Let me pay for Firefox
(discourse.mozilla.org)796 points by csmantle 3 days ago
796 points by csmantle 3 days ago
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.
Leaving aside the (valid) sibling commenters here pointing out that it can be done well, but you're making a strawman argument - the gp never said anything about eliminating managers or organisational structure.
They specifically targetted two things:
1. directing funding towards Firefox development. Mozilla have been criticised for spending large portions of their income on non-Firefox endeavours while not publishing breakdowns of Firefox-specific spending in their annual reports
2. The CEO's salary: the commenter said nothing about not wanting the CEO position to exist, merely a desire for the funding to the Foundation to not be excessively funnelled into salary increases while the company's resources contract. Which seems reasonable.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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
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.
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 don't understand what these comments are actually criticizing in terms of side projects. They got rid of stuff like Rust, Firefox OS, Pocket, etc. Mozilla has streamlined to make web browsers and web browser accessories. VPN/Relay are both profitable projects that inhibit surveillance, so clearly that's not the issue. Do you want, not just these projects gone but the CEO gone? That happened already too, https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-cha...
We've been through a decade of the Mozillas blackholing money with zero telegraphing of any intent to bring financial sustainability to Firefox. The (expensive! ugly?) rebrand did not include any meaningful recommitments (which filtered down to me, anyway). I've just now clicked around the Foundation's website trying to figure out what my prospective donation might have gone towards and it's still kept very vague. Am I donating to Firefox, to non-software activism, to a podcast? I couldn't even find a single mention of Firefox on https://www.mozillafoundation.org in a minute of looking.
I don't mind side-projects, I mind that Mozilla looks completely directionless from the outside. It might even look like a Google-funded adult daycare. I can't trust that.
Whoops, it happened. An internet argument changed someone's mind. :)
According to their latest financial transparency report[1], software development as a line item is about 60% of their expenses. However, your question wasn't about where revenue has gone, it was about where new donations would go. That lead me to the donation FAQ which reads:
> At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. The Mozilla Foundation programs are supported by grassroots donations and grants. Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all. This explains the lack of Firefox on their website. Any mention of it as a product of the foundation would be misleading about where the donations go. From the point of view of the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is just another revenue stream for outreach efforts.
This really bums me out, because I'm a huge fan of Firefox. It's my go to browser on my computer and my phone. I advocate for it as much as possible. I've donated before, but I've likely never actually financially supported development of Firefox. I support the EFF, so it's possible I could have donated to this foundation on its own merits. But I didn't.
[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
[2]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...
> If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all
Yes, this is what so many people here on HN have complained about for years :) and is also being raised by the OP:
> To be clear, I very much support the Foundation, and it does amazing work, but I want to know this money in particular would directly support Firefox development.
I just took a look at that site after reading your comment. It almost appears as if Mozilla just isn't interested in making a browser anymore.
"In the early 2000s, the Mozilla community built Firefox. We toppled the browser monopoly, gave users choice and control online, and helped create a healthier internet.
Twenty years later, Mozilla continues to fight for a healthy internet — one where Big Tech is held accountable and individual users have real agency online."
They list a bunch of projects on the site that are kind of all over the place. It's almost as if they don't know yet what they want to do. Mozilla is synonymous with Firefox and the Mozilla browser before that, but it is clear from the site that browsers do not fit in with their future. I'm not even sure they know what their future is. They look like a research organization that's dong research for the purpose of finding something to do? They are also accepting applications for funding.
The only purpose Firefox has in this organization is to fund exploratory research via the Google search deal. There is no plan. These people don't deserve our money and are not responsible enough to be custodians of a project as important as an independent browser.
A new organization should fork Firefox, rebrand it, contribute real resources and monetize it enough to keep it healthy. I'm not talking about junk like Zen or Floorp where they just put a skin on Firefox and have no real development resources to speak of. Someone should do to Mozilla what Mozilla did to Netscape.
Personally, I think that's a more worthwhile approach than what Ladybird is doing, although I'm rooting for them to succeed.
I'm curious, how capital intensive/wasteful were these aimless projects? Compared to their operating expenses? What better way could they have spent this money? (Development isn't exactly a good answer, if it's not a lot of money, it won't exactly buy a lot of R&D and even if it did, R&D doesn't necessarily translate to more income).
> They got rid of stuff like Rust
They got rid of everything. Relay and VPN are both five years old. Other than MDN, everything they've done, including "browsers and browser accessories" have been killed. For company as old as Mozilla, if your two oldest offerings are less than a quarter of your lifespan, what does that say?
And on the browser front, they're really not making a whole lot of anything. Ignoring fixes and web standards work, the latest version has.... Vertical tabs? Which there's been an extension for since pretty much forever. Some AI stuff? Changing the background of the New Tab page? I'm supposed to be excited for this? This is supposed to make me want to give them money?
Meanwhile there are startups like The Browser Company who are actually doing exciting things with the web (that people use! that are exciting enough to raise funding for!), and users love it. You can't say "we're building the best browser" and then not even ship anything.
99% of consumers don't care about web standards, they just care that their site works. Nobody is paying for the minimum viable browser. It's not going to get anyone up in the morning.
What gets people excited are quality of life improvements, like video chat picture in picture, or new ways of grouping and managing tabs (your reminder that Mozilla killed Tab Candy). Firefox only got a cookie cutter clone of Chrome tab groups on v137.
There is no shortage of ways browser vendors can ship features that make browsing the web better without getting in anyone's way. Hell, they could have a build of Firefox that just has all the new stuff and merge it back to trunk when it's been proven out.
The thing is, for people like my mom, every other browser has features she uses and likes. Firefox hardly does more in the core experience than it did fifteen years ago when they started shipping every six weeks. My mom has every single department store's app installed on her phone, she's not choosing a browser based on how much it may respect your privacy.
I keep seeing comments on HN that misunderstand what's happening with Mozilla and it's kind of frustrating.
Right now, if you were to take away Google's money, Firefox would not be able to compete with Chromium and Safari. It would die.
All these side-projects are attempts to find a source of revenue aside from Google and are necessary to Firefox's survival. So saying they should stop doing them, completely misses the point.
Unless we want Firefox to die, we should understand Mozilla's situation and encourage this exploratory process, not hate on it.
>Right now, if you were to take away Google's money, Firefox would not be able to compete with Chromium and Safari. It would die.
I think the only way for it to prosper is to take away Google's money. I firmly believe it could do better browser development on 5% of the income it's currently receiving.
It'll be a heck of a culture shock at the foundation, though.
