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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

I'd be happy to pay for Firefox, but I have a few points that are important to me. They are probably not very realistic but here they are anyway:

1. I would like 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 would like a Firefox with absolutely no strings attached.

- No Pocket, not even a trace of it. The proper place for Pocket is a plugin.

- 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 would like Mozilla (as a whole and not only the Firefox branch) to be more careful 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.

4. I would like to be able to pay without having to be logged into a Firefox account.

This is actually davidhyde's idea from another thread [1] but I added it here because I fully agree.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20144726

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I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them, just as a condition for maybe giving them something day.

See, that's one of the weirdest problem in FOSS: the fans hold them to a way too high standard, making it twice as hard to thrive. Once because it's hard to make money as an open source, benevolent product in a world of free for all. And another time because the very people that should be supporting you will always say you don't do enough.

I generally agree with this (FOSS fans can be wildly too demanding, especially for the tiny amount of cash donated)

But is the comment above really too high a standard? If a paid version of Firefox doesn't (1) at least strip the adware out, and (2) actually fund Firefox development, then what would even be the point?

If you want to blanket donate to everything Mozilla, you can already do that today. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

I think a default search engine and default first tab is fine as two examples where that list of demands is excessive.

And depending on what “no network connections to third-party hosts unless I’ve explicitly opted in” means, this probably breaks CDNs, multi-host content serving, and lots of common js distribution mechanisms in ways that normal users will find confusing and result in “Firefox doesn’t work” if that’s the default it ships with.

I'm not sure why that is excessive, except that Mozilla made (maybe still does, I'm not sure) most of their money from getting paid to put search engines as their default. How hard is it to pop a dialog in the installer or on first run to let you pick? I don't think that is unreasonable.

And the default tab just means loading a blank tab up. The last time I used Firefox, this was already a setting that you could pick.

When I last installed it, the default tab was the Firefox home page (or some other Mozilla landing page), which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I find a lot of open source software insufficiently opinionated. Can't decide? Make it an option. Want to be "fair" to all? Make it an option and prompt the user during installation! As a user, I like when I have options but when some kind of sensible default has been pre-selected to shorten the time and mental effort between deciding to install and the first "wow" moment.

You may be surprised at what the default looks like now-

https://i.imgur.com/hGe837H.png

Agreed, I was totally on board with the parent comment until those points. All browsers have a default search engine and start page... it's expected.

>All browsers have a default search engine and start page... it's expected.

Maybe on the first launch you could get a wizard allowing you to pick your search engines, or to have none at all.

I'm pretty sure the poster meant no 3rd party connections initiated by Firefox independently of what's in the actual HTML it's loading. No telemetry, in other words. I strongly agree that telemetry features should be excluded.

Really? Isn’t the telemetry in the HTML on most sites?

I assumed they were looking to block any cross-origin fetch that they hadn’t whitelisted.

I don’t care about “adware” and would likely be annoyed that I paid for something and it had less things in it. I use the Pocket feature for example. So for me the point would be why would I pay if my features are being reduced. Or things are changed that I don’t care about. So then for me it would become what’s the point of paying. You can’t make everyone happy. And not everyone feels the same way about things. L

donating to mozilla specifically does NOT go towards firefox development, unfortunately. It just goes towards mozilla foundation's advocacy stuff.

Its pretty out there to expect to dictate a companies budget because you opted to buy a product from them.

Will you only buy a big Mac if McDonalds commits the money to ball pit maintaine only?

No, it's not really that "out there", you just don't see it because the vast majority of companies take the money you give them, and spend it on one of two things: 1) operations, or 2) shareholder dividends/profits/etc. (with most going to #1 for normal companies). Operations, of course, includes employee salaries, building rent, utilities, but also new development/R&D, advertising, etc. (I might not be using the totally correct business definition of "operations" here; bear with me.)

Most companies do NOT spend a lot of money on things which do not help their bottom line or benefit (or return profit to) their shareholders. At best, they'll spend some token amount on some donation, in return for getting their name plastered on stuff, which in effect a form of advertising, just a better one than handing money to some media company for ad time or something, and creates something beneficial for the community (such as sponsoring a museum exhibit).

Your analogy is off, because (for example) the OP specifically said that they didn’t want the money to be spent on other things Mozilla does even if those things generate more money for Firefox in the end. That’s the analogy for spending the money on rent or advertising, or building a ball pit (be it called Pocket or VPN) in order to bring in more users.

