Hacker News Reader

Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

Why do people keep saying this when Mozilla is and has already been vocally fighting against Google's overreaching proposals?

There's new headlines about this every few months.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...

https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...

There's also this:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll...

https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

And the top comment of the hacker news thread associated with that last link?

>My friend who works in an adtech company:

>"Protip: Use Firefox instead of Chrome. We get very little data from Firefox users"

View on HN

Because of such an apparent conflict of interest. At the end of the day we do not know how many good ideas (for the users, for the web and for Firefox market share) were silenced because not to upset the feeding arm. And where would Firefox be today if it relied on its own users for the revenue instead?

Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.

Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately.

It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue.

I don't envy the market dynamics of their situation. Selling FOSS is hard to begin with, and it's even harder in a market that is utterly commoditized by players 1000x larger than yourself, and it's even harder if your niche (privacy) rules out nearly every funding option apart from the search deals with Google.

A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current users, no?

10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue as 200M users monetized with a Google deal. Now, would 5% Firefox users convert to paid users is a different question. If not, then perhaps Firefox as a product (or as an idea) may not be as good. But I think they would, and even if the percentage is lower, it would at least set Firefox free. And that is a good position to be in for any company.

Mozilla have been losing market share when the barrier to entry is "install this free alternative to your existing browser" the chance that they could succeed with "buy this paid alternative to your existing browser" is approaching zero.

Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives.

Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would.

In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process.

If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee.

Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole.

That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla.

The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.

>10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue

The only way that works is if they abandoned the entire Firefox codebase and made another Chrome clone.

Even in their diminished state they still have 220 million monthly-active-users. With only 10 million, they'd have no leverage in the web standards groups, and no leverage with web developers. The Blink monoculture would be well and truly complete.

Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million.

> Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million.

I disagree. 50M people (including myself) already pay $12/mo ($144/year) for YouTube Premium [1], basically so they do not see the ads even though a completely free alternative is available. (this also tells us you need just one 'killer' feature)

And a browser, executed right, is arguably a much more valuable product. It is where we spend most of our day in. It is what we use to work and create value for companies we work at. So 10M people at $5/mo should not require such a stretch of imagination. The only question is is Firefox that good as a browser right now, and what would need to change?

Besides what is the alternative for Firefox? What good does its leverage in web standards group bring it? Even at the price of free, it is losing tens of millions of users every year and the death spiral of user attrition will drive its market share to the ground eventually. It clearly signals a need for a radical turn.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-millio...

You are arguing that people "should" pay based on value.

This is a competitive market. There are reasonable alternatives. Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0.

(It's actually not, you're paying with slightly less personal data for Firefox than the alternatives, and there are substantial externalities like the effects of monoculture, but none of that is going to change the big picture.)

Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay, but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled, and will abandon your product when it changes in any way they don't like.

The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors, in order to add switching costs and reduce the fidelity of alternatives. And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web.

Good luck with that.

> You are arguing that people "should" pay based on value.

I believe I am arguing that we underestimate the willingness of people to part with their money when there is a right product.

> Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0.

Not sure whether we live in different times, but isn't the same with YouTube? The cost to watch is $0, and you can even watch it ad-free for $0 with a free ad-blocker, yet 50 million people still choose to pay $12/mo for YouTube Premium.

>Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay,

I think you are speculating, so let me speculate as well. If Firefox does not make a radical turn, it will become irrelevant in 3-5 years.

> but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled

With YT Premium, the one thing I request is that the one killer feature that I pay for (no ads) works reliably. So yes, I can agree that users will feel massively entitled to get what they paid for, but that is up to Firefox to define and control.

> The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors

I agree! Firefox lost a lot of the product innovation and leadership mindset it had until roughly 2010-2011. Bringing that back would help (and the right business model could do it).

> And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web.

How does making Google a default search engine in Firefox help that mission? Firefox should do it because it believes Google is the best default choice for their users and the open web, not because it gets paid to do it (if compatibility with its mission is what Firefox is striving for).

>Not sure whether we live in different times, but isn't the same with YouTube? The cost to watch is $0, and you can even watch it ad-free for $0 with a free ad-blocker, yet 50 million people still choose to pay $12/mo for YouTube Premium.

