Someone needs to fund the actual browser development.. it's possible to avoid your data being used, but it only works because data of others is monetized.
> Approximately 85% and 81% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.
[0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
And why "humanitarian aid" to countries at war allows budgets to be shifted to weapons instead of food and medical supplies.
Sometimes you just can't do the seemingly obvious "right thing"
Firefox Support Edition, for $10 a month you get nothing (or maybe some Sync stuff) but all the funds go to Firefox exclusively, and your copy will show a pretty star on startup or something else.
Patron Edition: for $20 a month, same thing but you also get the VPN from Mullvad.
160M users. If 10% subscribe, you get $160M every month. I'm a marketing genius.
Can't tell whether you're serious or being sarcastic. A 10% conversion rate for a free product would be the most successful marketing campaign in history. Typical rates are in the low single digits, and that includes goods/services that people have no choice but to pay money for (eg. drop shipped goods from china or SaaS products).
Now if you buy a self serve coffee in a paper cup the cashier whose sole job is to take your money, expects a tip because their wages are shite.
What should they do instead? Their "Program" (ie. non-management) salaries alone are $200M+ per year. That's not something you can replace with a Patreon.
They managed to convince everyone that a browser is naturally a hypercomplex app which requires so much maintenance, support and whatever. But in fact, a browser is an app mostly for rendering text, images and videos, and an embedded scripting language, which all wastes lots of memory and crawls on moderate loads. You can make an app like this in a month, solo, you just can’t fit it to the standard. Before web was a thing, people regularly made much more complex software that “web” heavily sucked compared to. This has to be done. No $200M/mo org can exist without naturally destructive interests in it. The lesson should be recognized, learned and never “feature update”d again. We learned everything we needed in these 30+ years, time to rip it out of corp hands, revisit, settle and put it into maintenance.
Add: to be clear, this is not a tech problem. It must be recognized and done at the antimonopoly level, crushed by the law.
If controlling a browser engine was considered strategic-- and for the love of the darkness, anything that gathers that much information and is owned by American techbros should be-- then they could provide a fair bit of a backstop to finance a dev team.
EU backing could also provide general street cred for the project-- it's both "financially resourced enough to not go poof" and "backed by an authority that both has a strong history of privacy protections, and is in a geopolitical scenario where they can't afford insecurity".
No body wants to pay say 20$ a month for what they can have for free. I suspect you'd need a few hundred million in annual revenue to actually fund a full browser that doesn't rely on existing engines.
The key factor to me is whether that poorly specified extra stuff is actually necessary as part of funding the development or not. As far as I can tell, getting a search engine deal is actually not out of the question for one of these forks; Waterfox's documentation[0] indicates that it has a deal like this (with Bing, from what I can tell from trying it out yesterday), and presumably a large migration of users to a fork could lead to an increase in the funding in the future, in addition to any individual donations. I don't know whether this would result in enough money in the long run to be able to continue developing a browser indefinitely, but Mozilla also is doing other things than just developing Firefox and has costs associated with that, and I don't think there's any other obvious revenue source, so the two most likely scenarios are that they're either making money off of selling user data (or something derived from it that they're claiming isn't user data but aren't willing to bet on the law agreeing with them) or they're actually incurring costs from those other things that could otherwise be spent on Firefox. If it's the former, I think that being vague and quibbling over semantics has lost them the presumption of good faith, and I'd reluctantly conclude that having browser focused on user privacy is no longer tenable and we might as well just all switch to Chrom{e,ium}. If it's the latter, then focusing solely on the browser would _reduce_ the incentive to sell user data for funding, and the fact that Mozilla doesn't seem able or willing to do this means that we're all better of moving to an alternative.
[0]: https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/#6-how-does-waterfox-make-...
Web API surface is large, and if we see new features like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113790 and developers start using it, then websites start to "look worse" in Firefox (or work slower if polyfills are used).. then in order to keep up, Mozilla might feel pressured to expand their engineering team to implement things, and this is expensive..
So the whole thing is kinda weird, because the new terms of use _do not_ give Mozilla any ability to monetize your data. All they do is state that if you give the browser some data the browser can use that data to follow your instructions.
For example, I am using Firefox right now as I type this message in. Firefox will save what I type in my profile so that if my power goes out (or Firefox crashes, which is rare these days but wasn’t always) then it can recover this text when it restarts. It’s always done this but apparently Mozilla’s lawyers now think that this requires an explicit mention in the terms of use. I disagree, frankly, and I think the lawyers who forced this issue are milking it.
“ In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar”
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
This has been discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
> You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
This new license to the data that you enter into the browser is only for local operation of the browser itself, not for ads or sponsored suggestions. In addition to that license, they also use the words that you type into the urlbar or search box to customize the ads and search suggestions that you see. It is important to keep these two things separate, because only one of them is new. The other has been there for years.
It does not. That is explicitly stated as a subset of their rights. Before that sentence you might notice:
“This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice.”
So check the privacy notice and you find…
“How we use data
We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business”
So they can use the data in anyway that helps sustain the business.
I would say that those 3 vaguely worded things pretty much cover them to use consumer data in any way they want.
1. The data processed described in the Privacy Notice,
2. A nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox.
The 2nd is not the data they talk about in the 1st (a.k.a the Privacy Notice). The data they describe in the Privacy Notice in the 1st are not the data they have "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" in the 2nd. Don't mix 2 or these together.
Operate Firefox is an extremely broad statement. It then goes to outline that means everything in their privacy notice (which then also includes even more broad language) and then exclusive, worldwide license.
No good will or benefit of the doubt should be given to a terms of service like this. The changes here are an expansion of Firefox’s rights - therefor, a contracting of your own.
If anyone thinks Firefox processes the data with "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" outside of "the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox" like in scenario 1 (the Privacy Notice), I would like to learn about which codes in Firefox that do that. It would be really useful as well if there would be legal disputes in court to Mozilla that could clarify these things.
No one wants a terms of service like that, of course, because we all agree implicitly that the softwares do what we input in it. However, not all lawyers or legals are "we", many of them always want things interpreted explicitly to make those activities "clearer" for their jobs when legal confrontations happen. Like Epic founder said:
> The license says that when you type stuff, the program can use the stuff you typed to do the thing you asked it to do. This is what programs ordinarily do, but nowadays lawyers tend to advise companies to say it explicitly.
Also it makes no sense for a program that runs on your own computer to have "Terms of Use".
If firefox starts backing up your profile to a mozilla server, encrypted, you requested it. If there is an additional encryption key that lets mozilla decrypt it and sell it to OpenAI, you requested it.
Also, I am requesting that firefox send this post to HN by pressing the reply button. By the terms of firefox's ToU, this gives Mozilla a license to this content. That license is not limited to the duration of the http call if other firefox behavior that I have "requested" uses that content later. Perhaps they will scrape my comments from HN and use their content in targeted ads that firefox will display to me later. All allowed by the ToU.
When you enable firefox sync or whatever? Is there any evidence they're backing up stuff behind users' backs?
>Bear in mind that a nontechnical user has no idea it does this, and a technical user only realizes it does this after reading the code or experiencing a crash. You "requested" this behavior implicitly by using firefox. So any behavior firefox has, now, or in the future with data you input is implicitly something you requested.
The crash reporter has a checkbox that says "Tell Mozilla about the crash so they can fix it". I'm not sure how it can get more clear than that.
https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...
The ambiguous nature of the changes favor some shady self dealing. Sorry.