Firefox Public Data Report
data.firefox.com
data.firefox.com
1 uBlock Origin 4.189%
2 Adblock Plus - free ad blocker 2.462%
3 Video DownloadHelper 2.397%
4 Cisco Webex Extension 2.375%
5 Facebook Container 1.735%
6 DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials 1.434%
7 AdBlocker Ultimate 1.415%
8 Adblock Plus - kostenloser Adblocker 1.230%
9 Grammarly for Firefox 1.160%
10 Adblock Plus - bloqueur de publicités gratuit
I know I don't have any additional add-ons installed, but I'm already getting nagged so much by websites to "disable your adblocking", with many confused to thinking I have something like uBlock Origin installed and only a few so far realizing it is just Firefox. (Those that do sometimes requesting I reopen the page in Chrome seems to prove the point that Firefox is doing some things right and Chrome not at all.)
Yeah I imagine a good chunk turn off Mozilla telemetry and data collection 'features', meaning the percentage of users using uBlock Origin is likely much higher.
However, you are right that we shouldn't overestimate the client capabilities in the global scale. There's a huge market in developing countries, where every working computer is taken as a blessing.
"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."[15]
By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."
There is no incentive to do so.
I assume the donation money can't legally reach Mitchell Baker, since it goes through the Mozilla non-profit, but the whole Mozilla Corp vs Mozilla non-profit structure and the handling of funds is still very confusing to me.
Also I do believe Baker is president of both, though the big paycheck comes from the Corp IIRC.
* Out of the box adblocker
* Out of the box anti-tracking
* Decent sync options between devices
* etc.
Well there is Mighty[0], which plans to 'stream' your browser from the cloud for a $30/mon fee. A privacy nightmare if you ask me.
But it is a good point and I guess with enough people using this kind of thing, they could raise the price a bit and use the difference to develop an actual browser engine. Which is a tremendous task so I'm not even sure it would suffice to support every cases of the modern web.
You might be able to get some people to pay, but the value has to really be there for it, imho.
The only way to monetise an audience like FF's is via ethos, and it's questionable whether that's enough. Wikimedia Foundation do this quite successfully, but I believe their revenue is a bit smaller than Firefox's.
The problem may be that the Google deals are too generous, which traps Firefox into an overspend, crippling their ability to build alternative revenue streams that meet the same income level (why cut costs when you have enough income).
Is it possible to maintain a browser of Firefox's scale at a WikiFoundation-level income of ~$120million?
Edit: found the link. There’s discussions on HN, reddit, and other sites too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...
Would it bring in equivalent sums to search deals: of course not. But I think it would be at least a not-insignificant addition.
What makes you presume this?
> If at some point those donations outpaced Google, or the stability of Google's funding comes into question for some reason, then I'd like to show there are other funding models available
The problem with this is timeline. If the donations naturaly outpaced Google's funding that'd be great, but it seems unlikely. On the other hand, if the stability of Google's funding came into question, how long would it take to ramp up alternative income sources? This isn't something that could be done overnight: it needs to be called out and contingencies considered early (now).
> I also like their non-Firefox work
I also like some of their non-Firefox work, but none of it is unique/essential. If Mozilla stopped all their other work tomorrow, and only developed Firefox, there would still be good alternatives out their to their other works (e.g. Lockbox->Bitwarden, MozVPN->Mullvad).
Good alternatives to Firefox are much rarer, and most truly open alternatives are incredibly small niche projects like Dillo or Otter Browser that aren't really very mainstream-usage-ready.
I don't disagree, but I also don't think this discussion is related to whether or not folks should be donating to Mozilla right now. My giving them a donation doesn't restrict them exploring other funding options, which they do seem to be doing, with Pocket and their VPN services and the like.
> Good alternatives to Firefox are much rarer
Right. So my thinking is: suppose Google funding dries up some day. From there we have two possible universes: Mozilla looks at their incomes and sees 80% of the missing funding is coming from donations. Or they see 10% is coming from donations. In the first case, they could scale down their non-core features and continue Firefox development on that donations revenue. In the second case, they would have to find some alternative income stream, which is difficult and full of uncertainty, or shut down and Firefox dies. Personally I favor the first universe, where Firefox is funded through voluntary donations. So I donate to make the first universe more likely. And there's no downside to me donating now, since it's totally cool with me if they use my money to fund their non-Firefox work in the meantime.
Many people from the community contribute freely to the FF codebase, and the Firefox project also employs paid engineers to work on the codebase. Funding to pay those engineers comes from Google. Donations to Mozilla do not go toward paying those engineers.
I think it would be great if individuals who aren't in a position to write code for FF could contribute donations to a fund that pays FF engineers.
Most people just want to browse Facebook or their bank and don't have a clue about adblockers, add-ons, etc.
To those who claim you can opt-out of the "experience":
You can spend quite some time configuring firefox not to check for updates, get rid of all mentions of mozilla's servers in the config, try to have it not phone home, opt-out of any data sharing .. then you start it, and it does nonetheless: "Hey, update me please!" And what data do they share when checking for updates? Too much - I instructed the software to shut the fuck up and not ask for a fresh version, and surely don't communicate that I'm just using version X on my OS under my IP for fuck's sake! And that's just the obvious part of data that'll have to be transmitted in order for an update check to work! See pinky promise, above.
And then, after an update, if you don't start it with -ProfileManager to force your old profile (under linux), it will start with a fresh profile and ... phone home. With fresh settings. Which, by default, share your data. Oh and you can't control what it does while it sits there in the profile manager window. I presume it phones home. How can we be so blind and think this is a good alternative?
I know for me, it's exhaustion, and the inability to quickly scan the obfuscation mess that mozilla calls firefox's source code. What is it for you?
Yeah I tried doing this once. I searched about:config for any mention of `mozilla.org` and deleted it. It still pinged Mozilla looking for an update.
You're probably wondering why I wanted to disable updates, well I have a few toy browsers I don't want updated because I like the specific version and some addons I have are not compatible with newer Firefox (due to the webextensions overhaul).
My solution was to use an older version of Waterfox (Waterfox Classic) which still supports older addons. I also use Palemoon for oldskool extension support, but don't use it as my main browser for obvious reasons.
What I meant is that if you remove all references to `mozilla.org` you still receive updates as though they hard-coded the Mozilla URL because they really don't want people disabling updates.
I'm surprised the number is as low as it is.