Isn't that more about information asymmetry than value proposition?

Blocking YouTube ads with the appropriate add-ons for free isn't necessarily that well known, except among the tech savvy.

While some tech savvy folks may choose to pay rather than use such add-ons is one thing, but the "great unwashed masses" don't have information about such add-ons, perhaps encouraging them to purchase something they wouldn't purchase if there was more perfect information availability in the market.

I'm not claiming that's the case, but it seems a reasonable supposition.

Potentially yes, but hard to believe that a $7bn business exists only because of lack of information. I certainly don't lack the information and few other people from my circle that also pay for it so it is hard for me to scale from there.

Ad blockers don't work for YouTube on a TV or the native YouTube app (unless you are one of the few people with a DNS ad blocker). I wonder how many of YouTube Premium subscribers primarily use the website. I'm a YouTube Premium subscribers solely because I typically watch YouTube on my TV.

> Ad blockers don't work for YouTube on a TV or the native YouTube app (unless you are one of the few people with a DNS ad blocker). I wonder how many of YouTube Premium subscribers primarily use the website. I'm a YouTube Premium subscribers solely because I typically watch YouTube on my TV.

An excellent point. I mostly watch YouTube on a computer with ad blockers, and I also have a DNS-based ad blocker (Pi-hole). And the combination does block many ads, but other add-ons are required to block the video window ads as well.

I don't use YouTube enough on non-general purpose computer devices enough to care about that. As such, I didn't consider that as a reason to pay for Premium.

Thanks for expanding my view on this!

I'm not aware of any scholarship looking at correlation between level of tech knowledge (specifically, ad blockers) and subscription behavior to avoid ads.

That said, apparently ~42% of global users[0] block some ads.

Given that there are ~4.6Bn users[1], of which ~1.9Bn sometimes use ad blockers, some 2.7Bn users don't use ad blockers at all.

50 million (although that includes YouTube Music subscribers as well as YouTube Premium) subscribers is a little more than 1% of total users and ~2% of users who don't use ad blockers.

I'd also point out that nations with higher per-capita incomes tend to use ad blockers less, which implies (again, I'm not claiming this to be true) that they may be less knowledgeable about ad blocking technologies.

It's not clear what the global distribution of YouTube Premium subscribers looks like, but it's reasonable to think that those with higher (and presumably more disposable) incomes would be more likely to pay for such a subscription.

I don't have any data to back up my hypothesis, as I can't find any published research into the tech savvy of those who pay for YouTube Premium vs. those who don't.

Even more, just because the absolute numbers (50,000,00 subscribers which includes 30,000,000 YouTube Music, and 2+ or 7+ billion in revenue, depending on if you count the 30,000,000 YouTube Music subscribers) are large, given the total population, they are a tiny group.

How many people use add-ons to block youtube ads? Who knows? Possibly Google/Alphabet, but they certainly aren't going to talk about that.

I want to be crystal clear that I'm not saying you're wrong, but the idea that there's a lack of information driving subscriptions to get ad-free youtube is certainly a reasonable one.

Perhaps that's a good topic for a master's thesis in psychology? Since I'm not a marketer or a grad student in Psychology, that wouldn't be something I'd do. Hopefully someone will.

[0] https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

[1] https://www.oberlo.com/blog/internet-statistics

Edit: Added the missing link.

It is a valid analysis and I think that my primary analogy still holds - a good browser should be able to find 10M paying users, when something like YouTube Premium is able to find 50M, just because browser is a much more valuable tool - even though free alternatives exist (because free YouTube also exists).

>It is a valid analysis and I think that my primary analogy still holds - a good browser should be able to find 10M paying users, when something like YouTube Premium is able to find 50M, just because browser is a much more valuable tool - even though free alternatives exist (because free YouTube also exists).

A reasonable point. And I don't necessarily disagree.

Although "Video of stuff I want to look at" may be more compelling than "some icon I click to view the intarwebz," when they see essentially the same thing unless they take specific steps to block ads/tracking.

And that goes double for Android phone users.

