Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredoliveira | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com