedia developing the community.
The objections are primarily around the aggressive and deceptive fundraising.
Wikipedia collects donations by essentially saying (in some years more directly, otherwise more implying) "if you don't donate Wikipedia WILL DIE", rather than "Please give us some money so we can build an even bigger community to make Wikipedia even better".
They are also making the banners incredibly obnoxious. From "donate or ask later", full-screen interstitials, to delayed popups that interrupt you after you've started reading, and with increasing frequency. During their "yearly" fundraisers (I think it's actually 2-3x a year, masked behind "local" vs. "global" campaigns) they pop them up every few days on every device you use, and now they're introducing "experimental" banners every month (again per device) so several times per month, and more frequently if they delete cookies. [1]
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Proposed_ch...
I wish there were a way to donate to the devs who work on Firefox directly.
Like a pool where we donate and money goes to devs to work on user-centric features (eg: I’d also want to exclude those working on first party spyware and adware).
No worries, if you donate to "Mozilla", i.e. the Mozilla Foundation, you're unlikely to fund built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. You're more likely to fund sociology-style campaigns and studies that have absolutely nothing to do with Firefox (https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/what-we-fund/), because the development is done by the corporation.
Yet when you search for "donate to firefox" you will first find one of two Mozilla Foundation donation page... Just making it possible to actually donate "to Firefox" would probably help a lot...
Agreed. Until I upgraded phones and just couldn't be bothered anymore, I kept around an old build of Firefox from before they messed up extensions. I have to run nightly now to get my extensions and just pause updates at relatively bug-free builds. It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost it. I've even switched to edge canary because it gives me extensions and didn't have a few regressions (that eventually got fixed) that prevented smooth video watching
> It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost it.
No, it's obvious. Google Pays for Firefox. Google doesn't want Adblock Extensions.
No, contrary to you and GP, the stable version of Firefox for Android (on the Google Play Store) supports all Firefox extensions, including ad blockers.
There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
> There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
They got rid of extensions in August 2020 and brought them back in December 2023.[1] Fenix has lacked full extension support for more than half of its existence since release, and it has been less than two years since extensions were brought back.
1. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-lov...
I just want to see a pie chart with how they spend any donations. I also don't mind their forays into stuff like free speech and internet privacy, but beyond that they should stay out of politics. That said I have donated a few times since I use firefox as my primary browser. Their activities are far superior to anything that Brave and Google are up to
https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core [a submodule of their main repo] is noticeably missing any licensing information
I went there to find out how they're tracking upstream releases, because that's my major heartburn about any fork of one of the biggest attack targets on a personal computer. Since 12.0.14 doesn't tell me anything about what version of Firefox it's built against, I guess https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp/blob/v12.0.14/brow... is the best one can do and since it says 128.anything and the current production release is 140.0.4 I got my answer
That's the latest ESR (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/notes/), which seems good enough for Tor Browser.
I don't feel that firefox is slow on anything I use it on other than Android. Its reasonably responsive on all the machines I have ever used it with including some pretty old laptops. It seems pretty smooth, its been a while since I used chrome.
It might not be that hard to finance Firefox improvements. We should establish a Firefox improvement group. And then set a plan for bug improvements roadmap. Then publish that roadmap and set up a fund for the programmers.
I think what you are asking for is better steering of the Mozilla foundation. And maybe better steering for Firefox development. Possibly with less opinions. We might be better off supporting servo devs instead.
I agree with your opinion of that corp which as of today exists solely to employ the highly paid CEO for doing less than nothing. Or something on those lines.
But Firefox (+ forks) is a lost cause. One simple non-statistical reason, I mean it seems so, is that whenever I see that “I donate to Firefox fork” mentioned somewhere, it’s almost always a different fork. So maybe now Firefox will die a 100 deaths.
Yeah, always thought this was incredibly short-sighted.
You have an orders-of-magnitude smaller non-profit-ish thing going toe to toe with THREE of the hugest and most powerful companies to ever exist -- and generally holding their own for freedom.
It's good to be critical and influence, they do make bad decisions sometimes.
But COME ON, given what they're up against, most of the time I want y'all to just shut up and keep giving them money.
It is possible to create a new foundation that works on a new browser product based on Gecko indeed. You just can't call it Firefox because of trademark ownership.
It would be interesting to see how it collaborates / competes with the origin project, how fast and how far they diverge etc.
You can if you arrange with Foundation to license the trademark under non-profit terms. Not that this is likely to be done by anyone, but if anyone could do it, I’d like to think the Servo group could.
Donate to Ladybird, Firefox and forks are unfortunately over.
Ladybird has a chance to become a new truly open source browser written from scratch.
I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.
How are you expecting to run an entity with developers, support, and operations without any leadership?
I don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy, but in my experience that is almost always a disaster.
I'm worked on many larger teams and leadership is independent of compensation.
The fact that "high performance leaders" need to make tens of millions of dollars is one of the greatest lies being told in the modern age.
Right now my chief in the fire company where I volunteer makes the same amount of money I do: $0.00. He is the greatest leader I have ever personally met, and I've been around for a while.
