Is There a Google-Free Future for Firefox?

> Quietly put up with Firefox being hostile to them simply because it's Firefox?

That's not what I've been suggesting.

My suggestion is to not go to the even more problematic competitor.

Then the same people should not complain when they get ChromeOS Platform instead of the Web.

I think I’ve missed something here: how is Pocket user-hostile?

Indeed. A paradox inherent to the notion of paying to avoid ads is that it identifies you as someone who has disposable income and is willing to spend it, i.e. someone who advertisers really want to target.

I cancelled a subscription to the Economist because after paying about 10x more than other news sources their online website still showed obnoxious ads. That irked me. If I'm paying a premium for a service good news I want it without ads and digital is my primary viewing media. But I don't think many companies can resist double dipping.

Also, subscriptions for software always have a kind of smell. I'm not paying for a service - the service is done by my PC via execution of the software (using my own power, storage and computing resources too, btw). So superficially, I'm paying for the permission to execute some software on my PC.

It makes more sense if this is understood as paying to continuously keep the software up-to-date. But then, this would be the most honest thing to do: Request money for each update but let the user executive a particular version as long as they want.

Don't forget streaming now, too.

I was a big fan of Pluto TV until it got purchased by Viacom or whomever. Now, just like cable TV, there are 800 channels going at any given moment, and all of them show their commercials at exactly the same time.

I joke, but only partly, that there's not a jury in the country that would convict me if I murdered whoever instituted that change.

I’m afraid it’s inevitable. If there’s a large enough audience, someone will be willing to pay to market to them. Almost no business will be able to say no to the money.

"no ads" was never a selling point of cable. it's always been a balance of fees and ads.

Chrome is interesting because Firefox shows it could actually be a standalone business, and it's one of the scarier ones to let Google keep because of how much power it gives it.

The time has come for Mozilla to offer a way of donating that guarantees that 100% of the cash goes to Firefox.

Just in case: you can turn it off by setting "extensions.pocket.enabled" to "false" in about:config.

Thank you for reminding that there exists a browser that is based a Firefox, without the "services" from Mozilla.

As a Firefox user, I will give it a try on desktop and android. But can anybody maybe tell what are the limitations in daily real world use, if any?

With the ubiquity of Web browsers today, it would be very disappointing and dangerous for a single corporation, and one whose business model is to exploit people's identities and online activity, to have that much control. Whether government or whatever, we really need to find a way to rescue Firefox in particular and have a healthier funding of FOSS in general.

You did not mention Waterfox. It seems to have better compatibility with modern web sites than Pale Moon. Not sure what is going on with Seamonkey these days. I may have to give that a try. The problem I have with Firefox is that it is now way too similar to Chrome to bother with it. Maybe Seamonkey has retained its own identity.

Brave appears to be currently ad based, so no not the same.

I guess the micropayment model failed, maybe because it used bitcoin?

https://brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/

Exactly what ffpip said. The TOR browser does much more than just run your traffic through TOR to counter website fingerpriting, and Google being an advertising company, I see a conflict of interest to provide you with the anonymity that the Firefox-based TOR browser currently provides.

It doesn't support the anti-fingerprinting measures of TOR.

I don't thing you can block fingerprinting in Chromium. We can only fake it. There is no flag to outright block the fingerprinting.

And things like first party isolation and other about:config tweaks.

I think the TOR browser does a lot more than just run a browser through TOR. It uses Firefox's built-in fingerprint counter-measures; it spoofs the user agent; it starts using specific window dimensions to counter resolution fingerprinting; and many more things that I am probably not aware of. Running a random browser through the TOR network does not really anonymize you from the myriad number of ways a website can fingerprint you, and the TOR browser / Firefox go to some lengths to protect you from those things too. I think Google, being an advertising company, would have a conflict of interest in providing that same level of anonymity.

Mozilla is definitely NOT equal to your average open-source project like Debian or LibreOffice. The development on those projects is done entirely by volunteers. Maybe some of those "volunteers" are paid by companies to be contributors, which is the case with the Linux kernel.

But Mozilla is a large company. It may be a nonprofit, but there are HUNDREDS of millions in Google money funding the company and paying salaries for the 1,000 (??) or so employees, including, as mentioned above, a very well-compensated C-suite.

