Firefox Premium Coming This Fall
i-programmer.info
i-programmer.info
1. I want my money to go into Firefox development and nowhere else.
I certainly don't want my money spent on their content business, even if it is used as a leverage to generate more money for Firefox development. I'm torn about Rust development because I certainly would love to see Rust flourish, but if we allow the money go into personally preferred projects it becomes hard to draw the line.
2. I want a Firefox with absolutely no strings attached.
- No Pocket, not even a trace of it
- No experiments, labs or whatever they call it (see Mr. Robot for an example)
- No network connections to third party hosts as long I haven't explicitly opted in.
- Safe search off by default
- No predefined search engines
- No predefined start page
3. I want Mozilla (as a whole and not only the Firefox branch) to be more carefully with the selection of their businesses partners.
I'm am not aiming at their co-operations with Google, Yandex and the like, which are OK for me. At least as long as my points from above are respected. Specifically I'm OK if the free version of Firefox continues to be sponsored mainly by Google. I'm not OK with business deals of the kind they had with Cliqz for example.
I think anyone would be just fine not having you as a customer.
But I want my version with Pocket. Pocket integration is one of the reasons I use Firefox in the first place.
I would gladly pay for Firefox if it had an option of radio-silent mode, with detailed list of which hosts it wants to connect to and why.
Some connections are obviously needed (CRL retrieval and such), but there's a LOT of superficial chatter due to options like "Block dangerous and deceptive content" that are on by default and that ultimately leak stuff that I don't it want.
Person A states their preferences regarding a product and says that they wish that the company would offer certain options. Person A says that they would be more likely to buy (or would only buy) the product with those options available. Nowhere is it demanded that the company implement these options, but person A has very clearly indicated their preferences.
Persons B, C, and D then immediately come out of the woodwork to shut down the discussion:
* Person B explains why nobody else would be interested in the options that person A has asked for. Person A is a "niche" user and their opinions are unimportant.
* Person C characterizes person A as "unreasonable" or "entitled" and explains why no company in their right mind would want person A as a customer.
* Person D counters person A's statement by explaining that the company can produce any product they want to, and that they don't have to listen to person A's request. It's a private company, etc, etc. (Note that nowhere did person A imply that the company had to listen to their request.)
For real-world examples of this phenomenon, see any thread regarding (in particular) Apple, Mozilla, or Tesla.
> We have repeatedly commented on Mozilla's precarious funding situation. According to Beard's answer in the interview 90% of the organization's income comes from search - i.e the royalties received from companies like Google and Yandex for including their search engines in Firefox. From our report on its 2017 balance sheet, the latest year for which it has published its accounts, Royalties amounted to $539,168,000 of total revenue of $562,279,000, which is around 96%.
Anything to lessen that reality is probably a step in the right direction.
In agreement with others, can't wait to vote for FF with my wallet (even though I might not use any of the features).
Mozilla keeps building stuff nobody wants and employing a thousand or more people to affect that pointless effort.
What Mozilla needs is not a new, paid product; what Mozilla needs is new management that understands what the point of Mozilla is.
I might agree that Mozilla might need some new management, but this seems like a good move not a bad one so...
I would have hoped you could just bank that and pay for Firefox development with the interest. What is Mozilla spending that amount of money on?
I think it could be great - better funded by 'power users' than by tracking and ads.
There are plans to launch paid subscription services & products in a Firefox brand family. Some of services may even be independent from the browser and be separate standalone apps & products. Some of the services may even - gasp - work in a non-Firefox browser.
Think of things like Firefox Send, Firefox Monitor, Firefox Lockbox, a system-wide VPN, an in-browser secure proxy. Specific plans are still in progress, but I don't think any of them are literally "you pay for browser now"
I just think if you don't make payment look like it's about a specific product, that people will be more willing and likely to pseudo-donate by subscribing before they hit whatever such limits.
Supporting Firefox and getting some perks normally associated with other paid services sounds like a win-win to me.
I'm not adverse to paying for a performant, privacy respecting browser.
Unfortunately, purchasing an unlock key is not much better either. It ties your browser to personally identifiable information you submit when you pay.