When I was in the Army, my company commander (a Captain) made ~4x what the newest private did. The highest-paid officer makes ~9x.
There are government senior executives and university professors running labs with budgets and teams that make Mozilla look like a lemonade stand for practically nothing.
Mozilla should ask the Linux Foundation what their budget is, what their leadership structure is, and do that.
Mozilla, no matter what they say or think or try, is and will always be a web browser developer. A web browser. Anything else is a side project, a hobby. A distraction. Every single molecule of fuel used by their brains while at work and every single microwatt of power used by their infrastructure should be wholly and aggressively dedicated to building the tools and organization needed to create the best web browser possible.
Bloated payrolls are tolerable if the decisions made are wise, responsibility is taken, and strategies exist and make sense.
Mozilla seems to have none of these.
But man they're spending a shit-ton on "AI"!
Three examples off the top of my head — PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, and Debian — are doing just fine without someone "taking responsibility" (when have Mozilla's CEO ever done that?).
Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.
There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.
PostgreSQL is just a community of volunteers as far as I'm aware, not full-time developers employed by the project.
FreeBSD seems to have three paid directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/our-team/
Debian has a leader and also seems to be more a volunteer organisation than a full company: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
It can be done; an example is Igalia: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/
> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.
If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.
> If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable
That's a big if. AFAIK most open source project developers don't get remotely enough donations to support them working on it full-time. The ones that do are the exception, not the norm.
Leadership doesn’t mean earning more money.
I’m fine with twice the amount of a developer. Taking into account responsibility, public involvement and special clothing. Travel costs and so on are separate. The developers are doing the hard work.
There is not “team” if a MBA or lawyer gets 38 times the wage of an actual person doing the work.
Worth thinking of it also "the other way". As long as some people (developers) accept an MBA above them getting 38x, without adding much value, this will happen.
I don't personally like it (so generally did not allow to happen to me), but if some people feel "safer" getting lower pay (less chance of getting fired, easier to get re-hired as there are more low paid positions than high paid positions), the natural result is that it will happen.
My experience is that both high and low paid positions are not as "safe" as people think they are (seen multiple changing in various organizations types), so people should care more about finding a reasonable organization.
I think you need a CEO, you just don't need a CEO that is paid $7m/year. That's ludicrous. What amazing decisions have they been making that were worth that amount? Have they really contributed more than a team of 70 developers could?
There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.
It doesn't even have to be that. Take that and bump it 5 times like a million dollars. Throw in more cash if they can increase Firefox's market share. Have clauses to penalize anything about opt-out telemetry or anti-privacy features. I'm happy to add more carrots as well as more sticks.
All said and done, that will still be way more reasonable than that ludicrous salary.
> don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy
I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.
I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.
It's bizarre. In Japan, the custom is to revere your elders, in the US its apparently whoever is titled "leader". All of HN shivers in exaltation at the mention of the word.
The reality is that Firefox would have done much better had Mozilla fired their CEO 15 years ago and never hired another one. All of them executed significantly worse than mere government bonds did.
Yet we happily do that for everything else.
Either software developers have to figure out how to out compete the CEO ghouls (without becoming CEO ghouls themselves), or we just have to accept that the CEO ghouls will take their cut. There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.
I think that's because those everything else are products with an opaque structure, and Mozilla, and for example Wikipedia, are more transparent. Really highlights why some people don't open up, either themselves, their source code, or their organizational structure: it's just inviting endless criticism.
Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.
This has been part of my conclusion too.
There's an irony that in providing people the option of not paying, you are also inviting them to find flaws in your organization to avoid paying. We are all aware that Microsoft sucks, yet there's never any doubt that you'll have to pay for a 365 subscription if you're a serious business. At the same time we'll also gladly accept that small companies don't donate to the Linux foundation, because they have to pay their bills.
By using the control we advocate for (forking projects, reducing funding, etc) we only harm the projects that afford us that control. Not paying Mozilla does nothing to reduce the control of Google over chrome. It only hurts the one browser that gives you the choice.
That's true, although I will point out that we've long had a funding crisis in OSS. Tons of very valuable, very necessary OSS work is being done for no or little pay.
Add to that the value capture that happens outside of that exchange. We may say that valkey is well enough funded to continue development, but that doesn't account for the immense value that is being captured by the big cloud providers charging a premium for hosting it. Azure, AWS and GCP are only as valuable as they are because there's some software you can run on them. The cheaper that software, the more they get to charge.
This is sort of a general problem with the American system of "philanthropy". We can say that the Linux Foundation is developing the Linux kernel independently for free, and that various other companies then donate, but that ignores the fact that the Linux kernel has been tremendously valuable for those same companies. In a more real way, they are paying for the development of the kernel, but they are not paying anything even close the value they are deriving from it. Value is in that way being extracted from the Linux kernel outside of the Linux Foundation, and that looks a lot like "an executive in between".
