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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

It’s sucky and I particularly hate ads percolating to every part if my life, BUT how are they meant to support Firefox and other software without a revenue stream?

Mozilla seems to attract criticism for how they run the whole operation, I can’t tell how correct it is, but even if they run it perfectly they still need revenue.

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I used to give money to Mozilla Foundation, I stopped when I realised it actually wasn't going to Firefox development, which is done by Mozilla Corporation. I even reached out to their support, and no, there is no way to support FF but with your eyeballs.

With that feature, that I will of course disable for my personal use, I will not be able to recommend Firefox to other people any more.

Please let us pay!

Seems to work for Wikipedia (possibly another dysfunctional example). I'd happily pay for Firefox too.

If nothing else, there's not that many rendering engines out there. Chrome, Brave and Edge are all Chromium. Safari is separate I guess, but that's tied to Apple platforms. I really don't want yet another Google monoculture.

maybe go the other direction and try to cut expenses rather than trying to make more money? Firefox gets hundreds of millions from Google alone in royalties, that is not enough to build a web browser?

Firefox has lost almost half of its users since 2010, yet it keeps burning more money every year. Run the company in a lean way, cut the fat, do one thing well. It's like Wikipedia, every year they seemingly find new ingenious ways to burn more cash.

> Firefox gets hundreds of millions from Google alone in royalties, that is not enough to build a web browser?

Empirically, it is not. Even Microsoft gave up that chase. Browsers are staggeringly complex and expensive to build. Which may be an indictment of the Web itself, but in the absence of a simpler alternative (Gemini?), the Web we have is the Web we've got, and browsers have to meet it where it is.

Microsoft gave up developing their own engine, because that aspect doesn't make them money, and their engines were too far behind to bother investing into catching up. They're still making a browser, because it's useful even if it doesn't make them money.

Mozilla's engine is modern and they have a clear revenue stream to subsidize its development with their browser revenue.

But instead the browser revenue goes to dumb shit like mobile OSes (that definitely is too expensive), VPNs, executive bonuses, and basically anything but their browser or engine.

FirefoxOS has been dead for at least seven years. That horse is quite dead. The VPN product probably pays for itself. I'm not an insider anymore but aside from FirefoxOS the vast majority of the money has always gone into browser development and I have no reason to believe that has changed.

(Actually FirefoxOS is not quite dead; KaiOS lives on. But Mozilla's not funding that.)

> Empirically, it is not.

This is just not true. Mozilla spends millions on exec salaries and useless side projects, yet they still have hundreds of millions in cash reserves.

We're talking about hundreds of millions, not millions. And spending cash reserves is not sustainable

> simpler alternative (Gemini?)

I never heard of that before. I'm off to investigate.

I've often thought we need to rewind the clock on the internet, as the whole thing has gotten way out of hand.

What's to stop feature creep of Gemini, though?

>What's to stop feature creep of Gemini, though?

Gemini is deisgned to be non-extensible, for precisely that reason (if it becomes mainstream though, I'm sure the monetisers will find a way).

Gemini throws out way way too much. Inline links and image support for one. It feels like someone wants to have everything exactly as it was in the 80s.

They claim to stop feature creep by not including any kind of optional data support like headers and the spec team will reject any feature additions.

While I would be happy to have HTML/CSS exactly as it is and replace JS with a minimal WASM implementation that lets the website bring whatever tools it wants rather than relying on 1 billion JS apis.

I'd be surprised if the most popular Gemini clients didn't support Markdown.

I would be. The Gemini devs would insist that nothing should be supported that doesn't work on an 80 char terminal with only the ascii charset.

> What's to stop feature creep of Gemini, though?

The culture. A portion of Gemini users use it as a way to escape from the complexity of the modern web, including some small "browser" writers who want to target a small and easy to understand spec for their efforts.