If you had put all the money Mozilla executives have spent on buying then winding down bizarre startups, occasionally connected to them, in index funds instead, you would probably have an actual revenue stream to support Firefox, other than what they have now, which is nothing, because like their leadership, these purchases never amounted to anything other than damaging their brand.
I think it’s fascinating how languages shape our society. In this case, the ambiguity between free as in “at no cost” and free as in “freedom” is probably hurting the FOSS landscape. In French, there are two very distinct terms for this: “gratuit” vs “libre”. And it doesn’t sound as an oxymoron to pay for a “logiciel libre”.
The German "frei" can mean "free of charge" sometimes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frei#Usage_notes
(Native German speaker here), it's a very rare use of the word "free" and usually only used in fixed terms like "Freibier", it wouldn't even work for other drinks, e.g., you can't say "Freisaft" or "freier Saft" for free juice, it has to be kostenlos there.
The other Wiktionary example of "freie Krankenversorgung" sounds wrong to be, but it seems to be used rarely in some more formal or legal contexts, no one would say it like this in a casual conversation. Google results also show a 4x difference between frei and kostenlos here in favor of kostenlos. But both are low since "Krankenversorgung" is already a very unusual word. I suspect many of those uses might be bad translations from English.
Spanish has separate words (gratis and libre) and so does Dutch (gratis and vrij).
I think people on tech forums overestimate the significance of this in today’s world.
Back in the early days of FOSS, when almost everyone who used software was also a programmer, it made a difference.
Today, nearly all people who would care about libre software licenses, are aware of their existence. The vast majority of computer users today are just attempting to do some other task and do not give a shit about the device or the legal consequences of using it, even if you warn them. They simply don’t care about software.
On the other hand, how come that the desired connotation is not the immediately prevailing one in the land of the free which is not the land of no cost.
> Nobody thinks of it as "land of the free" nowadays
I feel like it is, but it’s not headed that way, though neither is the world:
https://github.com/t3dotgg/SnitchBench/blob/main/snitching-a...
> in the land of the free which is not the land of no cost.
Maybe it is exactly what that means, and we’ve just been interpreting it wrong all this time.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8
> Free installation. Free admission, free appraisal, free alterations, free delivery, free estimates, free home trial, and free parking.
“Gratis” meaning “no cost” is an English word, albeit an uncommonly used one.
Technically that’s a Latin word that just happens to have kept the same spelling and meaning in English.
Arguably it’s really only an English word once it deviates from the original spelling and meaning. Like how the original British English “Aluminum” is now the American English word for the metal represented by the newer British English “Aluminium”, all of which borrowed from, but didn’t outright steal, the Latin roots.
You’ve made the faux pas of presenting the spiel that a word’s etymology or genus means it cannot be English.
While an entrepreneurial view, this mammoth disinformation is equivalent to plaza cafe sofa schmooze.
(I know this isn’t the most coherent post I’ve ever made, but I wanted to make a point by cramming in as many borrowed words as I could)
I have seen OS projects use the word "libre" in English before to distinguish between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" uses of the word. But I can't remember which projects I've seen using that.
The intention was great, but I find the word awkward. Leebraayyy
It looks/sounds foreign and feels a bit pretentious to use in conversation
.. or I feel like some gringo speaking broken Spanish
In British-English "libre" is French from Latin roots (liber). Though Spanish has the same word, I'd guess all Latin languages do.
We get liberty, liberal from the same root.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libre gives a pronunciation which matches my own (lee-bruh).
I paid for Mozillla Pocket Premium and they canceled their product within a few months, did not properly open-source the server, did not export my "permanent library" and refunded 6$. As the websites in the "permanent library" are partially offline, that data is now lost. No thanks, not buying again.
I suspect that they don't actually maintain the permanent library, but rather a formatted view of the content that used to be there. Some of the sites I have the URL saved have transitioned to paywall and/or merged, goes offline or disappeared for some reason, so I can't actually read many of the links I exported from it. Though for the one that actually catches interest, I'll look for it in archiving service, but it's a tiresome work to search for it one by one.
I still don't get over the fact Mozilla bought it and shattered it less than a decade later. Perhaps it doesn't make enough "impact" to justify their time and resources, and if this behavior subsists, I would be more discouraged to give them money ever again.
The permanent library was strange. Not very transparent what happened there. I am still shocked they did not invest in the original idea (tag and archive web page), but instead tried to build another content stream with recommended articles and such.
Browser is the most intimate piece of software we have on our computer. Paying for it (vs someone else paying for your browsing) is a no brainer.
From day one Orion browser [1] has been designed with this business model in mind.
Napkin math also shows that if only 5% Firefox users decided to pay for it, Mozilla would not only replace Google search deal revenue but also align incentives with its users, leading to a better product down the road.
With ~200M Firefox users and Google paying ~$400M annually, a $5/month subscription from just 7% of users would fully replace that search deal revenue.
Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine.
(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
One of the core problems of the internet is that the "everything-is-free-if-watch-ads-but-you-can-also-easily-block-them" paradigm of the last 25 years has created a generation of people with an innate entitlement to free services.
Asking these people to directly cover the cost of the services they use incurs a level of incredulity and anger on par with charging to breath.
Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening all over the place, there is also a growing market of people who are willing to pay for something of high quality that won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?
Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.
The problem is that people like yourself don't even register on the radar.
Nebula for example is the choice answer to the enshitification of YouTube. Lots of the top creators push it to billions of viewers. Pretty much everyone who does the YouTube rounds knows about it.
Yet they only have ~750,000 subscriptions.
That is an awful conversion rate, and why these creators will be stuck making ad supported yt content for the foreseeable future. People overwhelming do not want to pay directly.
Completely unrelated but being that typographically close to "onion browser" made me confused for a second or two
I use both kagi and Orion, both on mobile and Mac, and I have to say that there a few bugs. On the other hand, paying for a software and a service feels good.
My only real complain with Orion is that it's not open source. I get the rationale behind, but still I don't like it.
I pay for Kagi. I generally find it to be adequate at the moment --- not wonderful, but better than other options available. And unlike other options, Kagi is improving slowly over time.
That said, your point about the incentives is spot on. It is the primary reason that I pay for Kagi: they have the incentive to deliver good results and even improve. They even talk about this on their website [1].
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
I've grown very tired of all the whining about the Mozilla Corporation. The browser, MDN, and certificate trust auditing work need more money than the foundation is getting. Making the browser paid for would kill it. This means that they need to find another way to pay the bills.
