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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla seems to be in a lose-lose situation with HN crowd.

When they attempt to diversify their revenue with VPN, email tokenization, etc, (things not tied to Google revenue) … HN crowd ridicules them for not being focused on gaining browser share.

When it comes to Firefox, it seems few have even given it a fair try anytime recently.

(How can they gain share when HN doesn’t give them a try)

Irony is, HN loves Rust. And Rust was created at Mozilla.

Note: I have no ties to Mozilla and am a Safari user.

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You're talking as though HN is a monolithic entity with a single opinion.

There are some HNers (myself included) who hate the direction that Mozilla is going under Baker. I want Mozilla to give me an option to put money into a bucket that will directly pay for browser development, the way that restaurants have a tip jar that goes directly to the employees. I want that because I use Firefox as a daily driver and want it to survive, and the way Mozilla spends the donations they get to the org as a whole isn't helpful to that end.

Separately, there are other HNers who still think of Firefox as the slow dinosaur that Chrome unseated. These HNers likely don't have a strong opinion about Mitchell Baker because they have no skin in the game.

And even more separately there are other HNers who love Rust. That Rust originally came from Mozilla may or may not even matter to these HNers. They probably do remember the day that Mitchell Baker laid off the whole Rust team, though.

I’m way closer to paying for Kagi than I am to paying for Firefox. Sure “apples to oranges” and all that, but if Kagi slapped a coat of paint on a shitty electron app, gave me bookmarks, profiles (for dev testing a la containers in Firefox), and asked me to cough up $10-$15 / month for it? Done. Paid. Maybe even a tip on top.

What the hell does Firefox bring to the table? Sure they’re open source and “competition” to Google but come on… surely we can all see those aren’t features, they aren’t products, they’re bullet points.

Kagi actually does make their own browser (Mac-only and Webkit-based): https://kagi.com/orion/

It's everything that Firefox should be and misleadingly claims to be. Unlike Firefox, Orion actually has ad blocking by default.

Thanks for the kind words! Note that Orion is macOS/iOS only for now (we had to start somewhere).

Well I use Firefox but I hate their harebrained monetisation schemes. And anyone with any idea of business knows they'll never pull in the money they need. Whatever the answer is, this isn't it.

Mozilla shut down the Rust team to focus on Firefox.

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