Isn't this the idea of charity though? To give without expecting something in return? I think open source software had a tremendous positive impact even if some companies also made profit out of it. How would it have been otherwise? Only walled gardens with no possibility of doing anything (like forking) and probably a miserable developer experience.
You give the examples of Azure, AWS and GCP - do they really have that much secret sauce? My impression is that AWS is mostly giving a new name to open source stuff. If all would decide tomorrow to double their prices competitors will appear immediately. And my guess is that their profit is due to forgotten or over-provisioned resources of other organizations anyhow.
I think we should focus on the benefits for society of open source, not on reducing the profit that some will make from it here and there.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before
I'll need to think about this more but one difference that comes to mind after giving it some thought is that donations are a choice. Buying food is not really optional. I'm not going to the store and giving them 50€ because I hope they continue to operate, I give them the money as an equal exchange
There is a group of people who would choose to shop more frequently at a certain place, or tip more, if their favorite place is having trouble, but as far as I know this is only a small effect and market forces decide for 95% whether a place can continue to pay its bills. With open source software development like at Mozilla, barring other income sources, they rely on those 5%. The donators don't need to accept that their money is spent on drugs and mansions¹, the way that they do when buying groceries and the big boss might indeed use the profits in that way
¹ I have no clue what else you would do with the 7M USD a year that someone else quoted. Even at a 50% tax rate (idk what the tax rate is for someone who operates a non-profit in the USA), an average person could literally retire after six months of telling others what to do at this "non profit"
I can't get around doing it for good products that are better than their competition. Firefox isnt that. I'd pay if it meant supporting enthusiastic engineers that try to make the best browser and strive to compete with Goliath. I'm not going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a product that is worse than the competition.
Or in slightly less fatalistic words: In any entity with more than 1-2 employees you need someone to make decisions and be accountable for them. The normal solution is to have a director/CEO for this. You may be able to get away with paying them slightly less than market rates if they are doing it for a good cause, but if you want someone competent you will need to pay them a relatively high salary to compete with other employers.
Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.
Firefox's entire appeal is that it is not like every other corporate entity. Its legitimacy hinges on how far it can separate itself from intrusive corporate interests.
If Mozilla goes the same way, Firefox loses all goodwill it gathered over the years and stops being an option against Chrome et al.
Yes exactly! Except for developers who I don't like and except for the development of features I don't like and except for certain functions within the code which I don't fancy, and also they have to use tabs instead of spaces if they want my hard earned money! Also which text editor is each developer using?
We need more paid stuff. Making everything advertising funded has given advertisers too much power over society. We don't see real human opinion anymore, we see advertising friendly opinions.
Nothing can compete with the ad model + ad blocker.
The suckers can watch the ads, and we can ride for free. (And we can complain that the content progressively caters to the suckers and not us).
Google is also getting pretty aggressive about blocking people with ad blockers from YouTube. I think it is great. I ad-block everywhere, but if people don’t want me around for that reason, that’s their right. If I wanted to watch short videos, I’d actually have to become a paying customer somewhere!
Ads have many more perverse effects than wasting your time or being ugly, and you can't fix all of those with an ad blocker. They're a constant pressure to make everything retain your attention for the longest time possible, or to editorialize out content that would detract from clicking them.
You also end up paying for all this advertising indirectly, in the price of everything you buy. So you might think you get free content, but you're really not. And let's not even mention the insanity of constantly pushing everyone to consume more trash in a world that really doesn't need it.
Firefox is free, none of its users are paying for it.
Hard agree. I pay for monthly hosting like FreshRSS, Wallabag, etc and support the devs who make those projects. Privacy and developer support. And it's not that much.
Definitely interested in making Firefox, Thunderbird, etc sustainable too.
This is a very, very Western-centered take. It's been growing in most other areas of the world, although from a much lower starting point. I'd say it's been "reverting to the mean".
> when the purchasing power of the working class has been falling steadily for the last 45 years
Yeah? How much did an always-on pocket sized computer connected to the internet cost in 1980?
This is my kept-warm take on Signal.
Signal personal should continue being free. Signal needs to develop a business line for enabling authenticated, private communications to individuals on Signal.
There's at the very least an entire area of secure healthcare messaging which is full of terrible bespoke systems, or just goes over SMS, which would more effectively and with better user experience go over signal (i.e. the ability to send longer messages, encrypted attachments etc.)
This is the Threema business model: https://threema.com/en
Public app, and a separate business offering - both with E2EE
Welcome to the world of MacOS X, where there is a very healthy ecosystem of pay-once apps made by everything from giant corporations, to boutique software shops to individual developers.
I have found that whatever software I need or want, I can always find the best-in-class option to buy for a very reasonable price.
The best part: If you experience a bug or a problem, it's usually fixed within a few days at most after you report it.
I used to want to donate to Mozilla Foundation, but I've long lost any hope that the corporation would spend that money in a way that makes sense to me. The pessimist on me would expect donated money to be spent on more built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. Or maybe a bonus for their executives.
I just want Firefox to be faster. I'm donating to Floorp (a Firefox fork), at least they seem focused on making the browser better.