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Comment by user1980 | Hacker News Reader

user1980

"New focus on economics": It was bad enough seeing terrible clickbait in the "Recommended by Pocket" section displayed on every new tab. Now I have to go into settings to opt-out of Sponsored Stories so I don't have to see ads for Honey.

All to fund the so-called "internet activist movement"?

I just want a web browser, not an ideology.

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I'm totally with you on "Recommended by Pocket" thing, it's very sad. But I think you are confusing Mozilla with something it's not.

Mozilla is not a software company today that tries to be an internet activist. Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point. So no, it's not just about the web browser.

> Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point.

Then they should prioritize actions over words. Their blog posts paint a very different world from the one where they often ignore their users.

I wish Mozilla would distribute their free software the way some museums charge entry. A “suggested donation” of $X. And when I go to download the browser prompt me to either pay the suggested donation or manually change it to $0. I’d gladly pay $10 for Firefox every major update and I’m sure I’m not alone. It’s just not something I really think about very often. The passive asks just aren’t that effective.

In theory it's a nice idea, but it's hard enough to persuade my friends and acquaintances to try Firefox (again, since many of them left between versions 4 through 56). If they visited the website and were asked to make a donation, they'd think Firefox has become commercial software and will leave immediately. This will hurt their market share even more, if anything.

Ubuntu tried that one, and it wasn't very effective.

Ubuntu is still trying it - the Ubuntu desktop download page still prompts you to donate. You no longer have to pass it to get the download, though.

> And when I go to download the browser prompt me to either pay the suggested donation or manually change it to $0.

FYI elementary OS does that and they have public analytics where you can see how many people skip it: https://plausible.io/elementary.io

Their "payment skipped" goal has 57.9k conversions, while "payment complete" has 1k conversions. This is <2 months of data, since they've started using Plausible pretty recently.

> I just want a web browser

Excellent! How much are you planning on contributing?

Well, there is no way to contribute economically since donations go pretty much to everything except the browser it seems like.

Can you make a financial contribution that goes solely towards Firefox and not towards some other Mozilla activities?

Already contributing by allowing all the telemetry & data collection and by having unchanged the default search engine (Google)

Telemetry and data collection don't contribute to paying the bills, only to let Mozilla work on improving the browser.

Default search engine does.

Unfortunately web browsers cost money to make and maintain and people at large have shown they won't buy one the old fashioned way. Finding something that works is a hard problem.

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