I just want a browser that isn't controlled by the ad mafia.
Maybe a way to rely less on Google and "trusted partners" money is just to spend less.
[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/
It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.
Wow I didn't know that. I always assumed Firefox was developed by a non-profit. So it basically means that Firefox is a commercial product (the purpose of which is to make money). Thanks for that bit of information which was not at all obvious if you don't pay close attention...
In contrast to all other browser products, whose main purpose is increasing share holder value.
The subsidiary is a for-profit, but the profit all goes to the parent non-profit, which is then constrained in how it can use that income.
Think of a little charity shop that sells, say, second hand clothes in order that the profit from sales funds a charitable purpose like fighting cancer. The little shop is likely to be a for-profit company, wholly owned by its parent charity.
Charities have to follow strict rules about how they spend their money, care for their assets, make decisions, report on everything and be audited.
Everything they do is required to be demonstrably for the charity's purposes, which clashes with the on-the-ground flexilibilty required to make business-like decisions for something like a shop. For example when you decide to spruce up the lighting at the front of the shop to attract customers, which only indirectly serves the charity's goals.
That may be a poor example. The point is that the subsidiary business can be run more like a business, being managed, making decisions and spending its income in the freer way a business is allowed to do. The parent charity retains shareholder-like ultimate control, but that is indirect control; the subsidiary has its own directors and executives.
In the case of a shop that means it can spend on things that may attract customers, take gambles that may bring in more profit for the parent charity to use, and make day to day decisions that aren't subject to the same level of reporting, auditing and trustee oversight that the parent charity is. The shop's operating assets are outside the charity, giving it operational flexibility, but when it transfers some portion of assets as profits to the charity, those assets become inside and how they are spent becomes more tightly regulated.
I have no idea how that works.
[Edited, because I got it 180deg arse-over-tit]
Here's what I'd really like them to do:
* Stop paying out millions to execs
* Focus more on Firefox instead of other side projects
* Let me pay for Firefox development directly
It lasted a few years (it seem 5, based on Wikipedia), and they ultimately ended up switching to the default engine business model.
Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??
A lot of people just think that Mozilla should be a nonprofit and not aim to primarily enrich it's CEO and leadership. This isn't the case at the moment, which is clear if you paid any attention to what they've been doing for the last few years.
Little of the money that's going to be raised by this will end up paying for engineers to improve or maintain the Firefox code base and the vast majority of it will end in the pockets of said leadership, and this is kinda displeasing.
https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
mozilla employs at the moment around 800 people.
according to their FAQ
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/f...
> More than 75% of Mozilla spending is on people-related investments to produce the products and programs that support our mission: keeping the web open, free, and accessible.
this would mean they had around 300 million to spend on these 800 employees, averaging around 375 000 per employee.
Sr. Software Engineers get <$200 000, so IF all of their 800 employees were senior software engineers (extremely unlikely), their salary would be around 160 million, which is slightly more then 50% of what was available. a more realistic calculation would be around 20-30%, because not everyone will be getting SV wages. They've got global presence after all with offices SF, Toronto, Berlin, Beijin etc.
you'd have to verify in which unrelated projects by third parties mozilla invests and generally follow the money to figure out anything more, but that is simply out of scope of a hn comment.
Minor nit here - they don't have to pay taxes because they don't make a profit, not because of their status. If a for-profit corporation doesn't make profit (and few tech companies do), they won't have to pay income taxes either.
$375k per employee for a pure technology company doesn't seem outrageous? That has to include facilities too.
It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries. I really doubt that's going to succeed in a challenging and competitive market like browsers. IMO they'd be better off spending more trying to poach the best brains behind Chrome.
does it? whats the remaining 25% (100 million) for in that case?
> It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries
i do not want them to do that particularly. i just pointed out that not all 800 employees will be getting the $137,000 with a $54,800 bonus wage to point out that i'm being extremely generous in my calculation of how much they're likely paying to actual employees.
there are no conclusive numbers i know of, but if you just look at their open positions portal (https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/) you will surely agree that few of these will be getting that $190k...?
this is quite offtopic but what i find especially disheartening about mozilla is that almost all of its revenue comes from google.
every nation i know of is trying to build up their online/web presence, and yet we have only one mega corporation sponsoring web browsers to a significant degree. why isn't every nation like the USA, Canada, Australia etc each investing at least 10 million into a fund to build an open source web browser or contribute to one? why is every nation fine with that situation?