Firefox and whatever else Mozilla produces is funded with this very, very large pot of money. Could they run the Mozilla operation on $10 million (or $20 million) a year and invest the rest ($90 million to $390 million) a year in an endowment that could ensure Mozilla's independence in perpetuity? They could do that, but like many nonprofits, the "profit" goes to a large number of well-paid people. I can't think of another open-source project with such enormous funding that isn't part of a for-profit company.

Red Hat isn't asking individuals for money to fund Fedora or RHEL development.

I don't know what crazy universe a company -- even one hiding behind the framework of a "foundation" -- gets $100 million to $400 million a YEAR from Google -- and still has the chutzpah to ask individual users to make a contribution.

I love Firefox, and I absolutely agree that browser diversity is important. I use Firefox daily. But Mozilla is a huge outlier -- a "nonprofit" dragging in hundreds of millions and spending it. Do you think Debian collected more than $1 million last year? I'm not sure it did. It sure didn't get $100M or $400M. Mozilla is a huge company. It just doesn't have shareholders.

I hope they end up spinning that off into its own nonprofit focused solely on browser development.

Totally agree, in theory. In practice US regulators are too short sighted, incompetent and possibly corrupt (in that they benefit from the status quo, and are heavily lobbied) to deal with the situation; also, if Firefox dies, it’s another thick nail in the web’s coffin.

Igalia's model almost certainly couldn't cover maintenance of the entire browser engine and the desktop/mobile browsers, yet alone any ongoing improvement. It gets specific platform ports supported on an ongoing basis (typically for embedded platforms) and new features of interest to their paying customers supported (which are, inevitably, mostly major corporations), but that's largely it.

As far as I'm aware, Firefox is the browser engine they contribute least to: they have many more clients who have much more interest in WebKit or Chromium based browsers and that's where the majority of work goes.

Quite smaller. Postgres makes money too. But nothing close to what Oracle makes.

IIRC, Canonical gets most of their money from server support licenses, analogous to Red Hat.

Like Pocket/etc.? I seem to remember the userbase of sites like this excoriating Mozilla for including that, so I would assume any such effort now would be similarly rejected.

Someone will build and host free version.

> They did not fire employees working on Firefox.

They did, and some pretty notable ones at that. Filtering https://talentdirectory.mozilla.org/ to the "Engineering" department is largely people who worked on Firefox. The loss of David Baron for one has got to be felt: he's one of the few people who had a good high-level view of all layout and style work in Gecko and its integration with the rest of the engine. And he's not the only pretty senior engineer who was let go: there's definitely some dubious lay-offs there.

The Servo team was pretty small (around half a dozen people by the end, I think), and many would've been fantastic people to keep within Mozilla, even if refocused to Gecko.

And it must be said that Mozilla have been trying to diversify for years, largely to little success. Losing Mozilla entirely would unquestionably be a loss for the web, and it would be a real shame to lose another browser engine.

They also laid off the Rust guys, and the mozdev folks. Both of which were pretty essential for the mission.

I now consider Firefox to be a failed, and quickly sinking project. It's time to give up on them.

I'm most probably somewhat naive here, but if you could fork the latest release, remove all Pocket, VPN, whatnot stuff and just give me that as a build, I would be totally fine with it.

I love the core product, I really don't need any of the fluff around it.

> Getting a large enough group of contributors is hard.

Not really. This is a thought-terminating cliche in the form of a just-so explanation. The group of volunteer contributors who were underpinning Mozilla's success at its peak was quite large and healthy, complete with its own governance model. But then Mozilla Foundation essentially handed the keys over to the Firefox subproject, which in turn made a bunch of questionable hiring decisions, including people that deeply affected the project at an organizational level.

The really perverse thing is that a very similar thing had already happened once before—with Netscape. It was those very circumstances that led to Mozilla's original governance model as an insurance policy against any one corporate group accumulating too much power after getting it into their heads that they were the real reason for the project's upward trajectory and the only thing they needed to do to really get things on track was wrest full control of the golden goose. Mozilla's "failure" began when every random yahoo who managed to get through the company's hiring process was ipso facto part of a privileged class and anyone not on payroll became second-tier consideration at best (or more realistically, seen as a nuisance).