My hypothesis was orthogonal to your thesis, but I agree that the data I outlined certainly supports yours.

> yet 50 million people still choose to pay $12/mo for YouTube Premium.

Yes, because de facto YouTube has no viable competitors, so I am not feeling that analogy.

If I want to watch YouTube videos specifically, I have to go to YouTube. People don't use YouTube because they necessarily like the experience of how YT does things, they use it because it has the content users want. Browsers aren't like that. Both Firefox and Chrome on a high level provide the exact same content.

Sidenote: adblockers and such are nice, but, as others have pointed out alread, non-tech savvy users won't bother. And the situation on mobile devices and smart TVs (which account for a growing percentage of YT consumption) have a pretty non-simple adblocker story (or non-existent, if we are talking about using native YT app on a mobile network).

I'd be curious how many were just Play Music that rolled over into YouTube Premium. I'm not sure it would do as well if it dropped the music streaming.

Here's the one I have always touted:

They could build themselves to be the independent alternative to conglomerates.

They could be the alternative, offering services above and beyond the browser. I think their VPN service has been a modest success for them. I'd love for them to have moved into the same space as say, 1Password and other cloud based services of that nature. They are the independent 3rd party that works on all platforms. That is what I think their position could be. They're a trusted entity with known good track record of caring about privacy and their users, why wouldn't they move into markets where its a natural extension of this is a win?

I think Brave is a good model for developing alternative, independent revenue streams. They're helped in large part by having a community that understands the need for it, a lot of the vocal Firefox fanbase seems to want an independent browser engine and service backend run and distributed as donationware.

Brave does ad-hijacking and has been caught hijacking referral links in the past. I'm not sure I would call their model "good".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

Ad-hijacking?

The referral code thing was a bug that got fixed - the intended function was Firefox Suggest-esque sponsored links from a local directory when you typed a word but not a complete url, eg. "binance". The bug was that it gave you a suggestion for complete, legit urls too (eg. "binance.us") and put the suggestion at the top. The bug was fixed to make the feature work as intended, and the feature is turned off by default.

Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.

I don't totally understand how people think Brave is against ad-tech, when it is very much an ad-tech company making money primarily from ads, and secondly from its crypto ownership in BAT.

Brave does a lot of user tracking, but it says it anonymizes it, which hopefully it does, but it still tracks all your behavior.

It is still a cool model, but very much ad-tech and ad-based.

Of course they're not against ad tech, they are an ad agency. They just think there's a market for a privacy-respecting setup, is all. And I think they're right in that.

As far as web ads go, a lot of people's objection to them is not seeing ads (though the ads themselves can obviously be very invasive and bothersome), but to things like tracking and fingerprinting, which the company is adamantly against. The attempt is to have ads, but also have privacy, which IMO is the correct move. It's not like we can run everything on subscriptions.

> Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.

This is not exactly true. They have separate functions for an adblocker, an ad delivery system that's entirely separate from the websites you visit, and a tipping system for sending BAT to creators.

I'm not terribly fond of crypto, so I use Brave as essentially a degoogled Chromium with a built-in adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since it's not an extension) and is available on mobile, and who run an independent end to end encrypted sync service. It's pretty nice.

Business model wise, Brave is same thing as Google just at a smaller scale. Their revenue stream is still ad monetization, just it happens that it does not come from Google (although it is curious that on default settings, Brave's ad blocker does not block Google ads?).

And what does the world look like if Brave "wins" (meaning becoming Google size)? Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them.

Worth noting is that people would run ad-blockers even if all ads in the world are privacy-respecting. Users simply do not want ads on the web pages and eating the bandwidth.

> Business model wise, Brave is same thing as Google just at a smaller scale

> if Brave "wins" […] Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them

No, Google’s business model is gathering humanity’s largest hoard of data and monetizing that through targeted advertizing. Brave doesn’t show any of their most traditional ads unless the user explicitly opts in, and then it doesn’t come with comparable tracking.

> Brave doesn’t show a single ad unless the user explicitly opts in, and then it doesn’t come with comparable tracking.