I thought he was implying Mozilla Foundation's outreach and advocacy programs.

I agree. Unfortunately, I've seen this more demanding behaviour primarily from tech savvy people. Programmers/Engineers (me including) can have wildly esoteric demands. Only after did I start running a business, did I re-adjust my expectations of myself and that of others.

That said, fortunately, Firefox is still common of a tool which is used by the general public and I think they'll pay. This would have been a painful process had this been a library which was exclusively used by devs but browsers etc can escape that unreasonable expectation.

P.S. I don't think GP is making some extra-ordinary demands but I won't be surprised if someone will demand the heaven and moon from Firefox for 10 USD a year. Absolutely will not be surprised.

I feel like most of these demands aren't too onerous because they're pretty much all in the form of "hey this thing you're doing that takes time and effort to do -- don't."

Like it would be one thing to demand lots of features that require effort to develop but the parent is literally asking to pay more for less.

It is very normal for donations to foundations to have stipulations about what they're allowed to be spent on which is why developement (not in the software sense) pushes so hard for donors to allow spending in the general fund. I have no problem letting Mozilla spend my money as they see fit but I absolutely understand people who are only interested in Firefox.

No search engines installed by default seems strange. It is much easier to switch or remove search engines than to add them.

>I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them, just as a condition for maybe giving them something day.

No, right now I'm not paying a dime to companies that don't provide me with the products I want.

Parent is talking about being a customer, not a charity.

The parent is not only talking about the products they receive but how that money is spent. Those assurances are pretty impractical and I doubt any company can reasonably be held to that kind of standard.

Well, a company where what you buy is "how the money is spent" (since browsers are free anyway), better provide it...

What would it even mean, though? It would just let them free up other, unencumbered funds, for things that aren't browser related when they would have otherwise been spent on the browser.

Surely the influence of "wow look at all this money coming in from browser development" is going to influence them to invest it there? If you don't think that then you don't trust them enough to give them money. And that's fine. But this idea that it makes sense to try to put strings on the very small amount of money we're talking about here...seems to imply some naive notion that you one could operate without trusting Mozilla...

Parent is confusing product owner or a developer with being a customer. Most of stuff he requested is already there.

This is just people: I make games. Players want 100 hours of unique experience, DRM free, DLC free and oh free. Plus they want all their features and bugs fixed or they threaten you.

The reasons for this are complicated but just like FOSS, videogames have convinced players we can provide them with the moon on a stick when in reality it's a photo of the moon and they need to provide the stick.

Are you saying the pervasive DRM which degrades performance, day 1 DLC practices, and sectioning up content that used to come with the $60 game I bought are not problems with the game dev industry? Yeah there are some people who want exactly what you said, but the majority just want a complete experience.

I'm perfectly fine with a 20 hour game with no DRM(or at least no denuvo) and DLC after a few weeks of the game being out. I'll pay full price for it too. What I don't pay for is a game that costs $60, has 10 hours of content that are riddled with bugs, a "beta" two weeks before release, day 1,2,3 patches because it is broken, runs at 3/4 of the fps it should because of Denuvo, and has day 1 DLC and a $30 season pass (which doesn't cover all the DLC from that season, just some), and content walled off by pre-order.

Consumers bear the brunt of the blame for this. I worked at a few AAA game shops when DLC was just starting to be a thing. Consumers drove that by their habits: they demanded add-ons and extras that took enormous effort to develop but didn't want to pay as much as a third or half the original purchase price, so we tinkered with smaller releases at much lower price points and consumers ate it up.

Then as mass development by indies offering free apps took off the "problem" got worse. Consumers now expect apps, including games, to have a tiny purchase price or be free and to pay a-la carte for things they want.

This is absolutely correct. If this stuff didn't work, then consumers wouldn't buy it, and the game companies would go out of business or change their practices. Game companies are highly profitable, therefore this strategy, as horribly as it sounds, is apparently a successful one which consumers are happy to fund with their disposable income.

Games are a luxury; this isn't something like ISP access or cellular service that you basically need these days to fully function and participate in modern society. If people really didn't like the practices of the game companies, they could easily just not buy any games and do something else with their free time. The consumers are absolutely to blame here.

I don't think it's that simple: there was a feedback loop involved in which game (and app) developers share some of the "blame" for what has happened. A few could have differentiated themselves by continuing to offer high-end gaming and app experiences at a premium, but chose short-term, easy money. I don't blame them entirely, but someone in a position of power with even reasonable patience and foresight back then could have kept enough competitive share of the market to profit well without going into the race to the bottom we've seen.