People whined about search licensing and it now seems there is a court order imminently about to kill those deals. That leaves either running other services or putting ads in the browser both of which attracted much complaining.
And no, forking is not the answer. Mozilla does the lion's share of security work and maintenance. If the mother ship dies the forks will slowly wither and die as they don't have the funding to replace Mozilla. If Mozilla can't make the numbers work a fragmented mess of forks will not do better. A few of these forks have made the problem worse for themselves by insisting on bringing back and maintaining the exploit ridden mess that was XUL based add ons.
> The browser, MDN, and certificate trust auditing work need more money than the foundation is getting.
I don't believe this to be based on any facts, and it's certainly ignoring that MoCo makes money that doesn't come from the foundation. In 2023 Mozilla had over $650M in revenue and only $260M was spent on software development expenses.
Having a paid offering doesn't take away from search deals. Nor is it ideologically orthogonal.
Here's the thing: Mozilla is addicted to blowing cash on non-software projects. It's addicted to blowing cash on software that is far outside its core offering. It's a graveyard of projects that it buys or builds in earnest, gets the userbased hyped for (sometimes with resistance) and then kills the damn thing in a few years.
Other than Firefox and its various flavors like Firefox Focus, what actually even still exists? A HIBP front end, Thunderbird (again?), Bugzilla, Firefox Relay, MDN, and Mozilla VPN. No, SeaMonkey doesn't count.
The trail of bodies behind Moz as it lumbers on is worse than Google's discontinued products when you compare based on the size of the org. We joke about Google launching new projects, but Mozilla projects are almost certain to be killed. Possibly the single most valuable thing to come out of Mozilla in 20 years was Rust (and by proxy, Servo) and they've managed to not just let it slip through their fingers, but to yeet it as far away as they could muster.
You don't need an MBA to understand that this isn't how to run a software company. It's not about money! If they picked literally any one thing and whole-assed it and made sure users actually a) cared and b) liked it, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
> I've grown very tired of all the whining about the Mozilla Corporation.
The whining is because they have mismanaged so much. The only clearly visible strategic direction is to fire and keep firing developers, which does not bode well for the future of the product. All the side products and distractions seem to be experiments of business folks. The company isn't run by product people.
I have a Firefox account. I will gladly pay a yearly fee for it! It provides significant value to me.
For example I pay Bitwarden $10/year for both myself and my wife. We will be moving to a Bitwarden family plan soon as our kids are getting old enough to have online accounts. Similar pricing structures for Firefox accounts would be totally reasonable!
Clearly some people would prefer a free way to use Firefox and that’s ok, too. In the same vein Bitwarden have a free plan. This kind of pricing structure already works in the market. Please copy it.
Mozilla, please stop screwing up and just make a great Firefox!
There are many comments from people wanting to pay for Firefox, but not to Mozilla.
As an independent alternative, the Ladybird browser (https://ladybird.org/) is being developed and could possibly benefit from more financial support.
Security is my top priority (even above privacy) when it comes to internet browsers. My impression has always been that browser technology is a very hard subject and incredibly difficult to do right. This approach is the main reason I keep a distance from any software that is not widely adopted. Even if it's innovative and novel. This being said: If I switch to ladybird today, am I a beta tester or is this a project I can count on?
Ladybird is advancing rapidly but I personally wouldn't use it as a daily driver yet. It's quite a small project in comparison to the giants like Chromium and Safari, but despite their talents and the from-the-ground-up approach free from legacy crap, it lacks a lot of functionality and performance enhancements for it to be a daily driver at the moment.
Give it another year or two and things may change, but if you daily drive it now you'll be either a beta tester or a volunteer part of the Q&A team.
Out of all the new and upcoming browser engines, I think the usability ranking is Flow, then Ladybird, then Servo, with none of them being a great daily driver yet.
"How to drop the Firefox market share to 0%?"
1.Waste the budget on irrelevant side projects.
2.Neglect user expirience and cut features.
3.Add a price tag to alienate users.
4.Perhaps a humiliation ritual like mandatory 2FA and "Login to Firefox"
You missed 0. - where does the budget come from https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...
It's become a meme, but consider WinRAR. Odds are, it's installed on your machine and you haven't paid for it. It just works. It brings up a polite nag box but it doesn't sell your data. It doesn't invade your privacy. It just works and makes enough money to keep getting updated.
It sounds hokey but, perhaps, Firefox should be trialware. Don't cut off the people who can't pay. Make a browser that just works and see how many people will pay for it even if they can use it without paying.
WinRAR is such a simple app compared to a browser. It probably only needs two or three full time developers to stay updated.
I was going to say "a better example is Reaper, a full-fledged DAW that has a similar business model..." then I realized even Reaper is probably a small piece of software when you consider what behemoth a modern browser is.
Does anyone choose to install WinRAR when 7zip or the default windows options exist these days? I haven’t downloaded it since the 00s
I'd wonder if there's enough willing to pay within individual consumers or professionals that would support a browser development team, and my impression is that file compression and browsers are pretty much a software commodity where they can be easily swapped with other options. I doubt there would be a lot of uptake on licensing within companies, and any bundling a licensed copy with an OEM build PC would probably involve mozilla paying them instead of the other way around.
It seems like the browser only exists with a very important secondary motivation, for microsoft and IE it was tying the web and windows together with activex, and for chrome it was to give their ads/services a good presentation. The other alternative I wonder about is the Document Foundation with LibreOffice, where their offering is distinct from MS Office, and there's still space for other players to exist healthily.
If Mozilla made a popup for payment that came up on every application start people would lose their fucking minds. I mean riot in the streets, assassinate Mozilla CEO levels of insanity.
The sheer entitlement of Firefox users knows no bounds. They made a tiny little pocket button, which you can turn off, btw, and people shat on it for months on end and said Mozilla is dead and switched to Chrome. Because we all know Chrome, fucking Google Chrome, respects their users.
After a certain point we have to call a spade a spade. I mean, Mozilla could write every user a check for 100 dollars and assholes would still complain. The greatest adversary to Mozilla isn't Google, it's their own users.
See, the problem is that Chrome markets to the average Goo Goo Ga Ga internet idiot. To them, Computer is magic box, and a browser is an operating system. They don't give a flying fuck that Google records their location 24/7, or that Google builds profiles on them, or that Google killed Manifest V2, or whatever. Google could shit in their mouths and call it ice cream and they'd believe it.
Meanwhile, Firefox users care about privacy and the internet at least a little bit. That means Firefox is held to a standard 1000x greater than Chrome ever could be. For every 1,000 mis-steps Chrome and Google can make, Mozilla is allowed one.