I have what looks like a promotion for Crypto.com, Binance, Gemini and FTX.us in Brave browser, on default settings even though I never turned them on. For few of these I never heard and I certainly do not have any interest in crypto. Not sure why these would even belong in a web browser on default settings unless there is some kind of a deal/partnership going on?

Both Google and Brave have the same business model. They make money when a user clicks on an ad.

The execution may differ and maybe only because Brave is still new and relatively small and did not feel the same kind of shareholder pressure Google withstood for the last 20 years. That is why I said, imagine a world in which Brave "won". It would not be the same company it is now (compare Google from 2000 to Google today).

Fair enough, I’ve edited my comment (I haven’t used Brave besides ~2 hours of trial months ago — I won’t use any Chromium browser more than that when I can help it — but that’s no excuse to leave misinformation up). Still, those promotions are more in line with the ones that Firefox is filled with (Pocket, Google and Amazon search, etc.), not really the same type of thing as Google’s banners and youtube autoplay videos, and AIUI they only track the referral source (Brave) not the individual user (a defining distinction IMO).

Brave has at least two kinds of ads at present: Sponsored new tab page backgrounds, and user-controlled mechanism that delivers ads as toaster popups. The sponsored backgrounds are on by default, the popups are not. The toaster popups have a revenue share thing where Brave gives a cut of its ad profits to users so they can use Brave's tipping service to benefit creators.

Brave Talk and Brave News are ad-funded as well but I haven't tried them so it's hard to say.

>A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company

An even better "funding model" would be a non-profit entity with no additional agenda beyond providing an anti-adtech browser to the world. I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who would donate their time and money to thwarting the overreach of adtech.

Isn't Firefox the proof that this isn't the case?

How about this for a funding model: tie executive compensation to revenue growth.

Mozilla has had five fold increases in CEO compensation over the last fifteen years, as Firefox market share has gone down six fold. Firefox had ~30% market share in the mid 2000's, and now it has less than five percent market share. Safari has twice the market share Firefox does, by some metrics.

Mozilla has literally paid its CEOs fantastical salaries for driving the company into the ground.

Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.

Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.

Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.

Then there's the fact that Mozilla insists on having multiple offices in probably the most expensive real estate markets in the world. San Fran, Paris, Toronto, Portland? Not just that, but look at where the offices are. I'm not suggesting Mozilla move out to the burbs, but...the offices are dead-center downtown.

If Mozilla moved those offices about a mile or two from the city centers (or shut most of them down - there's no reason to have THREE west-coast offices, especially post-pandemic), and adjusted C-suite salaries to be indexed to growth, I think that would be a great "funding model."

> How about this for a funding model: tie executive compensation to revenue growth.

I'm not sure this would go quite the way you think. The quick numbers I could find are $104 million in revenue for 2009 [1], $828 million in revenue for 2019 [2]. Your market share percentages sound about right, though (and is more relevant to the success of the mission.)

> Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.

I would agree, if I were to completely ignore the existence of competition and all other forms of external reality. I mean, look at the size of the computer market these days. What were Cray, SGI, DEC, Commodore, etc thinking? They must have all been unbelievably incompetent!

Sure, the results are not good. It is perhaps true that you personally could have done far better. Maybe you should give it a try, in some other market where a little company called Google decides to move in on your territory.

> Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.

She's CEO of a company with a revenue of $800M USD. What should the CEO's compensation be? Is $3M too high or too low? Personally, I honestly don't know. My perception is that CEOs are generally paid large sums of money until they're fired. Perhaps that's not the way it should be in an ideal world.

> Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.

Yeah, that sucks. It really sucks. (I work at Mozilla.) Though for the record, we're not post pandemic.

Still, when your burn rate is too high for your income, you have to do something. In some markets, it might make sense to go for broke: borrow to fund scaling, and pray a lot. In the browser market, that would be incredibly stupid. You can't crush your competitors with a $0 product and a compatibility moat that it is your mission to minimize, especially when your main competitor is many times your size.

> ...office rant...

Thanks to COVID, the offices are indeed getting pruned down. But you seem to place a lot of faith in your ability to armchair quarterback. Those offices provided value (partly as a result of their locations), they incurred costs, and people did the math on them. You can assume rank incompetence, but why?

