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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

How do you get money to develop a browser?

1) sell it. You’re competing with Google. Not gonna fly.

2) embed ads. You can now get Google to pay you. Sounds nice, except Google’s own browser doesn’t do that.

3) donations and grants. This could work with a government with enough foresight to ensure viable browser competition, which isn’t even a theoretical problem. Getting enough money to pay for anything but coffee and electricity may be a problem, though.

4) run an ad network and make sure your browser shows those ads ‘better’ than the competition: kinda makes sense, except you don’t need the browser here to make money? Google already makes one, after all. So you need some kind of a long term contract between the ad network and the browser development branch to make sure the browser part keeps doing the browser.

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Mozilla has received billions from Google and has a billion in cash reserves. Why didn’t they set up an endowment so they could spend it sustainably instead of assuming the free Google money would just keep flowing forever? They could’ve been independent of Google by now.

I'm all ears on how they could be independent. All I see is using Google's money to invest somewhere else than the browser market and perhaps maybe fund the browser-making foundation with it out of good will.

One solution is already in the comment you're replying to - by setting up a dedicated org financed well into the future via the endowment so that it would not be affected even if all income dries up and the other org collapses. (nothing foolproof about this, it's a challenge, but still)

> All I see is using Google's money to invest somewhere else

Yes. Use Google’s money to bootstrap independence from Google instead of spending it all straight away.

Not paying their CEO 7mil a year would be a start.

>3) donations and grants. This could work with a government with enough foresight to ensure viable browser competition

It's worked for Wikipedia, perhaps a little too well in fact: their foundation spends a bunch of money on stuff unrelated to the Wikipedia website.

And then they beg for more every year on Wikipedia itself. It is gross and no one should give them money any more. The endowment amount was met long ago. No one wants their other shit. Just be happy with Wikipedia being the massive success story it is, you parasitic non-profit management class assholes.

> sell it. You’re competing with Google. Not gonna fly.

The Enterprise™ spends insane money on both real and dubious security products, that often achieve their objectives via hacky ways (TLS interception, etc). The browser being at the forefront of a lot of security threats nowadays means it's the perfect candidate to implement said security features in it and sell it as a paid version, alongside productivity features such as built-in ad/tracker blocking, etc.

Security teams are already mandating chrome as the browser, it's in a local maximum of controllable-enough + usable-enough... a disruptor in this space would need a really compelling value proposition.

I'd say Edge is more popular, especially in the shops that go all in on Microsoft/Office 365. It integrates better with the whole ecosystem, you have more control over it with policies, sync is easier, and most importantly, underneath is all just Chromium.

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