Mozilla has already millions of dollars than can be put into Firefox's development instead of the business they're getting into. It doesn't need even more money, it just needs to put part of it into engineers who would make Firefox what we need.
Some people say that the hate for Mozilla Corp is not deserved. But the thing to understand is that ten of thousands of people have rooted for Firefox. Even if not contributing to the code or money, supported it, pushed for it, like telling everyone to use it, ensuring that what they do works well with Firefox despite corporate interest regarding the market share and all. Lots of people have proudly distributed Firefox/Mozilla marketing stuff to help with that. People have accepted what was forced to be done to accept the money from Google to support the project.
And there, in parallel, there are greedy executive in Mozilla that took a big cut of the money, and wasted shitload of it in stupid and useless things that went to trash In the end, achieving really little.
Yes firefox is a little bit better than in the past, but like just a single digit percent better compared to what it should have been if the money wasted was really used to develop the project. Interesting other projects that could have changed the world were underfunded, like thunderbird (that never thrived as much as now since the Corp is not charge anymore) and market shares are still as low as ever...
The "paid Firefox" the author wants already exists, as LibreWolf ships almost the exact same code minus the telemetry, ads, and Google defaults for free. If people wanted that, they'd already be using it. The real problem isn't the business model, it's Mozilla's leadership, which has been compromised to hell and back at this point. No pricing experiment like this will fix the exodus.
Aren't they just piggybacking on Mozilla's work though? The point is to make the work that Mozilla is doing sustainable, not to pay someone else to ship a slightly modified version of it.
Yes, forks do indeed piggyback off of their code; that's the point of free and open source software anyway. And Mozilla, in its current state and current leadership, is not sustainable and still won't be with people paying for Firefox. Its marketshare is dwindling, and people are moving to forks such as Zen or to other browsers like Vivaldi. Adding a paid version will just make that trend go faster. And you don't even need to make a fork, because user.js tweaks such as Arkenfox or Betterfox exist anyway.
The point is that people want to fund the development of the actual browser engine which is more important than the customization scripts that those forks maintain. The engine is what people are worried about.
This is basically an optional way to pay for the features that a decent fork like librewolf provides.
This is really just a long way to donate really in some sense directly to firefox somehow just because everybody feels like mozilla takes the donated money and tries on some "zanky" product
See The Ville_Lindholm comment really, those were my first thoughts too but I wouldn't really donate to mozilla like ever.
Ladybird's cool though. Maybe donating to them makes more sense but I understand they are not mature but that's exactly the point, they need way more funding (IMO) to get to a genuinely stable browser and need all the help that they can get as compared to the past.
Sure, we all like to stick the big firefox guy to beat the monopoly of google, but firefox/mozilla survives on a single deal by google, and if google ever stops the deal of paying for search engine, it can really shut down mozilla or maybe hinder it extremely.
I do hope that ladybird grows in a way where I can use it in compared to firefox in like hopefully 5 years since browsers are a mess.
I don't think paying for Firefox is going to lead to Mozilla making decisions that benefit Firefox.
Probably would take that money and immediately spent it more on https://mozilla.vc/
I'll happily pay when what happened to Netscape, happens to Mozilla.
> Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model.
This is not true for the vast majority of people leaving. It might be true in the hyper focused tech bubbles that we frequent, though they certainly don't represent the vast majority of users.
First, all the normal people left. Those leaving now, like me, are former Mozilla fans, techies, die hard Firefox users. That hate the Mozilla business model.
I like firefox too, as a browser. I dislike it as a means to track me and serve me ads that Mozilla Corporate deems 'acceptable'.
Ads make me the product. I do not want to be the product.
I agree in the abstract: I'd rather pay for a product that I need, use, and love, than be the product, and have it supported through ads or unfortunate deals like Mozilla has with Google (default search engine).
But I also need to believe that the money I'm paying is being spent wisely. Given how poorly Mozilla has been managed over the past decade or so, I wouldn't care to give them any of my money. I've watched Firefox go from nothing to the dominant browser and now back to a tiny minor player that gets dropped off site compatibility lists. It makes me incredibly sad that this is the state of affairs, but... there it is.
Mozilla needs to be spending a ton more money on user acquisition in order to become relevant again. I would be happy to support that, but I have no faith that's where my money would go, or that they'd spend it to that end effectively.
If I am a customer, not a donator, I have different rights and expectations.
I want to be a customer. Of a Firefox that blocks ads, not serves them to me.
I realize it's far from a perfect solution to finance the creators of the only browser I consider usable today - but I subscribed to Mozilla's VPN service some two years ago, even though I virtually never use it, and mostly to help them make a bit of a buck through me. (And still, it is nice to have the option of geoblocking circumvention at the ready, although I'd wish for them to just support "ordinary" wireguard/wq-quick as a client option).
They're not a real corporation in the "making profit by shipping widgets" sense. They've been funded by a huge annual grant from Google. So none of the management understands in their bones how money is made or how money is necessary for a company to survive. They have never built a successful, profitable product.
Instead of play-acting as a corporation, they might have decided to become a non-profit software foundation, which would have been a very honourable thing to do. But they have not, for example, built up a huge war-chest in case the Google spigot ever stops. Instead senior management has frittered the money away on their own salaries and absurd money-losing projects and acquisitions.
The risk with paid Forefox will be privacy loss, because the app will need to verify somehow the paid status. So there will be some unique, personal licence on the device and Mozilla can identify users using payment info.
The licence will be likely checked via remote API on app start.
Sell license keys... no need to check online.
Anyway the boat has sailed here as every browser connects to dozens of places automatically and if you go to any bigger site you are basically cyber attacked so advertising companies can fingerprint and track you.
Not trying to single you out here, I want to argue against how standard it has become to require a license server. A license server puts an expiry date on the software at an unknown point in the future. At some point the binary you downloaded after you paid for the software will stop working because the server got turned off, changed API, your internet connection is down, your local CA store got corrupted or any other kind of problem in the huge list of dependencies that goes into making a secure API call over the internet. Sure, you can put in safeguards against all kinds of issues, but that also comes at a development cost and you can never reach a point where the software will just continue to work, no matter what.
Even if you, as the company selling the software, can accept all of the above, a license server still is a liability. You sold someone a product and now you need to keep a public API running "forever" (as defined in your legalese). If something goes wrong on your end you are now denying the product you already sold to your customers who already paid for it. I know this is in the end all mitigated by some legalese, which is a whole different can of worms. You also need to make sure your license API is secure and can not leak user data or be twisted into exploiting your software during license checking. There is an ongoing cost to keep the infrastructure running.