But if there's more money in doing it the way they're doing it now (leading to you calling it "short-term, easy money"), and switching back to the old way isn't more profitable, then that's really down to the consumers, because without them there would be zero revenue for these game companies.

The game companies aren't really in a position of power here; the consumers are. If they stop buying, then the entire industry goes under immediately. As I said before, games are purely a luxury, though it seems like gamers refuse to believe this. But apparently there's no shortage of people willing to throw their money at these companies and buy into these business models of buying broken games and paying extra to "unlock" content to keep playing.

I have coworkers like this. They complain a lot about the state of games, about how buggy they are and how they're entirely broken when they're first released, yet they keep buying them anyway. I ask them why and they don't really have an answer. Personally, I have much better things to spend my time and money on than entertainment products that disrespect me: I can go on a hike or bike ride, I can go on a date, I can go to cultural events, I can go to the gym, I can work on one of the languages I'm learning, or if I want to kill time at home doing something "mindless" I can just watch stuff on YouTube for free, watch Netflix, or play an old video game in an emulator even. Why so many young men insist on spending all their free time playing buggy games that aren't even complete when you buy them, I have no idea; there's many other things to do with your time.

I don't buy them. One of the many hobbies I enjoy, alongside coding, rock climbing, and a host of other activities, is gaming. You can turn your nose up at people's hobbies as much as you want, but playing games is no less mindless that most sports. My complaint is that game series that I enjoy playing turn into micro-transaction-ridden garbage.

Street fighter 4: great game, some netcode issues, DLC expansions released every year or two. Street fighter 5: buggy mess that didn't even work for the first 3 days after release, even after two(!) betas, with half the content locked behind a paywall, and literal advertisements put on costumes. That was probably the last AAA game I bought. I pretty much only play games from devs/publishers I respect, my problem is that list is ever-shrinking.

A lot of consumers are not like me: the hype is too much and they don't care about the actual game as much as getting to play it with other people.

>You can turn your nose up at people's hobbies as much as you want, but playing games is no less mindless that most sports.

I don't watch sports at all; I think they're idiotic and mostly a waste of time. I'll make a few rare exceptions for things like winter olympics events (downhill skiing for instance).

But I don't think this is a great comparison. At least with sports, when you pay the fee to watch the game, that's it: you go (or sit, if it's pay-per-view), watch the game in its entirety, and you're done. You don't suddenly get your view obstructed at half-time and are then required to pay an additional fee to watch the rest. If sports got that ridiculous, then I'd be making fun of people who continued to patronize them too.

>A lot of consumers are not like me: the hype is too much and they don't care about the actual game as much as getting to play it with other people.

So they're happy to support the publishers who treat them this way, and make them highly profitable. I don't really see the problem here: why shouldn't the publishers act this way then? They can treat their customers poorly, the customers happily come back for more, and they make a boatload of money. Maybe they lose a few people like you, but apparently that's not a big problem for them because they're making so much money on everyone else who refuses to abandon them. What's more, it sounds like there are some publishers who still do things the "old way" (according to your post here), but since that list is "ever-shrinking" according to you, that means this just isn't that viable a business model, because they're losing to the publishers who treat the gamers poorly. The people are speaking with their wallets, and apparently they like being treated this way, even when they actually still have alternatives!

Don't forget the "90 day roadmap" that tells players when the game will be worth playing and then gets blanked out like Anthem's when the players give up.

Imho the answer is already contained in your statement: paying for some kind of "professional service" transforms any interaction with the users into a provider/customer interaction. It will boil down to "this is good, please make it better" (which is implicitly stating that you may stop using if it's not done). The power of FOSS or heavily modded games is that the separation provider/customer is broken into a spectrum where some people are in between, are empowered to do some of the things they'd like being done.

Going back to firefox, i think it's a mistake. They are already far down the road of this provider/customer separation and going forward they will face such decisions over and over. This is a zugzwang and the sooner they break it the better. With a bit of wishful thinking i would have hoped they would flip the table and go full on with hardcore gnuish philosophy, making a big move and a new political depth into their browser. Perhaps regaining some sympathy from people that have long considered them as compromised, perhaps destabilizing big web players which will again have to face some public rumble to which they can't easily say anything else than "yeah we screwed up but hey it's not so bad and we are getting nicer" (an answer which is starting to get quite laughable).

