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Comment by kvark | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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