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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

> Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now.

This is the meat of my problem with Firefox as it stands. I've not stopped using Firefox since the mid 2000's but come on, you need something more than just checks from Google. Charge me for a commercial version of FireFox that includes a VPN subscription and funds its development. Just do it ten years ago.

Honestly, if they're not going to embrace Rust and Servo becomes completely usable I may just jump ship eventually. My hope for Servo is that it becomes 100% Rust as much as sustainably possible (I understand for codecs and some things recreating them in Rust might be overkill when there's standardized libraries just use them), even the JS engine.

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This most common thing I write on HN is that I can’t believe I can’t pay to use Firefox.

“How will we ever earn money here at Mozilla? All we have is this world class web browser that provides massive value to millions of people, but we refuse to directly monetize. Oh whatever will we do?”

Charging money for the browser will quickly push them down to single-digit marketshare, and will make "works on Chrome, ship it" the only correct way to develop for the web.

If you want to pay for using their browser, you could always donate to them.

the donations never went to firefox. it was dispersed to many of their other misguided and failed revenue gen efforts. they redirected a ton of servo engineers to focus on VR/Magic leap, ffs.

Both of those projects were part of MoCo, not MoFo, and so your donations would not have gone to them either.

Yes. The money should gone towards dev, but also testing.

According to the author, the problem contributing to this misprioritization was that “Firefox exists just to give Mozilla a seat at the table when the web is defined,” such that they didn’t care if it was the best. I doubt that’s true. Few want second, third, or fourth place. So let’s assume they wanted it to be the best. Where did it go wrong?

As much as Rust is great and FF was a great project to try it out on, I’m not convinced that FF needed a full rewrite, and in my experience there were significant problems with performance as Rust wasn’t fully there and the developers didn’t test adequately on all platforms, which they should’ve pushed more for if the funds were there.

> they redirected a ton of servo engineers to focus on VR/Magic leap, ffs.

That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

The day I found out about that I stopped using Firefox and switched to qutebrowser.

Not with a freemium model, which is what would make the most sense for Mozilla, IMHO.

also completely baffled by this. i'd have happily paid $100/yr if it went directly to firefox dev, not their other marketing shenanigns.

they fired so much talent to focus on junk to drive revenue, that it's not something i can do anymore. very sad.

It's weird that when I tell my kids that when they want to help, but they won't help in the way that someone needs help, that they aren't actually helping, they understand it.

Mozilla has buckets of money, between the Corporation and the Foundation. They are separate, for good-ish reasons? But they are separate. If they start allowing customers or businesses to pay for Firefox, then they will have to provide an entirely different level of support. They will need a billing and support team that is beholden to those paying customers.

It will shift the focus that Firefox has on attracting and retaining users to attracting and retaining paying users.

It will mean they need to meet various warranty and regulatory requirements around the world, and potentially introduce new business risks and liabilities related to those requirements (e.g. non-compliance with specific regional legislation).

What you are asking for is to pay Mozilla for Firefox, and to get there you need a radical shift in the organization that supports and ships Firefox.

Or, you could do what the rest of folks who want to support Firefox do, and make a donation in the way that Mozilla is signalling is the best way to support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development.

If that isn't good enough for you, track down an OSS contributor to Firefox, and give them money. Direct action for the win!

> support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development.

That's the rub here. Mozilla's mission is a much larger scope than just Firefox. Some people want to support Firefox, but don't want to donate to Mozilla's mission. One such reason is because it's important to have more than one browser implementation. There's no way to support that without Mozilla allocating some portion of your donation to some unrelated part of their mission.

Ok but now you're asking for something weirder and more restrictive than "paying for firefox", right? If I buy a laptop from Lenovo I don't get to say oh I don't want to pay for tablet development, I just want all of this money to go to your laptop division.

But you do, you signal it with your money that you want tablet or laptop, it's very easy. FF is open source but you have to donate to some bizarre American social issues that you have no interest in or don't want to participate.

I basically agree with you, but there is a difference too. When you buy a laptop you're not strictly dictating how the money is used, but you are signalling pretty clearly which product you actually wanted. Can you do that when you give a donation to the Mozilla Foundation?

(Maybe you can? I haven't donated to them...)

> If I buy a laptop from Lenovo I don't get to say oh I don't want to pay for tablet development, I just want all of this money to go to your laptop division.

9HZZRfNlpR is right. Not only do you get to say this, you have no other choice but to say this. Buying a laptop sends the strongest possible message that you're giving your money to the laptop division, and not to the tablet division. If you wanted to support the tablet division, you would have bought a tablet. And Lenovo will keep very careful track of this. They may choose to cross-subsidize, but your message will be received loud and clear.

I feel like they would lose a lot of funding if they branch out Firefox's Non-Profit into its own thing because most people care more about Firefox than the kinds of things the EFF is already doing.

People, at least here, want mainly to donate money directly FF development not their political junk. And it's not currently possible.

You can have a separate version of Firefox that is commercial and complies, and still have open source Firefox. Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome is proprietary.

I might pay for Firefox now, but I wouldn't pay for Firefox 5 years ago, when I started using it. As a consumer, it's really hard to start paying for something that used to be free.

As a world-class browser, Opera did that route. Opera died. I believe that might be in thinking but far from an insider in either, simply a happy Firefox user since 0.7 and Netscape before that.

>Honestly, if they're not going to embrace Rust and Servo becomes completely usable I may just jump ship eventually. My hope for Servo is that it becomes 100% Rust as much as sustainably possible (I understand for codecs and some things recreating them in Rust might be overkill when there's standardized libraries just use them), even the JS engine.

Have you ever compiled and run servo? I have. It's really cool but nowhere remotely close to being ready for a full production browser.

Mozilla are embracing Rust, they are just no longer interested in the idea of developing entire components of Firefox in a silo, maintaining both at once during the entire process, and then spending multiple years trying to integrate it back into the browser.

Back when the Servo team was let go, what they basically said is that moving forwards things will be done more piecemeal and in-place, rather than hundreds of thousands of LoC at a time.

But then the VPN product is the revenue driver, not the browser. You still aren't making money off the browser. The whole point of the article is decrying the lack of focus on browser in order to focus on other revenue streams. I don't think one other other revenue stream is the solution.

The money would go towards the browser, just like the person suggested. How is that a bad thing? Maybe some nice mods like VPN, excellent RSS feeds, power user addons, etc for a couple bucks a month (or $5? )

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