This "failing", of course, is the kind of failure that grew revenue to half a billion per year even as Firefox was getting thrashed, so whether you consider that a failure or success will come down to principles. If your idea of success is tied to the organization's charter, its openness and approachability, enabling people to shape the future of the Web even when not on the payroll under a browser vendor, and its "market" adoption and the tractability of developing an independent browser engine, then Mozilla is a failure. If, on the other hand, you're predisposed to seeing high revenue as a success, then Mozilla has been winning up to the point when it will inevitably fail due to unsustainability and its approach of salting the earth around it, pulling up the metaphorical ladder, etc.

> For Linux this works since it was built over decades and contributors come from variety of backgrounds (students who want to learn, hardware companies who want to have support of their hardware, users who want it to be fast, companies which want to make it sort of a product (distributors etc.)

That's a pretty accurate description of Mozilla for a large part of its history pre-FirefoxOS. Mozilla was incredibly effective even before the number of people getting paychecks from anything called "Mozilla" had reached the low hundreds.

Agreed in principle. It's my primary browser and it seems to me that it's already in good shape (technically, and feature-wise). And the project is not starting from scratch.

So if the financial incentives aren't there yet, and the only remaining value that Firefox provides is privacy and user freedom (along with good but not perfect performance), I'd imagine the FSF could be interested in managing something like this. And can maybe start with part-time volunteers.

What about Debian?

I think this is a case where "It's the economy, stupid" gets right.

We need to build a economy for open-source projects or else the tech titans will eat the world.

People need to wake up that its not the nineties anymore, and without a better ecosystem for independent projects to thrive, we are doomed to depend on the scraps of what the titans left to us (mostly their open-source collaterals)

Some independent project might pop here and there, but keep them going without structure will lead them to a slow burn to death.

Not to mention they also pay Apple heaps of money to be the default search engine on iOS. Paying Mozilla for the same is perfectly logical.

It may be a rumor or speculation, but it is not a conspiracy theory. That is, it is not a group secretly conspiring to do something.

That was a period during which Firefox had 2-4x the market share it has now.

> How is Google convincing their competitor to help them in an antitrust case?

I hear that they pay them 450 million dollars a year (out of 500 million dollars in revenue.) Are you looking for another reason?

There's zero chance that google being the default search engine in firefox is bringing in a half-billon dollars a year. The number of people who make the effort to seek out and install firefox, but don't care what search engine they use so use whatever the default is - has got to be somewhere in the triple digits, if not the double digits.

Web standards are bloated because that's what users want: features. That's like saying "Firefox would be fine if there wasn't any well funded competition driving up the feature count of browsers to meet consumer demand."

That's like saying linux shouldn't need developers because of POSIX.

> I fail to understand why we cant directly donate to Firefox and only Firefox.

Because the amount of money donations bring in pales in comparison that the search engine deal does, but since that's something they actually sell, it (and therefore Firefox) is managed by the Corporation. At least, that's how I understand it.

Or have the Rust foundation continue to develop Servo, with financial support from corporations and users who would benefit from an independant browser engine.

I'd prefer a new browser that drops e.g. pocket in favor of secure communications features at this point.

The complex legal structure of Mozilla has always been some what sketchy to me anyway, The Foundation at this point I believe hardly has anything anyway, most of the employees I believe work for the Mozilla Corporation, which is owned by the foundation, but the Mozilla Corporation is for-profit, and is where most of the assets (IP, Pocket, etc) for Mozilla is owned.

At this point I see the Foundation has simply being a Marketing ploy for the corporation as they abandoned the core mission of the foundation long ago, it is just another for profit company at this point

You are correct, I have fixed the above...

Gecko is stagnate and in maintenance mode, all of the improvements to Gecko come from Servo, thus no servo no improvements

>>Firefox Desktop, and Mobile

I am not sure what you mean here, these are core products so sure they remain, but they are advance on the backs of the other teams, the core parts of both FireFox Desktop and FireFox Mobile depend on the advancement of all the components that go into them, thus if all R&D is shut down which is appears has been, it is functionally a Maintenance project now...

Sure we may get things like Moving the Address bar from the top to the botton in FF mobile, big whoop-de-do....

All of the cools things coming out of Servo, DevTools, and other core systems are gone now....

They laid off all of the developers in the DevTools Team, in the Servo Team, and in the MDN teams in the last round of mass layoffs.