A common rule of thumb is employees cost a company 2x salary.
The 2019 combined financial statements show $210 million for program salaries and benefits. Management and general salaries and benefits were $109 million.[1] Program means software development basically.[2]
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
I'm sure you could find 50,000 people in the world willing to pay this. I'm one of them.
The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.
In case of Mozilla/Firefox: do this while you still have some reputation left. It's literally the one party on the Internet that would have a chance of pulling it off.
But Firefox is open source. This is very important for many reasons.
Same. I already donate to the Mozilla Foundation but I'd love to fund Firefox more directly.
Maintaining an independent, high-quality browser engine so that the design and implementation of the Web isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly is incredibly expensive: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent... (4 years old, but the situation I describe hasn't changed, except that Microsoft has switched to Chromium so Mozilla's engine is more important than ever.)
Feels like a massive missed opportunity - microsoft is the only big player not funded by ads.
Also having their own Engine was cool, i liked it, although it did sometimes have failures. Looks like they got tired if different issues and thew in the towel
Remember the W3C DRM standard and how Firefox implemented it?
Read this: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
To quote,
--- start quote ---
The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing.
If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.
--- end quote ---
This is why. It's currently impossible to start a greenfield browser [1]. And even forking an existing engine and trying to keep up is almost impossible [2]
[1] There's Flow browser, https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ I don't know if it's truly from scratch
[2] Microsoft forked Chromium and is still almost 2000 APIs behind, https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
It actually used to be that way. For example, it used to be the case that the Firefox product owner was a Googler getting paid by Google to work on Firefox. Lots of other contributors hailed from other companies (or universities), too, whether they were specifically getting paid for it or not; there was a long-tail of completely unpaid contributors. Mozilla wasn't anything like the Bay Area company you see today so much as it was, loosely speaking, a co-op. Mozilla's various formal organizational incarnations were supposed to handle, in order of importance: A. keeping the infrastructure running, and B. paying the salaries of its own contributors to the mozilla.org commons.
Several things changed this:
1. Google, the biggest contributor to the project, pulled their people off Firefox to go build Chrome.
2. Mozilla-the-Corporation, having deceived themselves about the role that the commons-style development played in the project's success, went and Netscaped it.
On the latter point: basically, the Corporation abused its position. They tried (and unfortunately succeeded) at consolidating things under their corporate structure (particularly during the FirefoxOS era after hiring an Adobe exec to be their shepherd through that doomed project—convinced that what Mozilla really needed was good, business-minded leadership). This launched Mozilla on the descent we've seen over the last ten years, and burned all sorts of bridges including goodwill with external contributors and other parts of its base. They hollowed it out, and then had people on payroll to fill in the parts that were getting fucked up. As with the case of Netscape, not all of their hires were good hires.
The perverse thing is, if you know anything about Mozilla's early history, i.e. Firefox pre-history, you'll know that this was already tried once before. What's amazing is that it actually "worked" this time. You'll hear (from people like Mitchell, even) stories about how mozilla.org was an escape pod, and that it had to be rescued from Netscape, because Netscape thought they were the rightful rulers by fiat—this, even after mozilla.org had been set up! Unfortunately, Mozilla-the-Corporation (distinct from mozilla.org) succeeded at taking control where Netscape failed, mostly because everyone involved pretty much let them. A lot of the mechanisms that had been put in _specifically_ to keep Netscape hires in their place were rolled back as part of the post-Firefox-4.0, "we want to move fast and break things, too" era.
Lots of people who at one point once had @mozilla.com email addresses will dispute this, choosing to tell themselves—and others—a different story. And of course they do. It happens for exactly the same reasons that the "are we the baddies?" meme is a thing.
- Developing Firefox looks way more expensive than running Wikipedia servers. - It looks like there’s at least 10x less Firefox users than Wikipedia users.
It might still be possible (Firefox users might me more willing to pay and to pay more than Wikipedia users). It still looks really hard.
I wish they didn’t try to match the startup/VC/pivot/diversify frenzy but, in the end, I’m really happy that they exist.
Conversely, AFAIK, Wikimedia doesn't accept money for merchandising their users. At least not in any official, straightforward way.