On top of the usual way in which people (such as myself) can become self-entitled if we're not careful, there's also the concern that FOSS has a need to point toward "true north", while the realities of the market tend to blow us to the west. Until someone comes up with that magical business plan (and I'm still hoping for this), these things will always be in tension.

The best solution I can think of for the moment is to always express our demand FOSS without compromise, but no matter what show appreciation for them for getting as close as they can, so long as they seem to be trying at least (unlike, say, Android at this point).

If we don't demand true north, the ship will drift further and further west and we forget our mission. If we don't show appreciation, they'll fail to see the point and give up the journey entirely.

To be fair, most of these points are just asking them to NOT include a feature by default, rather than demanding they build something new before paying up.

>I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them

Examples, please. I'm not sure that I am, except perhaps in places where I don't have a lot of choice (e.g., my ISP). If your examples include things like Spotify, I don't use online music services. If your examples include things like Office 365, I sure as hell don't subscribe to that.

I am not a fan of using “this” in a discussion but seriously, a million times this. You’ve clearly identified a real issue.

FOSS users like parent believe they have a birth right to the software they’re using, including making decisions for the direction product is taking.

This is a user stating what it would take to make them a paying customer.

This is not about FOSS. Full stop. The title is literally:

"Mozilla will reportedly launch a paid version of Firefox this fall"

Mozilla is free to ignore that feedback and sell whatever product they want. The parent user is free to not buy it.

> FOSS users like parent believe they have a birth right to the software they’re using, including making decisions for the direction product is taking.

This is not the conversation we're having. Shut up about it.

Mozilla already makes millions from us using Firefox. There's nothing to feel bad about.

> including making decisions for the direction product is taking

If I am the product, I expect to be able to participate in choosing the direction. Businesses ignore that, of course, and look what that's dealt them in reputation.

If I pay for something, I expect to be able to participate in choosing the direction. Businesses don't typically ignore paying customers.

Your list of "strings attached" to Firefox are fairly weak because most represent a trivial few clicks in settings. Insisting that a piece of software must ship preconfigured exactly to your liking seems a bit selfish to me.

Really though, how onerous is it to configure a fresh Firefox profile to suit your preferences? (And how often do you reset your Firefox profile anyway?)

Complaints about Pocket are largely emotional. It's a service run by Mozilla just like Firefox Sync and others. I agree it would be neater for Pocket to be implemented as a plug-in, but you could say that about a dozen or more Firefox features besides Pocket, so why single that one out? And really, why do you give a shit how Pocket is implemented if you don't use it anyway? Just switch it off.

Firefox Studies is a mechanism that is in principle no different to automatic updates. Studies is functionally less invasive than automatic updates and exists only because Studies allows for progressive roll-outs, rapid roll-outs and rapid roll-backs. Don't like it? Just switch it off.

Firefox Sync is client-side encrypted, open source, and theoretically self-hostable. Pocket is none of those.

These are all good reasons to not use Pocket. I do agree that it should be easier to disable. I guess I just don't see it as a big deal because I disabled it years ago and it hasn't ever come back.

Pocket replaced Reading List, which was all of those things.

Pocket was a third party when Mozilla integrated the service into Firefox. Mozilla employees denied for months that Mozilla took money for the integration. It came out later that Mozilla took money for referrals.

Pocket doesn't follow Mozilla's privacy principles.[1] Despite that, the Pocket website says "as a member of the Firefox family, privacy is paramount."[2]

Mozilla committed to make Pocket open source over 2 years ago. There are no longer plans to release the server-side code.[3]

It's a big deal to some people because they trusted Mozilla and vouched for Mozilla to other people. My parents understood "even Mozilla can't see your bookmarks". Explaining that Mozilla could see the new kind but not the old kind was harder.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/principles/

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/

[3] https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75...

He's basically saying the PAID version of firefox probably shouldn't be promoting google or other services with kickbacks.

But the vast (vast!) majority of users will be expecting Google as an option when they want to search. Removing it from the paid product by default would be a negative in terms of user experience.

From the end user perspective you'd be asking money for a product that takes more effort to set up. That's silly.

i think it’s a principle thing. for 90% of people, they’ll use it with default settings. seems like OP doesn’t want to support the usage of those default services in general (say, google search default?), so supporting a product that implicitly advances their usage is unattractive.

It's a principle thing? No, it's a train wreck. It's a sure-fire recipe for cutting the installed base of Firefox in half overnight.