But the Web we have is not a monolith. If freedom/ethics/privacy/etc. are important to a browser user, they should realize that there's a subset of the Web that they need, and one they can do without. "I need to be able to discover and consume every work in every medium from everyone immediately and have it be secure and efficient" is the unspoken mindset that enables this kind of decay in the browser world. Essential services like banks, government are the one subset that you need but will be extremely hard to change, if even possible. For everything else, people need to realize that there's a Web that doesn't need their browsers to participate in this arms race, and that Web needs support from users and from producers.

EDIT: I guess I forgot shopping in essential services, which is another huge source of fuel in the arms race.

There is no need to "do without". Firefox should adversarially interoperate with the web.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

Today that means it should actively subvert the business interests of the web. Advertisers want to show ads? Block them and make no exceptions. Surveillance capitalists want data? Give them fake data or no data at all whenever possible. Sites start detecting Firefox? Start pretending to be Chrome.

It doesn't matter what these companies want or need. Firefox needs to take the user's side every single time. This arms race is absolutely necessary. Firefox needs to be a true user agent. If it ever stops being one, it's over for Mozilla.

We agree in that we wish Firefox prioritized each user's privacy and agency more. But what I'm saying is that users' demand for ubiquitous and frictionless media consumption is something that will always be abused, and to try to satisfy that need and also not become corrupt or destroyed by your competitors seems pretty impossible at the moment. I want there to be a space for a browser that doesn't need millions or billions to maintain.

Yeah. The only true fix for that is the end of copyright.

Strange to see so many people here seemingly operating under the mistaken belief that Firefox is developed by volunteers.

They've been receiving hundreds of millions of dollars each year just for what they set as the default search engine.

https://www.ghacks.net/2021/09/17/firefox-experiment-is-test...

Let me pay for Firefox, please!

Exactly, I would not mind paying 50 usd a year (it's what I already have paid in donation for mozilla).

1 user at $4.16 per month is not going to help, support and develop a competitive browser or search engine.

1mn users paying $4/m is going to be just over $40mn per year. There's no way any company can compete with MS or Google on that revenue stream. Get investors and they will enforce whatever it takes to build revenue = ads.

The main software design problem Mozilla is facing is their urge to add user hostile anti-feutures. MS and especially Google are way better at those, so why compete on that? It is a losing game ...

Get your facts right, FF has 870 million YAUs. You're off by several orders of magnitude.

This whole argument that only ads can save FF is weak and unfounded.

Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this.

And I most certainly don't want FF to spend money/time on "search engine" features. Let the search engines companies do that.

Wait a minute. Are you saying that FF users are all going to pay? How many free Versus paid users are on Youtube Premium? There are billions of Youtube users I would imagine, certain they are not paying.

>> Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this.

Get your wallet out, hire some developers, build it, share it. You want a lot and make demands but I don't see how what you said is economically viable.

> You want a lot and make demands but I don't see how what you said is economically viable.

FF _is_ already what I "demand" they just need to stop copying every UX feature of chromium under the ilusion that it will make them "competitive" with Chrome. And they need to stop spending money on all these side projects and focus on the core products FF and TB.

These corporate people need to step aside and stop chasing an impossible goal of FF market share growth. They can never compete with behemoths like Google or Microsoft or Apple. The funding disparity and they way the competition setup mottes and baileys is just not realistic.

Google paying Mozilla for default search engine privilege is just a way for google to go CYA, in case they get into anti-trust litigation ("we even fund the small players"). The moment FF actually make a dent in market share is the moment that Google closes the tap on funding.

Okay. https://donate.mozilla.org

Edit: My assumption was that a proportion of the money donated to the Mozilla Foundation is used to fund Mozilla Firefox.

I stand corrected (but I still consider the foundation worth supporting).

A follow up question for those replying to this comment: does the revenue from Pocket and/or the Mozilla VPN help to fund Firefox?

Well, no. Donating to mozilla does not equals funding the browser. They also have some more or less questionable initiatives.

nope, this doesn't go to development, only to their community and outreach programs.

