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Comment by bananapub | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

~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.

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