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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I think the situation is simple. They are rendering one service that their users value, and it is making Firefox.

They should ask (not require) payment for that service. Yes, what they should do is basically to run a Patreon subscription, clearly marked "For the continued development of Firefox".

At a very accessible level of $3 / mo on average, and merely 5M subscribers over the world, they'd have $15M monthly, or $180M a year.

See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash, without getting handouts from its competition (haha), zero ads, and asking users to spare $2.75 here and there.

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>They should ask (not require) payment for that service.

Sure - let them squeeze out the last drop of their one and only cash cow before it becomes utterly irrelevant - instead of investing in it and making it a core pillar of their strategy.

>See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash,

Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash. Browser market share and corresponding user eyeballs are immensely valuable. That money isn't going back into Firefox development. This is why it is borderline criminal that they choose to focus on everything except Firefox.

Alternatively, what are they without Firefox?

With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Now Firefox can't be used to make webapps effectively, the only alternative is to use Electron and fortify Chromium's monopoly.

I'm not a Baker fan at all, but no such initiative was cut under her leadership, because none existed.

Electron won not because chromium was more embeddable, it won because it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies. Everything else you could do already before with XulRunner...

> it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies

That's exactly what "more embeddable" is. It made itself easier to turn into Node.js, Electron, etc. I don't think it was a pure coincidence.

XulRunner existed before Electron. Node.js used v8, but could have use SpiderMonkey instead (this is what Gnome did). These were choices, not situations where using Mozilla tech was impossible. In the end that cemented Google stronghold on the web.

> With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Will you name them? Mozilla cut embedding when Gary Kovacs was CEO. XULRunner, Graphene, and Positron were cut when Chris Beard was CEO. GeckoView was not cut.

> instead of investing in it and making it a core pillar of their strategy.

What are they investing in now?

> Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash.

It's not neutral cash, it's Google's cash. The point is to get off the needle of Google's handouts and become independent. Maybe then there'd be less incentive to slowly drive Firefox towards irrelevance.

> what are they without Firefox?

With a small bit of conspiracy theory, that would be "mission accomplished" :-|

They have a donate button. Which is all about subscriptions. Which is why I went away without even doing a one time donation, as my original intention was.

I deeply resent being pushed into subscriptions and you should too.

One-time donations must always be an option.

But it's a recurring revenue what allows you e.g. to hire developers. Sad but true.

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