Mozilla Foundation != Mozilla Corporation

That donates to Mozilla, not Firefox. That is what people have the problem with, they cannot directly donate to a /product/

I expect if Mozilla made opt-out a paid feature, then all that would happen is that Firefox would be forked without ads, and the general public use Chrome or Edge anyway.

Nobody asked for or wants that. Just let people donate directly to Firefox development, instead of towards a bloated foundation funding millions in exec salaries and project nobody wants.

That is the situation already.

Evidently they're not attracting enough donations to not consider advertisements.

https://donate.mozilla.org/

> That is the situation already.

No it isn’t. Please stop spreading misinformation.

You can donate to the Mozilla foundation, which wastes copious amounts of money. It is NOT possible to donate towards Firefox development directly.

You can pay for Mozilla VPN, which goes to the Corporation: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/#pricing

It mostly goes to Mullvad though (which is great company) and to developing the client.

Not available in my region, and doesn’t support a server in my country

There's always Palemoon [0] (for anyone who likes the classic firefox interface). I've been using it for years (and have donated), plus I like the fact it can be installed just by unpacking a tarball/zip file (as well as the more usual methods).

[0] http://www.palemoon.org/

Wow, thanks, I need to try it!

Palemoon, the same guys who mock sandboxing and multiprocess browsing?

No thanks.

Ah, the old, now-deleted (and much-refuted) reddit post [0], I assume?

[0] https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270#p16867...

No, the things they post on their own forum!

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=17442#p12769... https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15168#p109681

Thanks, I didn't know that was an even older version version of the same claim. I imagine that's one of the reasons for the developers being tired of the same (incorrect in their view) claims.

The only remaining issue with Palemoon for me is webrtc (which is selectively disabled). For those that value stability (especially on Windows) that's no bad thing (personally, I'm not a fan of being forced to use a specific browser to access some sites). It's like the IE6 days.

This was my first thought, then I remembered Google gives Mozilla hundreds of millions every year, Mitchell Baker is paid 3 millions/year (after 250 people were laid off) when Firefox is basically dying.

Well, start to make paying for the main product possible. I don't donate as I don't want to support for other mozilla's initiatives.

I'd however gladly pay around 10-20 euros / month for firefox.

There should be a paid ad free membership for anyone who doesn’t like ads. Even if not many people take them up on this offer, it would be more fair since there would be a choice.

Alternatively, you could just choose to opt out when it asks you?

Yes, but how can you then support FF financially to make sure it doesn't go away or development grinds to a halt?

Subscribe to their other things like the VPN thats coming out.

To incentivize work on side products that I'm actually not interested in any way or form? This doesn't make any sense.

Mozilla still has plenty of cash and revenue to fund Firefox development. But they did the opposite, they fired large parts of the development team.

No donation will change that, it would require a strategic rollback from leadership.

This! How hard can it be to put a FF subscription payment somewhere inside the browser or on their website?

Of course people can always fork it and remove it blabla. But we're talking about people who otherwise would donate and just want to do it more directly (as opposed to the whole Mozilla foundation)

Those people should form a DAO, pool their funds in a governable smart contract for disbursing them, and reach out to people thru hn search who have their own forks of FF now and who make comments cough like me cough on hn about it over the years every time FF adds some more garbage in their browser.

;)

At this point, threads like this help me add to my list of what garbage i need to compile out every year or so when i feel like syncing up hahaha.

Have they tried setting up a Patreon?

Somewhat suggested one day that they could become a Rust consultancy.

They could start by slashing the out-of-control executive salaries maybe?

Ahaha, who am I kidding, capitalism be capitalism...

Edit: before you knee-jerk downvote, please read up on the evolution of exec compensation at Mozilla. It's pretty eye-opening, and really exemplifies what's going wrong with the project.

I was expecting some reply that has actual thought, not a knee-jerk reaction.

Exec salaries at Mozilla are a real problem. The search-engine deals bring a lot of money, which would be more than enough to run an engineering-focused group that develops a browser and associated technologies. However, it's not enough to run yet another megacorp-style organization with overinflated management compensation, which is what it has slowly turned into.

brave have some ideas...

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