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Comment by misil | Hacker News Reader

Firefox makes money by its search deal with Google, in other words: by funneling their users towards Google. This pretty much also boils down to "making money by showing you ads". Google's search ads, to be precise. Now you can say: "But I can turn this off", but then you'd also turn off their source of revenue.

Brave's stated goal is to establish an alternative ad-based business model that's long-term viable without the user being tracked. Will this be successful? Who knows, but at least they're trying to find a business model that respects your privacy while being long-term sustainable. Firefox's model doesn't, at least the way it works now.

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>Firefox makes money by its search deal with Google

Of course, development costs a lot. They will not need to rely on Google in the future if more people donate to them regularly. Consider donating to Firefox.

Considering most of their jobs are in mountain view, a very expensive col and developer salary area, they should consider moving somewhere more economical if they expect to live on handouts.

Why should we have to support their over priced office space?

I suspect that if you ask them, they're not in Mountain View for fun, they're there for the access to top tier tech talent. Browser rendering engines and java script engines are serious engineering, needing good engineers. It's not the only place in the world you can find them, but it's a good one.

Because they're still doing important work, and deserve to have nice things? Why does working at a non profit mean that you should have a bad quality of life?

You don't have to support them, but if their product provides value to you, it's worth considering

I think this miss the point. This seems more in the line to "Duolingo to Silicon Valley workers: Move to Pittsburgh, where you can actually afford a home" call[1].

That is, it's not about less good quality of life, just less high salary possible only in places with less high level of misc. inflation.

Plus passed some level, I doubt higher salaries make good corollary with high quality of life. Not that you can't have a sane happy life with a lot of money, of course. But : - it doesn't seem to to be a requirement, see for example the case of Matthieu Ricard[2] - large salary, or more generally acquiring a social status broadly recognized as great success doesn't prevent from terrible quality of life. Arguably, even you go with Camus saying "Un geste comme le suicide se prépare dans le silence du cœur au même titre qu’une grande oeuvre", not all people in [3] committed suicide out of a situation where they felt they had good quality of life.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/23/duolingo-to-silicon-valle... [2] https://onbeing.org/programs/matthieu-ricard-happiness-as-hu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicides_in_the_21st_c...

You're not wrong, but to many people, the appearance of a non-profit (notwithstanding the legal status of Mozilla Corp) operating in an extremely high CoL region isn't good.

If SV doesn't trigger that for you, think about, say, a non-profit headquartered in Monaco, that asks for donations so that its employees can have a nice home and QoL in Monaco with salaries several multiples of your own for comparable work.

This isn't true.

One, Mozilla has multiple offices across the world; see https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/spaces/

Two, a large percentage (perhaps even a majority?) work remotely.

This combination lets Mozilla hire talented people wherever they are.

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

Firefox is persuing other revenue sources as well, such as a paid premium browser. My last hope against the advertising economy is this model taking off.

Same, I intend to pay for their premium browser. I've been using Firefox for years. Chrome couldn't get me to shift over. I only use Chrome when testing front-end code and I don't do front-end development anymore.

I would pay buckets of money every month for a computing experience devoid of advertising.

I already pay YouTube for no ads, so I agree. I would do the same for TV to an extent, too many Netflix competitors popping up, I don't have time to spend hundreds of dollars on those, I wont be consuming enough content to justify them. I do spend way too much time online, I usually pay for no ads on mobile games / apps.

The Mozilla Foundation has multiple sources of revenue.

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