As a sibling comment pointed out you can use local only license management like license keys or just nothing like WinRAR or FUTO Keyboard[1]. Yes, you will get users not paying for your software, there will be keygens out there. But even if you use a remote license check, there will be cracks on day 1, if your software is popular enough. I know this is an old and flawed argument, but if someone is willing to navigate a website full of malware infested, blinking ads to avoid paying for your software, they probably would not pay for it anyway.
As an example of what the end stage of hooking up every software to a remote API looks like, Stop Killing Games [2] has done a great job of highlighting just how bad it has gotten in the gaming market. I know there have been some heated discussions around the movement, but the core idea of being able to keep using the software you paid for, is something I absolutely support.
[1] https://keyboard.futo.org/
[2] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&query=stop%20kill...
A few years ago I wanted to buy some Mozilla merch in order to support them. I'm glad they removed it because I would have regretted it.
Forget about Mozilla, donate to Ladybird—or another open-source non-browser project you like. If a competitor eats away the remaining market share of Mozilla's only "working" product, maybe they'll wake up.
If you want to help fund Firefox, you can for now just pay for a product https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ and not use it (if you live in a country Mozilla accepts money from). Be vocal about it that you do this to support Firefox (e.g. reply in the discourse thread). I personally recommend leveraging MDN for this as it's right now the closest to Firefox, as in it's part of the Firefox organization within Mozilla. I would hope down the road we could just directly for Firefox, but we need to put money where our mouth is.
I was going to respond with my usual point that money paid to the Mozilla Foundation cannot legally be used to support Firefox, but it turns out you're right: MDN and several other products are actually part of the Mozilla Corporation. The exception seems to be Thunderbird, which is MZLA Technologies Corporation.
Just let me donate directly to firefox. It's seriously about time this happened. Split off from all the Mozilla bs, it has its own independent management, and runs on donations, same as Thunderbird.
I even theorise they could cut the Google funding. There are so many people who would donate to firefox, but don't, because 1) they dont need the money, and 2) the money wouldn't go to firefox anyway. I even remember talking to a long time Mozilla employee at fosdem, and him telling me donating was pointless for those reasons.
They're not a good steward of this project and imo they should let it fly free. The problem is Mozilla would die without it because nobody cares about anything else they do, so their donations would plummet.
Yes! My pet peeve is people keep saying "no one would pay" or "it wouldn't work" but the thing is, as far as I know, it has never been tried.
For example Thunderbird is fully funded by donations.[1]
Of course Thunderbird's budget is in a different magnitude than Firefox but I'd guess the amount of users is also in a different magnitude.
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
> as far as I know, it has never been tried
Opera, up until 2000, was trialware that nagged users to pay. At that time, they were one of the first browsers to support tabs. In 2000 they put ads for non-paying users, and from 2005 they removed ads and survived entirely on Google money. Then in 2013 they became yet another Chrome-based browser.
Obviously, that was quite some time ago at this point. Perhaps paid web browsers' time has come again?
Opera corporation had most of income from embedded devices. Presto engine (and something they had before) could run on low end CPU without MMU and floating point math, with a few megabytes of memory! Browser wss just a side gig for them.
It would be death for Firefox given the scope of its mission
Who's going to tell him about Mozilla's situation?
> Charging for open-source software may sound hypocritical, but even the Free Software Foundation believes software fees and software freedom are completely compatible.
Paid support always has been allowed in free software. The issue here is two-fold:
1. When most people hear 'free software' they immediately think it is 'free' as in gratis (for nothing) and expect free support.
2. Especially for funding browsers it has always been an issue around who is going to pay for the long-term support without ads, tracking or VCs.
I’m going to bump this figure once again here: Mozilla has made $37.5M from investment income in 2023. [1] That might not be enough to sustain browser development alone, but it is surely a lot of money and charging for Firefox would likely be a drop in the bucket (considering many people would just stop using it instead).
Cut the bullshit initiatives, fire the C-suite and put that money to work.
[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
Wouldn't the ones in charge of firing the C-suite be exactly themselves?
I have no idea how to solve such an organizational problem.
Actually I have no idea either. In a for-profit company shareholders could do the firing, of course, but for foundations it’s tricky.
Let us donate directly to Firefox development. That is the solution. You don't have to look anywhere else. Thunderbird is a good example of what can be done when the donations reach the project. I just hope they don't screw it up as well. I have zero belief in Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla leadership. And every decision they did to screw MDN and Rust among other things puts their competition in a better position.
Unfortunately, I am done pretending otherwise. I haven't seen anything that is indicative of otherwise. Especially after acquiring a behavioural ads company. I will believe when they make decisions that aligns with it. Not with marketing materials saying otherwise or cos of whatever Firefox fans are left is saying. I stuck through the Firefox abandoned phase until Quantum release even for work. It's not cool that Mozilla is doing this.
I've been paying for Relay for years. I use it all the time. It's great!
I use Firefox out of principle, and might pay or donate to it if I felt Mozilla was the same organization that it was when it fought for the open, standards-based web. The handful of missteps along the way haven't increased user trust.
I had been donating to Thunderbird for a few years until I recently realized they paid $4,000 to be a silver sponsor at SCALE 22 https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x/sponsor/thunderbird. I was under the assumption they needed money for developers.
I've never heard of this conference, but is it possible that the Thunderbird team considers $4,000 for a booth there to be a positive ROI for recruitment and/or general outreach?
I would pay for the development of a decent free browser. I'm sure a lot of people would.
The problem is that Mozilla is so badly mismanaged that we don't feel paying for the current state of Mozilla. Mitchell Baker's tenure as CEO was disasterous, and the new CEO Laura Chambers had a bad start.
How about crowdfunding campaigns for specific browser features? Some users require compatibility, others - performance, some might pay for offline translation tools improvements, and, of course, GenAI stuff should get its own separate tier, if anyone is interested.
This is not "hot" take, this is correct take in itself. The problem is the execution: how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency? How do you ensure that the funds are not stolen? How do you make sure that the product is actually used and you don't fund a thing that no one uses? And so on.
Those are the problems that every govt funded project faces, but they are particularly tough in software. We have many examples where it went very wrong so not many governments acting in good faith are eager to step into it. And you can't allow the government to intervene in development or management here, because this how you'll end up with government-mandated preinstalled browser on smart phones or with added backdoors.