And then not sign into the browser that you use to browse the internet.
As for the unlock key: I think this solution would be OK for me as long as the keys are transferable. We could buy the keys in bulk an resell them at conferences for cash.
Although there isn't much information, I can't see myself really wanting/using any of the premium features personally, though. Unless they can reliably replace Dropbox or my password manager. Also, I feel they'd likely be making a mistake by putting any useful future core browser features which emerge behind a paywall (and that's going to be a constant temptation).
In my experience Firefox does detect MITM attacks though.
Once the connection is established, you’re fairly good, but until then quite a few things can go off the rails.
> Cost per click on Google properties — which roughly measures the amount Alphabet charges advertisers for each ad served on its web sites — dropped 29 percent from last year and 9 percent from last quarter, which might be alarming investors concerned that Google’s pricing power for ads is eroding. [1]
Additionally, Firefox is losing users, around 50,000 - 100,000 per day. [2]
They now want to add all kinds of additional stuff in order to make money. For a browser this is a death sentence. A browser can not be more than a browser, and ad tiles are the only practical way of making money next to search engine deals. While a pro-version of Firefox is certainly an interesting idea which can be sold to a tech-savvy minority, it neither can diversify their revenue in a meaningful way, nor is clear yet whether Mozilla is going to offer a paid Firefox version, or simply tries to upsell a software bundle branded with their name.
Mozilla paid around 30 million to aquire Pocket (one of their supposed foundations for making money), but there isn't any data to show whether they are profitable with it. Given the low number of ads in Pocket, they probably aren't profitable. In 2017, according to their financial report, they only made 2,5 million with Pocket ads.
Opera is the only other major browser that has to survive without having a tech giant behind them. They do everything they can to make money with Opera. And it has boiled down to ads in the start page and licensing. There’s nothing more you can do.
Opera is surviving on three kind of deals: [3]
– search (ca 60%)
– ads in start page
– licensing deals on mobile phones
Licensing is off limits to mozilla because they have lost the mobile market.
So all that is left is ads on the start page. Its that simple. There’s also a lesson to learn for Mozilla from the time Opera abandoned Presto: [4]
> “Because of our switch to the Blink engine, our retention rate on desktop users is much better now. This is because most websites work in Opera since we’re using the same engine as Google. We think we’ve become more relevant after we moved over to the Blink platform, and more companies now start to work with us,” Boilesen said.
> “We’ve got twice as many developers on the desktop browser now than we had with Presto, because all [our] resources went into maintaining Presto. The only error we made with Presto was that we kept it too long. Our change to Blink was because we wanted to get on the offensive with regards to innovation, we used too many resources to keep Presto competitive."
There are only two ways. You either stay innovative and keep up with the times, or you downsize and develop for a small niche group. Mozilla is doing neither.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/alphabet-earnings-q4-2018.ht...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/browser-maker-opera-has-fi...
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/show-me-the-money-how-opera-st...
Now that I think about it, Firefox 56 updated with security patches in perpetuity and with active add-on ecosystem would be a great product. It was the most extensible browser ever, so new features can be delegated to add-on developers. Make the add-ons paid as well, I wouldn't mind.
Maybe firefox should become more like microsoft and amazon and instead of monetizing the browser become a bigger competitor to google et al viz vi cloud services. They also could build products for developers to use for browser testing across multiple platforms, etc...
I don't see premium firefox taking off, but more competition with AWS, Azure, GCP is never a bad thing, or maybe they do something like Brave Browser and merge crypto with browsing though that seems tenuous compared to some other options.
This makes me wonder how much Google spends on Chrome?
Writing a rendering engine for CSS and an interpreter for javascript are not trivial. Plus you have to make them secure. And deal with all sorts of edge cases. And that’s before we even get to the HTTP stack, cookie and local storage handling, etc. Let alone expected browser amenities like bookmarks and (secure) extensions.
And then make it cross-platform, including supporting older versions of a bunch of operating systems, and all sorts of hardware configurations, several dozen languages, RTL input...
If it were that trivial, systems & C++ devs would already be doing it.