Of course if you don’t like what an organization broadly does with the money given to it, don’t give it money. Maybe issue some feedback that you think the organization should do x or y, and the fact it’s doing p and q makes you hesitant to donate.
I also don't understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.
Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or later, draw a line and find a better way forward (i.e. a new exec team). Either that, or the project will die and hopefully someone else will pick up the baton.
I am sure I will regret asking... but why do you think that?
Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be.
What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?
The big concern there is that ads that don't track are generally less valuable so even widespread adoption of Brave's system would cause a decrease in ad revenue, same as Apple's recent anti-tracking changes.
> Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture
If you start a conversation with "issues that you have", you are going to have a hard time. Always. Starting with "issues that you have" is bad because (a) it assumes that you know more than the developers who have done the work of designing and addressing the trade-offs of the system and went through the actual work of developing the solution, (b) it assumes that your needs are more important than those of other users who are satisfied with the solution and (c) places the burden of solving your issue onto their shoulders while offering nothing in return.
In other words: no one likes a know-it-all.
If you start the conversation with the intent of understanding why things were done in a certain way and why certain design choices were made, you will be more likely to get in an engaging and productive conversation than just showing up with a laundry list of things that you'd like to see "fixed". By asking why instead of "confronting" design choices, you are more likely even to get them to recognize when a choice is sub-optimal.
I follow a good part of the lead members in Brave on Twitter. I've seen a lot of conversations from them with other people. Most if not all of them are working with false assumptions and don't even bother to question themselves. Those that come right away aggressive against them or assuming malice are indeed met with brashness. It might seem rude, but I would probably do the same after fending off the 100th random person on the internet accusing you of things you haven't done or demanding that you do something about the token price.
Those that come with the intent of understanding and assuming good intentions are way more likely to be treated cordially.
This is not an issue on Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari god forbid. These browsers are the main contenders because they're simple, and just browsers. Trying to build an "everything machine" is what made Internet Explorer such an unbearable slog, which is why all of our modern browsers are defined more by their limitation than their capabilities.
Again though, these are not my problems to fix. Brave has already burned their bridge of trust by involving themselves in crypto (and pocketing a portion for themselves, worse yet), so I have nothing more to do here than kick back and watch your development slowly turn back into a Mozilla-type org again.
Anyway, you just created a bunch of strawmen and expect others to spend time trying to reasonably argue with you? If this isn't the biggest "QED" to my comment, I don't know what is.
I could point to at least 5 false statements in your 3 paragraphs, but it is clear that you are not interested in having a productive conversation. So, don't be surprised if others just tell you to piss off and be less of an entitled aspie prick.
No, I find it amazing and I can probably write an essay about it.
The "ad-supported" economy is directly responsible for a lot of content, but the majority of it is not just bad, it is also actually damaging to society. Think of all the sites that "make a living" on clickbait, content farming, fake news, SEO manipulation and outright fraud. Also, think of all the big ad tech companies that have no incentive in ensuring any kind of quality on its users and just focusing on metrics like "engagement".
It is not too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.
"Ad-supported" sites have nothing to gain by working on quality content and can put all their efforts optimizing for controversy, shock value and eyeballs. When everything became "free", we lost our ability to vote with our wallet and lose any power in steering the market to produce the things that we value.
Given that we can not simply ban "free" sites, the next best thing is to find an alternative way to finance content creators, but where the users can have a say in how the resources are allocated. The Brave model does exactly that. Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality. They will have to be able to demonstrate that their work is not just worth of the people's time (for those that want to put up with ads), they will have to produce something of value to us.
> If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.
No, not at all.
There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model. In fact, they can even also base it on BAT and leverage all the work that Brave already did and avoid all the pitfalls that Brave had along the way when they were developing the system. Brave buys the token in the open market, Mozilla could do the same. They could use the same partner exchanges. They could probably even use the same codebase on the client side.
Honestly, if Mozilla did just that on Firefox, I'd switch back to it immediately. Like you, I also wish that Firefox continued to be a strong alternative to keep Google in check. But after the many years of poor management, blatant cash grabs and all the marketing spending that makes them more focused on "looking good" than "doing good", I've given up. I don't want wishy-washy feelings, I want to destroy Surveillance Capitalism.
Mozilla/Firefox are not working on anything to do that. Brave is.