One solution could be participatory budgeting where the end users will directly decide where to invest part of their govt-collected taxes. E.g., on your declaration you'd have a field where you'd like to invest X% of your paid taxes into project Y. This comes with its own set of challenges and admin overhead, but I don't see any other good solution for cases like this, because they are impossible to run under direct government control.
> how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency?
You don't. The state doesn't know what a project needs at a given time, and will try to apply cookie cutter solutions when they don't need it. What you actually do is two parts:
- Give a budget for each institution to spend on open source projects (defined by some industry criteria, or something)
- Force institutions to consider open source projects for free (as in no cost) digital goods, and a report as to why open source solutions when paying for a digital good or service. The later should be evaluated by a central organization that promotes the rational use of digital products, like the U.S. Digital Service, EU Digital Services Directorate, Digital Transformation Agency, European Data Innovation Board, Secretaria de Governo Digital, etc.
These two policies in conjunction would supply projects with the cash needed and foment projects to do useful things.
Firefox is supposed to be committed to serving the user before itself yet I see that as a sham. They put ads on their new tab page and phones home when starting and exiting. It’s the least bad alternative but I’m not stoked about helping Mozilla which I feel betrayed by.
Their revenue in 2023 was $653 million. They would need 5.4 million subscribers willing to pay $10/mo, which is about 4% of their total userbase. Clearly that's a steep hill to climb, and couldn't be done all at once. The transition would be tricky.
Very tricky. First, it needs management change willing to go Jerry McGuire on the c-suite and Foundation, plus deal with all internal culture debt and oxidized dynamics.
Secondly, Mozilla would have to deal with Google - could be done, Google pays so a major browser exists, paid subscribers may help recover lost browser share for FF... And, that Google deal may be going away soon anyway. Probably negotiable.
Third, the free-tier and paid tiers need to be set in a way that everyone (OSS advocates included) are happy and there's tangent value for people on the fence for a paid subscription. Having people just pay because they want to pay for their browser is not a business plan, and Mozilla needs a real business plan moving forward.
Since 85% of Mozilla's current revenue comes from Google paying to have their search engine set as the default on Mozilla, and given that this is at risk due to last year's antitrust ruling against Google, they will need to diversify regardless.
> Today, I happily pay for software (including free and open-source software!) that puts users first, including Proton, Standard Notes, Kagi, and others.
Uhh two of those are primarily services with dedicated clients not just software.
I totally agree with the article otherwise. I don't want to donate to the foundation to support Firefox. They'll just use it for side projects and it does nothing to reduce their dependency on Google. Just let me pay for a version of firefox that has a nice contributor badge, and doesn't have Google as a search engine installed. It doesn't have to be something that's worth the money.
Also they could make the sync service paid. And reduce the free version. I'd gladly pay for it. They've said they'll never make us pay for it but I don't understand why not. It's a service that costs money on an ongoing basis.
IMO they should also go back to a more community driven approach. Not treat themselves as a mega corp with an overpaid CEO. But more like a startup. Because really, size-wise they're only startup sized. The only reason they pretend to be a big tech is because they have so much Google money to throw strong. A project like KDE (Which I sponsor monthly) provides a lot more software without all this overhead, and works much better along with the community. This is how I would love to see Mozilla.
But maybe ladybird will be what I'm looking for.
The post seems to present a false dichotomy:
FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices.
Paid software ensures quality assurance.
The poster worked at Mozilla Corporation, so I think they’re saying that unless you pay for Firefox, it’s getting funded in other ways that aren’t in its users’ best interest, like MoCo selling user data, which they’ve admitted to.
But, when MoCo sold out its users, they lost the ability to ask me to pay, because what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
I’ll gladly donate and have donated to an organizations whose products I use where those organizations would rather fail and be dismantled than sell their users’ data. I’ll even pay companies that don’t lie about it. But, Mozilla said they’d never sell out, and then they did.
> what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
nothing.
It's why i think browser (and other platform software, such as OS, or telephony/mobile platforms) should be FOSS funded by taxes, and "regulated" so that its always open access etc.
Relying on donation (ala, altruism of individuals) do not work at scale.
If anything the average is the exact opposite. Venture capital ensures enshittification to recoup costs.
The problem is that a lot of the most influential FOSS only exists because of VC capital (or other dysfunctional markets), either because they sponsor projects directly, or they pay the salaries of the people who happen to do it themselves. FOSS has become a form of economic dumping that could be causing more harm than good. If Google couldn’t “dump” Chrome for free, or Facebook couldn’t “dump” React for free, maybe browsers or front-end frameworks would be regular, functional, competitive markets. Making it “FOSS” is just an inoculation against what would otherwise be considered an anti-competitive practice.
After 30 years of Firefox, because of their wasting money and not improving Firefox, switched to Zen, very happy Zen user - hope they will switch to Ladybird engine if that ever becomes a thing.
You might want to be more specific on the definition of "not sold your soul" when praising a messaging app that holds the encryption keys of their homemade encryption scheme on their closed-source servers.
Telegram also introduced ads, but yeah, it’s a good example. (It does however suck, but for unrelated reasons.)
Kagi makes Orion[1] and it's paid. I haven't used Orion myself, but I pay for Kagi and have been a very happy user for over a year now.
We already paid for Firefox through decades of donations in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars MoCo has received over the years from Google that was definitely not a bribe in exchange for sandbagging Firefox by firing most of the Firefox devs. That's what the community got in return for our decades of support because again, we've already paid for Firefox.
At this point we should just fork Firefox or focus on IceCat instead.
> Am I suggesting Mozilla entirely pivot to this business model overnight? Of course not. [...] Run an experiment...
But Google can see it happening and pull support overnight.
Mozilla cornered itself into this situation, any official effort to make Firefox "more independent" has to happen really fast if they don't want to get almost entirely de-funded instantly.
I already pay mozilla for relay. Let me pay for firefox so someone can make the case that suits should care about it
Running on donations is not a viable strategy for any long-term goal.
Mozilla needs to learn how to do the very hard thing and passively invest these donations. This is a viable long-term strategy. FF would have extra monetary momentum or inertia, and donation stall-out, however and whenever it occurs, would not be game-over for Mozilla.
There are so many privacy improving Firefox forks out there. These people should unite and start a non profit to handle further development that's in line with the least common denominators of what they all try to achieve and abandon Mozilla for good. Giving more money to this compromised entity won't help anyone. Mozilla should just die.
