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Comment by david_draco | Hacker News Reader

> What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson.

They are trying to find a funding model that makes them independent from Google.

- Building a fast, privacy-oriented browser that keeps up with web standards and fixes security bugs takes people, organisation and therefore money. Yes, much more than that CEO salary.

- No one wants to buy for a browser.

- No one wants to pay a subscription fee for a browser.

So you are left with ads. Mozilla is trying to find a balance there between privacy and ads with a clearing house approach. People who hate ads out of principle scream. How should browser development be funded?

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> How should browser development be funded?

One of the most common Mozilla complaints I see on the web is that you cannot fund Firefox development directly. People want to give money to it, but cannot.

Which makes sense, I guess. Anecdotally, Mozilla is by far the company I know with the most vocal users that get completely ignored.

Come now, let us be realistic, no one and nothing funds browser development other than advertisement:

https://ladybird.org/#sponsors

That is provably false. Safari isn’t funded by advertising, neither is Orion, or LibreWolf, or any number of other smaller open-source browsers.

According to news stories, Apple received $20 billion dollars in 2022 from Google to make Google the default search in Safari.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...

Which is easy money that Apple uses for the company as a whole. They don’t make Safari because of Google’s money nor is it likely they would stop developing it if that money was no longer paid.

None of those appear to be advertising companies.

If there is one single piece of software I will post a recurring fee for, it's a web browser. Look at Kagi and Orion for example (I pay for both).

It's like email. You need to get people over the mental hump. But then if you offer a good product, buyers will be happy they got over it.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/

Here you go! Insert credit card here.

CEO of Mozilla earns $3m/year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30665913

If the Mozilla foundation creates a donation button with the condition that the money goes solely to browser development (no CEO salary or political activism) I will donate.

Except that it's well-known fact that none of your donations for the foundation ever go anywhere near Firefox itself, since Firefox is spun off as their commercial sector to accept Google's money

that doesn't pay for Firefox...

I donate to them as well, but donating broadly to the Mozilla foundation isn't the same as selling the web browser in exchange for money.

Mozilla has tried experiment after experiment to try to earn money. Let's try forcing Pocket down people's throats. Let's automatically install Mr Robot. You know what people will love? Full-page ads for a VPN! No one has seen enough VPN ads!

The one funding model they haven't experimented with at all is actually asking people to pay for Firefox. Donations or subscription, they haven't even tried it once.

And yet people will over and over again insist that that would never work. Doesn't that strike you as odd? They're willing to flail about trying thing after thing after thing that their users hate and yell about and they end up having to pull back, they're willing to burn credibility over and over again, but the one funding model that their users keep telling them they want they refuse to even try on the grounds it would never work.

> asking people to pay for Firefox

I do expect that's the next step at Mozilla - locking features behind paywall with some premium plan. Cloud sync probably will fall into that basket. And if that eventually won't work - they'll surely announce it's time to "sunset".

Personally, I think that's what they should've been doing all along. If it doesn't work at this point, it's because it's too late, and they've already burned enough of their credibility that people don't want to give them money anymore.

> And yet people will over and over again insist that that would never work. Doesn't that strike you as odd?

Not really. Perhaps they know enough about this that they believe it wouldn't work. How much would you pay for Firefox per year? How many people would pay that figure?

>And yet people will over and over again insist that that would never work.

Because it won't. And there is mountains of data to back it up. People will not pay if they don't have to.

Some people will, for sure, but to get those some people to carry the weight of "all the people" is totally untenable.

Besides, Chrome is "free".

At the same time, even a tiny bit of friction is enough to get people over the mental hump of paying for something.

They could easily gate off certain features behind a paid build, so either you pay or compile it yourself from source. Downstream packagers could of course do whatever they want (eg Debian). However, it creates a minor amount of friction for a relatively large fraction of the user base, and moreover sets the baseline expectation that this is not really "free as in beer", even though it remains "free as in freedom".

See also: Sublime Text, which, despite being closed-source, is 100% free-as-in-beer to use in perpetuity, and yet somehow they make enough money To not only continue development, but even start developing other products (Sublime Merge), even as their brand recognition wanes and their competitive advantage shrinks.

It doesn't have to pay for the entire Mozilla organization, it just has to bring in more money than the random other stuff they've tried. That's not a very high bar to cross.

Wikipedia has mountains of $$$ to back up that a lot of people do pay, even when it's not necessary at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

At one point Mozilla was literally selling a VPN subscription. That point is now - you can go buy one today. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-vpn-and-ho...

You can even donate money today: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/ From memory, Mozilla's spent years trying to get donations through asking people nicely and in relatively unobtrusive ways in-browser for years. You can even give monthly - a subscription, if you will.

Not only have they tried both donations and subscriptions, but their efforts have been resoundingly ignored. To the point where you are far from the first person to fault them for supposedly choosing to not do what they demonstrably do.

Perhaps people suggest that donations and subscriptions don't work well or reliably because there's history showing that.

> At one point Mozilla was literally selling a VPN subscription. That point is now - you can go buy one today.

I don't want a VPN. And I don't want to pay money to a Mozilla VPN of which some unspecified percentage will actually get used to pay for Firefox development (with the rest actually paying for the VPN). I honestly feel my money does more harm than good paying for the VPN because it creates a false impression of where the demand is.

I don't want a subscription to an unrelated service, I want a subscription to Firefox. I want my money to go into a stream that unambiguously shows my support for the single Mozilla project that I care about.

> You can even donate money today

That money will not (and I believe cannot) go to Firefox. As presently structured the corporation does all Firefox development, and the corporation cannot receive money from the foundation, so donations to Mozilla do nothing for Firefox.

> Not only have they tried both donations and subscriptions, but their efforts have been resoundingly ignored.

Not ignored, for the reasons stated above they haven't actually done what you say they've done.

If they wanted independence from google they'd cut overhead instead of raising the CEO salary year after year.

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