That's a huge jump. Incentives are basically the same, at worst the same as subscription-supported services that are slowly becoming the standard for news websites that still care about their reputation. The Brave system simply moves some of the power from multiple ad networks to a single entity, Brave. No thanks, this is not the open web.
> There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model.
It doesn't matter who runs the network, you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.
I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap, thank you. If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror when Mozilla goes down in flames, so be it.
Those with brand recognition and that can charge subscriptions are not the ones in the long tail. The rewards system is supposed to be a way to help those that are in the long tail: Youtubers with a small but engaged community, Open Source software developers that want to work on their own project, kids making Fortnite skins, investigative reporters that want to cover stories that are not getting picked by mainstream media.
- "Well, these people could use Patreon", you can respond.
Yes, some of them could. But Patreon requires people to contribute their own direct money and requires that people to have access to the global financial system. While with Brave anyone, in any corner of the world, can take whatever little amount of money they want and send as a tip.
> this is not the open web.
Do you use an ad-blocker of any kind? Over 40% of internet users do. Do you think they are "against the open web" and "abhorrent"?
Are you against ad-blockers? Are you okay with Google's push to make it difficult to run ad-blockers on Chrome? To me working actively against the interests of the users is the abhorrent thing.
> you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.
HOW??? To a site that is dependent on ads, I'm still failing to see what the brave rewards program does that is different from any other ad-blocker. That revenue opportunity is already sunk, Brave has no fault here.
> I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap.
You started to move the goalposts. You only need to deal with "cryptocurrency bullcrap" if you decide to cash out the tokens you receive. If you just want to take the BAT token to tip for other creators, you don't even need to signup to an exchange and you don't need to give away any personal data. If Brave was able to run its revenue share program by transacting with cash, would you be okay with it?
> If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror (...), so be it.
Honestly, it just seems like you just have a bunch of misconceptions and prejudices you don't want to re-evaluate. If you don't want to use it, fine. What is not fine is to be calling companies and people "outright corrupt" without anything to actually back it up.
Vivaldi?
I'm using Firefox myself and have been using it almost exclusively since it was named Firebird back in the day, but I have considered Vivaldi as an alternative at one point.
There is really close to no choice for browser alternatives.
Long term the gemini protocol and browsers like lagrange might be the only option - its just too hard to build a modern standards supporting web browser these days (even Microsoft has thrown in the towel and adopted Chromium for Edge).
Also, Firefox mobile lets me block YouTube ads with ublock origin.
Take out all the crap, and strip it back to a plain browser. Freeze all new features. The only maintenance that is needed is security patches. That shouldn't need more than a handful of full-time devs. They could be paid using just one exec's salary.
I'll maintain my contribution to Thunderbird; if Mozilla doesn't feel like helping financially with that more-or-less unique product, fair enough. But I'm not OK with having to drill into about:config to disable Firefox Pocket's hijacking of high-profile screen real-estate - why hasn't it gone yet?
A few don't, like VLC: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/73dafr/vlc_creator_...
There are in fact not a lot of posts about this topic
I'm still waiting for any concrete evidence, as I am genuinely curious what kind of sponsorships of that kind there are, or were, if any.
Are you sure? For me, I can only "Disable" it, and it gets promptly re-enabled right after clicking on some other item in the sidebar.
There doesn't seem to be any way to disable it permanently, or, preferably, removing it entirely.
I remember seeing lots of devs complaining about Safari not implementing the latest new shinny google technology for chrome but looking at some of these features those aren't things I'd have in my browser like PWA. Web developers are totally out of touch if they expect that everybody wants a website to have access to things like USB ports.
If you pay for it, yeah. But you can't have that and have the software be £free to use
Donating to the foundation feels a bit like donating to the WWF because I want to help a specific Panda I met at the zoo.
It seems it's time to find a Firefox alternative now, privacy-minded and ad-free.
Pity the web is mostly unusable with w3m. Would any HNers recommend DDG's browser as a viable alternative?
Notably was the notion that it came with a kitchen sink when most just wanted a web browser.
As it stands now, they are obviously wanting to monetise their product but for whatever reason don't want to open up to the option of a retail/consumer grade price. Probably it is because they'll make more from feeding ad companies.
Once someone gives away a roughly equivalent good enough product for free charging for a competitor becomes incredibly difficult and that ship sailed when MS bundled IE with windows.