I, too, have been saying this on occasion. In my observation, Mozilla has been in an increasingly suboptimal position with Firefox, for a while now, as Google and Microsoft have largely settled on splitting the market in between themselves where the core of Chrome is developed by the former and Microsoft spends their effort on what they are [better] at -- integration with Windows in the form of UX-level features and whatever else that they do with it to build Edge. Firefox is increasingly seen as a "fair" nuisance that is slower, and by comparison can afford less effort development-wise. Look at some of the practically critical issues in their Bugzilla database -- there are features there that have been waiting almost a decade for implementation, and the discussions point to a combination of code complexity that requires acute insight into the browser that is your typical bell curve distributed over developers familiar with it -- the number of developers who are able to actually deliver on those features, can probably be counted on two hands. And that is in part because most of these people are getting paid to do other things. In the very least Mozilla directs their effort in a manner that speaks for itself -- why are some of these features, like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360870 that would be considered critical in today's Web development environment, not implemented after nearly a decade? -- If Mozilla _is_ paying the developers?
This is why I too think we ought to migrate to Patreon-like direct sponsoring of individual (or vetted group) effort to generate some development steam for Firefox. It might make Mozilla deny these developers write-access to Firefox repositories for all I know, but a fork cannot be prevented.
I've been using Firefox since its "Phoenix" days (good memories!), but it's lagging behind the competition more and more, and while I'd be first to admit we don't need half the features Google is busy putting into Chrome which then "magically" appear in Edge (what a devious alliance, that), some of them are sound design but are absent in Firefox, to the detriment of developers. In short: Firefox is losing more ground faster than ever before, at some point the boundary conditions will cause it to no longer be a viable alternative for the average user, I am afraid. Which will cause a "cascading failure" where no developer will test for it, and you know what happens then (because we've been there before).
I would rather pay for Kagi/Orion if they ever went cross platform. I like the idea of paying for my search and browser package with LLMs bundled in. I don't want to get locked into the Apple ecosystem even more than I am so I going to need Linux/Android support at least in Beta
I would pay for Orion if it was open source (at least their WebExtensions implementation). Still a nice browser though!
What stops someone else from just offering a download of release builds for free?
I understand FOSS can be financed when the customer is a business, but when it's a user?
Nothing, but it doesn’t work for closed source software either.
Pirating a FOSS app would probably have less of a psychological barrier, but I think it would be more frowned upon instead. (I won’t judge you if you pirate Photoshop, but pirating Inkscape? Shame on you!) We’ll have to see how it plays out though.
I still like Firefox however I think it has lost already. It was Mozilla's management failure. Chromium past it years ago and I don't think it can be changed.
I have no intention to pay just for Firefox, the browser. A browser is not that special anymore and there are plenty of alternatives.
However, I do want to pay for additional features and services, like a solid ad-blocker, integrated VPN-networking, privacy features like email relays or anti-fingerprinting, a safe and reliable cryptocurrency wallet, a smart cross-platform password manager, a privacy focused gmail alternative, integrated detection of fake reviews, bot messages and sloppy AI content, AI summaries, …
Add value to Firefox, in a coherent, meaningful and effective way to make using the internet secure, enjoyable and interesting again. Do that and take my money.
I would definitely pay for Firefox. Like the author, I voluntarily pay for lots of good open source software. Happy to pay Mozilla for Firefox.
There are about 5.5 billion people on the internet. Firefox's "small" market share of ~5% is still about 250 million users.
I'm reasonably sure that a small fraction of those 250 million people are even aware of the concept of "Free Software" or "Open Source", or how it relates to Firefox.
Why not fund LibreWolf instead? Or maybe even ladybird?
They're actively working on that! Go kagi! https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/kagi.com/post/3ljqsgjmkpk2n
The real idea here should be that if Mozilla is accountable to its paying users, a bunch of incentives are fixed.
I would be very happy if paying for firefox meant that I knew when it would become Servo
I already posted a hot take [0], but this one is even hotter: there's no strategy that Mozilla could have employed to make any of their products popular.
I will substantiate that assertion with a simple argument in the form of a question: what were the most popular internet browsers in each period of history, for each platform, and why?
IE was popular because it came with Windows. Safari is popular because it is both Mac and iOS default browser. Chrome became popular because Google convinced you that IE was slow because it was IE, not because your PC was slow already.
Firefox should have appealed to the developer/hacker demographic. Instead they've made every effort to alienate those demographics in trying to appeal to the general public. They were never going to be able to compete against Google's influence, but they could have established a stronghold with the power-user communities that would grow slowly over time as they converted their friends.
For some reason I still cannot load unpacked extensions for more than 24hrs. I cannot load unsigned extensions unless i download a special build of firefox. Firefox doesn't support apple scripting. A stock install of firefox has more sponsored bloatware than Chrome. Great way to treat the power users.
I'm so exhausted by these threads. Hacker News is, if it's anything, a site built by tech entrepreneurs for tech entrepreneurs. If you really think you can do better, fork Firefox, hire some engineers, and have at it. Brendan Eich did exactly that! Go work there! Or skip some steps and look at the other browser startups to see if they already had all the ideas you do.
Do you have every right to whinge here, roughly ever few months? Absolutely! Do I have a right to call you a bunch of wingers? Also absolutely!
Someone should fork Firefox, strip all copyrighted stuff, and severe all ties to Mozilla. Worked great for Rust, Servo, Thunderbird and several other projects dumped by Mozilla.
But honestly Firefox has way too much technical debt. Starting new browser (Ladybird, webkit) seems like much better way to go! There are several independent browsers!
Thunderbird is de jure still a Mozilla project (through a subsidiary, MZLA).
And no, severing all ties wouldn’t work – not unless you find a viable financial model. Selling access for builds (Ardour-style) might work, but I’m not too sure.
My understanding is Thunderbird is self funded from donations.
> not unless you find a viable financial model
First reduce expenses by several magnitudes. There is no reason browser should need more than a github project, build QA servers, and 10 paid core developers. But you would need much better codebase for that!!!
As for income, donations come to mind. You can still sell default search, just not to google.
20 years ago browser companies had income from selling their rendering engine for embedded use. They also did consulting...
I mean I do agree – donations plus endowment should work pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549144
I think this is the only way to properly handle the current situation, but I don't think market forces will be enough to do so without them still needing to rely on some external sources. I think the most I'd want to pay for a browser is 50 bucks. The odd thing is the web is basically the OS for 99% of what most people do. So in that sense it's WAY worth it.