Using your example and estimate, the 90% of people who use default settings will install Firefox and then immediately conclude it's broken because it can't search the internet. So they'll just switch back to Chrome and never try Firefox again.

Remember, these are the "default settings" people. They're not going to change the default settings. And with the OP's prescription for "no predefined search engines," there won't be a "Google" setting anyway even if they did try.

Train wreck.

He's talking about the PAID version of firefox when he asks for "no default settings". How would that cut the installed base?

I've got no problem if he wants to lobby Mozilla to offer Firefox: Weinzierl Edition alongside the standard one. I do have a problem whenever someone speaks like their specific array of demands are more important than the quiet people who may actually prefer the status quo.

This is an oddly vehement response to a lot of sane defaults.

One simple solution to this "train wreck" would be for Firefox to simply link users directly to the search engine settings if they try to search without one set.

That’s not a simple solution because the OP is not just calling for the removal of a default search engine, but also calling for "no predefined search engines," so there will be nothing in settings to choose from.

My point is that you can have sane defaults without sacrificing usability. I'm sure with a few minutes of brainstorming, you could find a solution that both educates the user on why a predefined search engine is a bad practice, and direct them to resources to make an educated-choice on which one they'll choose.

What you're describing is a terrible user experience. The only people who would want that are people who don't need the education. The people who need the education don't want to spend money on software just for it to lecture them when they launch it and force them to make a bunch of decisions. This would literally be paying Firefox to make you do extra work.

True, which is why I go back to my original comment of just having it take you to the search engine settings, with the different services listed out. It's a reasonable compromise of being honest & sane without much friction on the user's end.

I know you're claiming that's not what the OP is calling for, but we're literally just going on four words from them. Regardless, "train wreck" is an over-exaggeration for either of our assumptions.

The OP is what I responded to. That idea is what I described as a train-wreck. And I stand by it.

I agree it's not a train-wreck to have your browser offer the choice of Google, Ask Jeeves or Lycos upon performing the first search. What this is is pointless. Nearly everyone doesn't care and will just reflexively select Google. The remaining people will have changed the setting themselves anyway.

Not pointless. A step in the right direction. And a step we should all take in the software we develop, because defaults matter.

And your opinion trumps mine.

https://www.darkpatterns.org/

1. Rust _is_ helping Firefox development, and is a key part of why Firefox is remaining competitive. And they should have the flexibility to invest back into future R&D, and into supporting the open source projects that they depend on. That's part of what makes Mozilla so great as a company, and why many of us love it.

2. For the paid version that seems fine. But it seems fair that the free version of Firefox needs to be flexible in figuring out how to find sources of revenue. For example, if they pulled the plug on the predefined search engines then Mozilla would be dead pretty soon.

> Rust _is_ helping Firefox development, and is a key part of why Firefox is remaining competitive.

You don't know that. What if all the money that went into Rust would have been spent on a new renderer in C++?

Can confirm, I would pay for a version of Firefox with just four "features":

- No Pocket anywhere in the code

- No telemetry / experiments / Normandy anywhere in the code

- No network connections to third party hosts (other than websites I'm viewing)

- No "discovery" feed / whatever they're calling the activity stream sponsored content thing now anywhere in the code

Just let me monthly subscribe via Paypal or whatever, and give me a private build server link and tar.gz of the source.

To be clear, I think there's quite a decent size market for something that could mostly be accomplished with a bash script that runs "rm -r" a few times.

Support for detecting RSS in a page would be great, but that's probably not going to happen.

> - Safe search off by default

> - No predefined search engines

> - No predefined start page

These in particular are bad ideas. Default settings should always target the average user, not the power user.

Having Google as the default search/start option doesn't harm you or me at all and takes only a few seconds to change, but not having it adds significant friction and frustration for the average user.

Adding my comment from the other thread since it also applies here.

I agree, I'd be interested in this as well. Based on the replies you're getting, I'd also like to point out that I'm tired of this trend in discussions:

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.

I would add to this that Person A's comment is almost always upvoted near the top of the post as it is in this case, which immediately disproves Person B's characterization of A's preferences as "niche".

> 1. I would like my money to go into Firefox development and nowhere else.

They donated to Godot[1]. Don't think this rule should be so broad.

[1] https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...

You really want Firefox to release a paid web browser that can't search the Internet out of the box?

It's a browser. Right out of the box, if I type in www.google.com, it will load the site and I'll be able to search.