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2009/f... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2019/

I think "post pandemic" there means "after the pandemic drove everyone to WFH anyway", not "especially after the pandemic is over" (which would be an argument for more local offices, not less).

Ah, your interpretation makes much more sense, and upon rereading I believe that you're right.

I may have been confused because I know some surprising things about how search ad revenue did at different points in the pandemic, so I overthought things. (I don't know if those numbers are public or not, so I won't be more specific.)

> You can't crush your competitors with a $0 product and a compatibility moat that it is your mission to minimize, especially when your main competitor is many times your size.

By definition, Firefox is not a $0 product - it is a $500M product, the product name is called primary search engine placement and it has exactly one customer, that also happens to be its main competitor and archrival.

The very fact that user != customer is where most of Firefox problems stem from (IMO). Turning users into customers is a correct (and only) way for Firefox to become independent and achieve a position from which it can really deliver on its mission.

1) Save most of the Google bucks rather than spending them on bloating your org to at least 3x the size it has any reason to be,

2) Invest your saved Google bucks,

3) After a few years you can drop Google for a decade or two and coast entirely on savings + investment income while being beholden to no-one. Maybe indefinitely, depending on how well it goes and how lean you keep your spending.

The alternative would have been putting all that extra staff to work on paid products that didn't suck and were in demand. Firefox could have built an open-source Slack alternative with optional, slick, easy-onboarding paid hosting, for instance. Not that big a stretch. And that's on the boring-and-safe side of things they might have done. Truly, they might have done anything worthwhile with the time and huge amounts of money they had, to gain future independence. Instead, they did... the stuff they did.

> Save most of the Google bucks rather than spending them on bloating your org to at least 3x the size it has any reason to be,

But then there would be no money for Mozilla's social justice initiatives.

> Selling FOSS is hard to begin with

Also worth noting is that Firefox is not in the business of selling FOSS, it is (currently) in the business of selling primary search engine placement.

Maybe because Mozilla collects a massive amount of "telemetry" on users, in a way that is personally identifiable, despite zero need for it to be so?

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...

Or maybe it's because you can toss some money at Mozilla and they'll silently install a browser extension on behalf of an advertising company for a shitty TV show about a l33t haxx0r d00d?

By the way, the bugzilla report about that particular incident was locked, then made employee-only, then made public again...then restricted beyond employee-only...by a project manager...who used to work for advertising companies before she came over to Mozilla.

Or how about the fact that flipping on some of the anti-tracking features include munging the timezone, which means times in almost any website are wrong - which seems to be a poison pill to keep people from turning it on?

Edit with details regarding the extension controversy: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...

What is the browser extension incident you're referring to? Can you provide a link to an article or previous HN discussion?

They're referring to https://www.engadget.com/2017-12-16-firefox-mr-robot-extensi..., an event that occurred 5 years ago, was immediately rolled back after launch, and hasn't happened again.

>an event that occurred 5 years ago, was immediately rolled back after launch, and hasn't happened again.

It shouldn't have happened in the first place so no one gets any points for taking it down immediately. The fact it doesn't seem to have happened again also earns no points because again it should never have happened in the first place. At no point should your web browser silently install an addon/extension without your permission. That this same web browser wants to trot around afterwards and prattle on about how secure and open they are makes it even worse.

> Maybe because Mozilla collects a massive amount of "telemetry" on users, in a way that is personally identifiable, despite zero need for it to be so?

Please point out how to personally identify a telemetry user.

I am a Firefox engineer who uses telemetry data, and know of no way to personally identify any of my users. Well, one way -- you can voluntarily put your email or other info into a crash report, though I know there was some talk of stripping that text field out because it's so rarely useful and touching any potential PII is like touching hot lava.

btw, Firefox crash reports no longer have an email address field, though they still have a comment field:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1688883

resistFingerprinting is a hidden setting. Mostly it's for Tor Browser. Supporting Tor Browser's threat model and not supporting yours might be disappointing. That doesn't make it a poison pill.

nonsense.

about:telemetry shows you all that is collected and none of it is PII, a unique fingerprint maybe...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com