I agree that Mozilla is problematic that past decade or so especially, but there is not a lot of other options. I do think it would be cool if buying Firefox as a product gave you a "voting share". 1 vote per user. I'm not sure how well that would work, but it would go a way to make it the browser of the people and not just "the org" which pushes whatever it wants on you regardless if you like it or not.
Everytime I try to get away from FF I find there's really not anything else out there at this point in time. Servo in theory "is coming" someday. But I am not holding my breath even though that would be my preferred option. Ladybird, well... I'm not keen on Andreas Kling's general approach to organization, but if it's a good browser that supports standards and plugins and has power to block ads, it would at least provide some flames to FF's feet to start taking things seriously and not just suck in Google's teat.
We have to get them away from Google. I'm honestly worried they're going to remove v2 at some point then we're really fucked. But I have to keep coming back, if only because I don't want to give Chromium based browsers more share, and since it's the source/main of derivatives, it's better IMO to just use that than a fork which may or may not break.
Mozilla dropped the ball and their financing structure killed my goodwill. I'd actually pay for a completely trackingless and privacy-focused Chrome since it's a better product, but I'm not going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a worse product.
can someone explain what is happening to firefox for posts like this to exist?
I use firefox daily and while i'm aware of market share dropping, it's still a reasonable browser to use.
Is it just speculation now on the future of firefox?
>"Some might worry that people would flock to alternatives if Firefox became a user-funded product. I disagree. In fact, I think the exact opposite is true. Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model"
Sorry but that's just... delusional. Yes the moment Firefox would charge money and become a paid product 90% of people would switch over to Brave et al. The average internet user or even Firefox user does not now what Mozilla's business model even is because they're not terminally online.
A browser like Firefox if it wants to compete with Chrome and wants to have an impact on the internet needs to be free because the average internet user is willing to spend exactly zero dollars on software. If anyone could make more money charging for their software than not they'd already be doing it, unless you think they hate money.
Same goes for all the tirades about Mozilla's management. Again the average person has no clue about it, they don't read news about software company management. Firefox has been losing ground because Google owns half of all major sites on the internet and Android and ships as a default on tons of devices, it's that simple.
This thread is a perfect example of why the ad-driven model will win every time. Most people don’t actually want to pay for things (that’s just what gets parroted in anti-AdTech posts here).
It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).
I don’t feel optimistic for the future of Firefox given it seems they’re likely to lose their primary source of funding in the coming months.
What alternatives are there? The temporary benevolence of a mega-Corp with a vested interest in online advertising? Crypto mining in the browser? Replacing affiliate links?
I haven’t seen a solution that seems practical here but it seems clear to me that if privacy-motivated, anti-BigTech HN commenters won’t pay for it, no one will.
>It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).
I think this is in larger part because people don't like the decisions they have been making. I think an executive team that had stayed focused on firefox or successfully brought in revenue to support it would have much less backlash on this point. People boycott other companies for similar reasons.
Mozilla is a perfect example on how wokeness destroys everything it touches. I would never pay any money to the Mozilla corporation until they really prove themselves not to be the extreme leftist activists they have been since they kicked out Brendan. Worst business mistake I have ever seen.
You can pay for Firefox, just donate. This post is ridiculous. What purpose does gatekeeping Firefox behind a paywall serve? People will just use forks for free, as the author himself says. Weird.
How could anyone consider tossing money at an organisation that wastes as much as it does pretending it's a publicly traded company?
The executive pay is disgusting and reflects in no way the performance of the products. This money should be going into engineering and outreach.
Until firefox fixes it's identity model it will never be useful for me, a systems engineer.
Yes, i'm aware of firefox profiles. it's implementation is hard to use and generally confusing. it requires going to secret pages, and quite frankly, i found it worked like hot garbage.
"Publish a version of Firefox with no sponsored content, no telemetry, no Google (by default), and ad-blocking built in. I wouldn't hesitate to pay.
If Mozilla doesn't do it, I fear someone else will."
Why fear; competition drives improvement
IMHO, need more non-commercial browsers; I use a 1.3MB (static) text-only one for printing large HTML files^1; there are not many choices for such programs
The author makes a strange but persistent assumption; payment will stop surveillance
Payment does not necessarily solve the issues of sponsored content, telemetry, Google partnership or ads (not to mention non-telemetry data collection and tracking)
It is possible to accept payment and still perform surveillance and advertising services
"Big Tech" is already doing this; e.g, stop ads/tracking in one context after payment, but still collect data, track and/or show ads in other contexts
What is more lucrative for the "browser developer"
(a) payment from trillion-dollar market cap companies serving the advertising industry, or
(b) donations from www browser users, or
(c) both
1. It bloats to 7.5MB (static) with OpenSSL; one of many reasons I use a TLS forward proxy
"Personally, I'd be ok with opt-in telemetry if the information was used solely within Mozilla for product development.
The red line for me is sharing of telemetry data with advertisers."
These so-called "tech" companies offer no such enforceable promises; the absence of enforceable (cf. non-binding) promises is intentional
How does this commenter know Mozilla does not share telemetry with its other partners, e.g., Google.
"Product development" is for the benefit of Google^2 and anyone else who leverages Mozilla's work.
2. Chrome's initial development was performed by former Mozilla developers who joined Google. The idea that Mozilla is "competing" with Google or offers some meaningful alternative is bonkers. Mozilla's work has direct benefits for Google. By all means, use Firefox and warn against Chrome. But spare us the illusions that this somehow impedes Chrome. The companies are business partners; they share data under agreement
IMHO, all these popular "modern" browsers suck.^3 Too large, too complicated and effectively outside the user's control. The developers maintaining them are paid with profits from selling advertising services, or search data in the case of Mozilla. The resulting software is designed with advertising and tracking in mind. That is why we see bizarre ideas, e.g., from Google, Apple, about how make data collection, advertising and tracking "acceptable".
3. This comment was submitted without using a browser. I'm using vim 4.6, hunspell, a couple of custom UNIX filters, a TCP client and a tiny 54-line shell script
> Mozilla pushed out Brendan Eich because of his poltical ideals. Because of that I am unwilling to support them.
Specifically - it was his PERSONAL ideals, not affecting the company in any way, shape or form. THAT's why it is so outrageous.
Lobbying the government to restrict his employees’ freedom to marry who they want was indeed a political “ideal”, but its actual content is of course important to the context.
You make it sound more noble than him trying to make his personal “ick” into binding law.
Is that because you agree with his ideals and that’s why you’ve made this decision?
If his ideals was something you disagreed with, would you then accept with Mozilla pushing him out?
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.