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Comment by endgame | Hacker News Reader

What if - and bear with me here - Mozilla set up a way for us to fund Firefox directly?

They have—it’s their VPN offering.

(Cue complaints about it not being the right way to fund Firefox, because it’s not a pure donation. Before you go down that road, tell me: what evidence do you have that pure donations would get enough transactions to be worth the overhead? Have they ever worked at scale for any other software?)

Their business model doesn't have to be donation-based. It can be, (surprise!) purchase based.

I pay for lots of software I use, and do so happily if it delivers value — it would be extremely easy for me to justify paying for what's probably one of the apps I use the most. Why can't we pay for good browsers, that put the focus squarely on being the best tool to access the www? Why can't that money be used to hire back some of the talent Mozilla has been letting go? I say it elsewhere in this thread — Mozilla should let us pay for the bloody thing.

I would pay for a "Firefox Pro" which allowed greater control/modifications for power users.

Make it open source, but have the official download for builds (and source code?[0]) be payed. Bonus points if the download bundle includes source code and a simplified build process.

[0] obviously it'll be mirrored in 2 seconds, but still.

the few people who might pay for a firefox pro would probably not even pay the wages of the people required to setup the payment and infrastructure therein.

Might as well just ask for donations.

I wonder if they could do a "pay what you want" download page for Firefox Developer Edition. It's my daily driver, and I'd be happy to pay for it.

Unless I’m mistaken, Developer Edition is just Firefox with experimental features enabled and permanently-enabled telemetry.

I’m not sure what in my brain says “Telemetry? Absolutely not”, but that’s how it is for me (and why I don’t use the Developer Edition).

I don't mind sending telemetry data however, as long as I'm reasonably convinced that Mozilla isn't doing anything shady with it.

However, I respect the “Telemetry? Absolutely not” stance and can only hope and pray that Firefox PMs use telemetry as only ONE among a whole host of other signals to support decision-making.

That creates a branding risk. If the idea spreads that Firefox is a paid product you might scare people away from the free version and the net impact becomes negative.

Honestly, the real branding risk is Mozilla's brand being tarnished by firing engineering talent, bundling Pocket, adding opt-out telemetry, etc. I'll take the branding risk that saves a beloved browser and company, over the branding risk that destroys both.

I honestly think the core dev work on Firefox could be done by 6 devs. I get an impression that half their devs are doing UI tweaks, which could be left alone for a decade without any issues.

The rest, outside of core, seem to write code as you mention. Product additions which most always give zero real value, no income, and even detract from the brand.

This might be a new low point for HN discourse regarding Firefox. Wow.

No, you can't maintain an entire modern browser (25 million lines of code) with 6 people.

You probably can't even maintain a complete multi-architecture, JIT-enabled Javascript engine with 6 people. Or GPU-accelerated rendering that works across thousands of hardware / software combinations. Much less that plus all the other things a browser has to do.

Konqueror was a better browser than Firefox maintained by a much smaller team for many years.

Honestly FF VPN is a really great product. Very very easy to use. I do wish I had access to more configuration options.

This is not by any means "direct", and is not very different from if they sold t-shirts.

You have been able to for a very long time, quite possibly for all of its existence: https://donate.mozilla.org/

People always post this in reply. I don't want to donate to the Mozilla Foundation's CEO salary package, or their navel-gazing side projects, or their endless reshuffling of deckchairs. I want to fund _Firefox_, the only browser engine keeping us from an endless monopoly of Chrome reskins.

So you need to fund either individual developers or a 3rd party like Igalia to develop the features you want, including the work to ensure it will end up in the upstream repo and not in a fork.

Since that's "a donation with restrictions", you can probably set up a grant / anything with a contract instead. It may be onerous for an individual, but get enough people to be worth the effort and it should work fine.

Donations to the Mozilla Foundation support the Foundation's outreach and education efforts, not Firefox development. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity owned by the Foundation and is not donation-supported.

See the sections "How will my donation be used?" and "Don’t Mozilla products, like Firefox, earn income?" here: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq/#item_8

As far as I remember the problem was that you can donate to Mozilla foundation, but not the Mozilla corporation ( which is responsible for Firefox + other stuff ). There is no direct way to finance/donate for Firefox developement (without other projects).

Shocking idea in 2022.

No, but seriously, Mozilla — I'll pay you real dollars for this.

too late for me.

they fired a ton of engineering talent working on exciting tech (servo) to chase some bundled vpn rebrand. what a misguided move, like most everything they've done in non-engineering space. sad.

before, i would have donated hundreds or more if there was a way to pay directly for firefox and thunderbird. but not anymore.

at least the CEO's salary keeps going up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563698

There's a way to directly donate to Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/

Unfortunately, there's no such option for Firefox.

At this point, I'm starting to wonder whether or not Mozilla leadership is controlled opposition.

I don't doubt the sincerity of the individuals involved, but Google wouldn't pay Mozilla if they didn't think it was in their interests to do so.

It is controlled opposition. And their CEO is not an engineer and has no clue how to manage engineers or run a software company; she's a lawyer.

"Never attribute to Malice which can be explained by Stupidity"

Several thousand people would donate. Several million wouldn't care. Chrome wins.

But eventually the “need” for never-ending growth means a manager somewhere will be looking to eek out that x% growth - and their individual (professional) needs will lead to suggesting monetizing the paid user base…

Why would this be a default, or an inevitability? Sounds like a reasonable incentive structure for VC-funded companies looking to be a unicorn. But it’s far from the only option culturally. It certainly doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that makes sense for Mozilla.

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