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Comment by someotherperson | Hacker News Reader

> While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run

Not focusing on Firefox is what brought it to its state today, so what should Mozilla do? Focus even less on Firefox and instead on ads, AI and begging. Insane.

EDIT: As an aside, it looks like Mozilla's VC fund invested in the funding round[0] of one of the former board members[1] of mozilla.ai which is kinda weird.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/credo-ai-series-b--...

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...

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Mozilla really is in a bad spot if advertising, AI, and fundraising are the only innovative ideas their leadership could come up with. I will begrudgingly still use Firefox as my daily driver, but the mismanagement being shown is really appalling and I worry about the future of a free and open Internet.

Suffice to say that we all deserve better.

The internet and browsers are a public good, no society functions without. As the US has transitioned into a kleptocracy, it would be even more logical for the EU to financially support teams developing important open source projects. Same thing for Linux and Libre Office perhaps.

Agreed, even if I am quite vocal about the state of Linux Desktop, as ex-believer, european distributions of FOSS OSes are the only viable way from US tech stacks.

Yes, I am quite aware of the contributions they also make to those platforms, but at lease those can be forked from, that ain't happening with what Google/Apple/Microsoft are selling as mainstream OSes.

The idea of EU funding Mozilla is naive, and if this is the best people can come up with, I'm not blaming Mozilla going for ads.

For one, Mozilla is still a US entity. As an EU citizen, I'd rather have my taxes go towards funding EU entities, especially in this climate. And I'd rather have that EU entity fork Chromium, starting to contribute to its development, as that would be a wiser bet.

And also, governments funding projects such as Firefox is a bad idea because the citizens of those governments come first. As one example, many online BBC shows are geo-blocked in my country. The EU is meant to serve its citizens, not the world, and you don't want the open Internet to depend on whom people vote for in the following election cycle.

The only way to fund a project that has global reach is via a sustainable business model, not taxes.

I do not mean to sponsor an external entity.

You have to analyze a project, and that might mean you need to fork it. It all depends on how much you need to steer and help. If a community is happy to welcome some formal stewardship, then that might work too. There is a company that contributes a lot to Libre Office. The same with Blender, where there can be cooperative development.

A hard fork is always possible, and nothing bad if the vision and needs differ from teams. Some might fork the EU stuff in turn. The free software model is designed to support that.

Mozilla got billions from Google and squandered it. If the EU were to fund a browser, I would prefer it to be Ladybird rather than throwing even more money into Mozilla’s bottomless pit.

what does that even mean?

"focussing on Firefox" isolates you from the vast majority of people who don't use it, and provides €0 of revenue per year to work on Firefox at all.

On the other hand, advertising doesn't do much to help Mozilla if it removes the main differentiator Firefox has from vastly more popular competitors. Firefox with "privacy respecting advertising" sounds an awful lot like Chrome with compatibility issues.

Yes. There is no such thing as privacy-respecting advertising. If they mess with extensions like Chrome did, they're going to lose their user base. A much higher proportion of us are only using Firefox because it's not connected to AdTech.

> There is no such thing as privacy-respecting advertising.

Sure there is; print ads are fine, and nothing prevents that style being used on the web (in fact, I'm aware of a local paper that does do that). It's just that advertisers really want to spy on users, so they pretty much always do.

One good example I like to show for this kind of web advertising is https://theweekinchess.com/

Basic image/hyperlinked banner ads, located to the side and non-disruptive, and relative to the topic of the website you are currently visiting.

I don't want the advertisers who are spying on us to get a second chance to reconsider a more ethical way of doing business. I want their industry driven into the ground and destroyed for the crimes they've already committed. Only after that happens can we can talk about privacy-respecting advertising being possible.

Firefox has been literally funded by Google's Ads, that Search deal having kept Mozilla alive. With all due respect, Firefox not being connected to AdTech is a hallucination.

Actually, all 3 major browser engines are directly funded by Google's Ads. And while you may have noticed that Mozilla and Apple have been singing the privacy tune, you should've also noticed that they never did anything to upset their cash cow.

Mozilla diversifying their revenue would be an improvement IMO. But whatever they did in the past, people got mad, because many imagine that such a complex piece of software could be developed for free or from the donations of individuals that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.

The salient difference is that Chrome kneecapped extensions, while Firefox has not. The more they get involved with ads, the more likely they become to mess with that. It will not go well.

~80% of their revenue comes from Google paying them for search deals on Firefox.

Focusing on anything other than Firefox (but ads and AI? really?) not only cheapens the brand, but also devalues and risks their Google deal.

I'm not sure what "isolating" means in "isolating you from the vast majority of people who don't use it".

I'm assuming you're saying that, since FF has a low browser share today, Mozilla focusing their effort to improve it would be wasteful, because that would be putting more resources behind a product that isn't popular.

If so, I wonder how that's different from any other company that wants to grow their market share. They probably face many of the same choices, e.g.: keep your core users satisfied, or try to bring in a new market. It's pretty intuitive to me that putting ads in Firefox would alienate their current core users, but how would putting ads in FF bring in new users? Wouldn't the result just be fewer people using Firefox?

If what they care about is the mission, then that seems like a bad idea. If what they care about is revenue, then I wonder how the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the Mozilla Corporation, squares that tradeoff with the mission they exist to serve.

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