But instead the choice, realistically, seems to be between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla. And Chrome works marginally better... :/
Would you pay a one-time $10 for a lifetime Firefox license? $100? $1,000? $10,000?
I never click on any ads, so while I'm sure I contribute to Firefox's revenue as another pair of eyeballs, I don't deliver any end value to their ad-biz end customers.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the value of ads. Clicks are of course the most valuable signal, but any ad seen is valuable. If clicks were all that mattered TV would never had ads, nor would newspapers.
Many ads are about awareness not buy now. Ford/Toyota... doesn't expect you to buy a car the day/week you see an ad, they just want you to think of them when you buy a car. They also want to slowly drive discomfort with whatever car you already drive so that eventually you do buy a new one despite having on that works. (or if you don't have a car they want to be sure you are reminded how much freedom to go places you are giving up - without concern for the costs of having a car)
You're basically talking about asking for donations from people that prefer to ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
They could've at least tried to sell a paid version - what's the worst that could happen? Any sale would be on top of what they're currently earning per download, i.e. pure "profit" that could be reinvested in the product.
It never was an "either/or" proposition.
But indeed, even if they ensure that donations go towards Firefox development, instead of other crap, that would be a step forward.
We have no interest in funding Mozilla, whose manifesto barely mentions Firefox and who has now decided that AI is their focus.
Assumedly, a paid version would exclude some features that Mozilla is otherwise monetizing through (like selling your data). This doesn't seem like sales "on top of" what they're already earning, but rather an alternative that replaces (at least some of) existing monetization routes.
The people who care are willing to pay.
I think it's already the case that only tech literate people prefer Firefox over Chrome or Edge (I bet a significant part of users don't even know about Chromium or what's the difference from Chrome). So putting a price on Firefox wouldn't change this in a meaningful way. The real question is how much tech literate people would be ready to pay, most of the users will stay on Chrome/Edge for the foreseeable future.
There are multiple forks that do that. Download one of them instead. Mozilla Corporation has no control over those, so if you don't like what Mozilla make, exercise your software freedom.
The problem with Mozilla, as far as I can see, is not the the compromises they make for obtaining money (everyone suffers that), its that they're deceptive and underhand about it. That makes them unethical. I wrote plenty regarding that here [0]
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
Librewolf and Waterfox are two fine choices to use for upstream sincr they have saner defaults and make the forking and building easier to wire up.
Ive been running my own FF fork for a few years like this now.
If Firefox dies, eventually so will they, as the code stagnates relative to better-funded browsers.
Saying "switch to a privacy-first fork" is not a long-term solution.
You're 100% right while operating in an environment that is hostile to privacy. In these conditions security/privacy remains mostly tactical, not strategic. In fact, against a predominant tyranny it is insurrectional. Free Software will have to learn to adapt with more intelligence-sharing and opportunistic manoeuvres.
As an aside though, one might generalise to say there are no long term solutions in tech, period. And therefore advocates of freedom and privacy are at no particular disadvantage relative to any opponents.
Some sites will need new features. But I guess it is fine to have a data-collecting version of Firefox or even some moderately well behaved malware like Chrome, as long as most browsing doesn’t happen through it. So, I guess I’ll look at moving most of my browsing to a privacy respecting form and keeping the a browser around for faulty sites…
Can't the EU just sponsor Firefox?
And even if they did, it would have to be a world in which they've lost all funding from Google and becoming dependent only on the EU. Perhaps such a thing might happen, but it wouldn't happen overnight — in the meantime it would be more money, from more diversified sources.
1) The European Commission has proposed Chat Control, pressuring platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram to scan encrypted messages with AI, including client-side scanning, which critics say breaks encryption and enables mass surveillance.
2) The EU has adopted the eID (European Digital Identity), a centralized digital ID system via a “wallet” app, tied to biometric and personal data for service access.
3) The EU’s Data Retention Directive forced telecoms to store metadata until it was struck down in 2014; debates still persist.
4) The EU’s Digital Services Act mandates platforms share data with authorities to fight illegal content, raising profiling concerns.
5) The EU’s Data Act requires businesses to share data with governments, threatening personal info control.
6) The EU supports the UN Cybercrime Treaty, boosting global surveillance and data-sharing powers.
That’s just off the top of my head; I’m sure there are more examples of how the EU abuses its power and infringes on users’ privacy.
So yes, of all possible stewards for Firefox, the EU is maybe the third-worst, behind only China and Putin’s Russia.
Your framing that "the choice is between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla" creates a false equivalence. Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
And "Chrome works marginally better"? By what metric? Firefox has better memory usage, stronger privacy protections, and doesn't exist primarily as a data collection tool for the world's largest advertising company.
The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web. This kind of uninformed take that ignores the nuances of browser economics is exactly why we can't have nice things on the open web.
Performance, compatibility, security. Chromium runs faster, it works with more websites, it's sandbox is better, particularly on Android. I don't care much about memory usage as I don't need a billion tabs open at once (does anyone). There's options available beyond Chrome that offer most of the same privacy benefits as Firefox does.
I think marginal is an understatement. As for Mozilla's business model, what business model? They're throwing everything at the wall to see if it sticks and virtually nothing has, all the while their browser has languished. Going full cynic, at this point the only reason it is allowed to exist is because Google deem it useful to have it around as a counterpoint to accusations that they have a monopoly.
Oh yes. And you don't even need that many tabs open for Chrome to eat half of your RAM.
People's overwhelming fascination with Chrome escapes me. Some subtle detail seems to make it stick out. Everyone remembers that one time ff crashed on 2005, but gives berth to Chrome crashimg every few days and selling their personal data to google.
I dont care if ddg and ff sell aggregate data.
My main FF instance has ~1,500 tabs FWIW, though I'll often bypass those for a given session by running incognito only. Even then I'll easily hit 100+ tabs in only a few minutes.
At the cost of a subpar cache; it's not like Chromium is leaking memory, & its memory pressure effects are both well-studied and well-understood. Yet, Firefox stans keep touting lack of comprehensive caching as some kind of advantage. I'm sorry, this is not 2005. It took Mozilla two years to implement some kind of JIT pipelining, and guess what, Chromium had V8 all along: an engine that can benefit from "open web" cooperation courtesy of Nodejs and the vast ecosystem around it. SpiderMonkey? Please. This is the crux of the issue.
> The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web.
The idea that the web—chaperoned by the likes of Mozilla, can be "open"—is the crazy, unsustainable one. OP is being pragmatic, and considering their privacy carefully. Mozilla's track record is that of a gravely mismanaged, disoriented, and subservient (Google) organisation. Firefox codebase is arcane, was already showing age even ten years ago, & now there's a whole ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers that can benefit from "open web" cooperation.
Firefox has zero moral high-ground, & pretending like it possesses some kind of virtue is a crime against semantics.
Just being different and capable of rendering websites makes the web a place where standards matter. It doesn't have to be noble to make this happen.
Firefox is just standing in there like a marker - as long as there's AN alternative, there's a chance for ANOTHER alternative.
>This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy.
>It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.
In Germany, a lot of people do (in particular in hacker and IT-affine circles), and I do claim privacy discussions there often do become as heated as discussions with vegans about meat.
This is the reason why in Germany Firefox has a significant market share (according to
> https://www.statista.com/statistics/462158/browsers-most-use...
13.65%).