You are not average.

The average person loads up the browser and wants it to just work. We're software engineers, but we have to understand our users too - and they're vastly different to us.

Anecdote incoming - most of the people who use Firefox in my immediate circle are family members, and they don't care about configuring a default search. They don't know about DDG, they don't know about Bing, and they don't care. They want to open their browser and search whatever they need to find.

Configurability is the engineer's pipe dream, but it dismisses a lot of people - and what matters is the masses, not the HN minority.

We are a minority.

Anything behind a CDN (which is a lot of things) will be broken

1. Rust development is expressly used with Firefox development though. The point is more reasonable libraries with fewer security issues and tighter constraints that is more maintainable.

2. Would be happy with an install / first run option to speciry autocomplete and/or start page options.

3. Agreed, and definitely no such shenanigans in the paid version.

4. Not sure that would be possible, you'd probably at the very least need to log into something (like the VPN service included).

Just donate instead and let them know you want all your money to go straight into Firefox if possible: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

Insert standard response here that donations to Mozilla Foundation do not go towards software development.

While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.

— https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq#item_8

i basically agree with you and would want the same if i were to be paying for it. but. usually when companies try to sell a thing they try to make it _less_ alienating, not more. loosening up wallets is hard enough; when you pry out all the “helpful” features it gets even harder (for a very large portion of the market. maybe opposite for you and me, but who will this be targeted with this product?)

in general it’d be great to see the wider market start to see these “helpful” features as actually harmful, but that 180 degree reversal is slow going. we’re in the middle of it right now with security/privacy vs convenience. seems like half the companies are going one way and half are going the other.

I'd add builtin Tor support too, as the form of another mode (below Private Window mode)

Even better, would be to have install options that offer: TOR and/or a built-in VPN service (like Opera).

I'd also add that Mozilla fluff (pocket, etc.) be an install option (default off).

Finally, I'd like to be able to build stable macros again (ala greasemonkey). GM functionality in FF has been an annoyingly moving target - dropping and radically changing functionality - to the point where I now just keep an old version of FF w/ GM around so that I don't have to keep trying to re-write my macros.

Yes, I couldn't agree more. I'm a Firefox user, never switched to chrome because I always had concerned with it. If this an attempt to switch the business model and become independent from search engines, it needs to do it properly. If it's the case, I would be a happily paying as, as much as I'm not fond of some of the decisions made by Mozilla like pocket or labs as you mentioned, it's the only browser I feel I can use without spitting on my beliefs.

Agreed on all counts.

In addition, I hope this does not give license to Mozilla to make the free version of Firefox in to a télémétrie nightmare.

I would also like to add to this list the fact that I want a voice as a paying member. There are a few longstanding issues that still haven't been solved (e.g.: dark GTK themes causing problems) that I would like my money to go to somehow.

Does Firefox actually have a safe search feature?

I would gladly pay for your #2 ("Firefox with no strings attached"), and not even as a charitable donation. I just want something like that for personal use.

I would pay about $250 a year for software with these features. I don't think I'm alone.

I like the idea of a privacy-preserving Firefox that removes pocket/start page/mr. robot/etc..

It's very unlikely that this will happen. Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free. When you have demonstrated you are willing to pay money for a service, you are likely to also spent money on other goods. This only makes you more attractive as an advertising target.

Most likely we will see premium features like: - premium color themes - more cloud storage for settings and extensions - analytics on your browsing data (after you hand the data over to them) (??) - more customer support (???)

>Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free.

I have only seen major US news outlets do this - namely NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ etc.

I have subs to different publications - Ars, Ken, Nautilus - and they definitely are ad-free and a lot of others also claim to be ad-free for subscribers.

To me what you're saying is Mozilla is no longer about FLOSS, they're now just a company whose only purpose is to make money selling their users downstream for as much as they can get?

That may be true but it's extremely sad.

Where is the proof that it is true?

I'm reacting the the GP, they said (paraphrasing) that Mozilla won't create an advertising and tracking free paid version because if you'll pay to buy such a version then Mozilla will be to eager to exploit your worth as an advertising target.

>Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free.

All I ever hear about in regards to news websites is that they're dying out because no one wants to pay for subscriptions, and the arms race is getting worse as many of them have strengthened their paywalls so that non-paying viewers can't see the articles (while others develop workarounds for the paywalls).

Magazines, like newspapers, also seem to be dying out, though not as fast as the print newspapers.

Maybe companies should rethink this business model.

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