Ask HN: Would you fund Mozilla to become independent of Google?
How much would you and or your company be willing to fund Mozilla should it need to become independent of Google?
Any donations you send to Mozilla today go to the corporation and are not spent on the browser. They are spent on things that have nothing to do with the core mission of the maintaining the browser.
Nobody is allowed to fund Mozilla to maintain the browser, which is the actual question you're asking.
Much like Wikipedia, my donations depend on being able to donate to the actual engineers, and not to unrelated political advocacy.
Yep. I even agree with most of the unrelated political advocacy, but I want to be able to donate for that to a different organization.
I figure it's either worth $0, or hundreds of $. I mean, sooo much whining about privacy and telemetry and ad-blocking but ultimately it's worth the same as a couple cups of coffee?
That seems to me to be a root question here. How much is privacy actually worth? The average number in this post seems about $20. So in real terms, nothing at all.
And yes, all of this is moot given that you can't donate to Firefox in the first place.
Still, for those starting a business, this is a excellent lesson- don't confuse volume with willingness to pay. Just because lots of people shout loudly about the size of their pain, don't just assume they'll pay real money to make it go away.
The corporation funds almost exclusively the browser.
The non-profit doesn't fund the browser.
And having a specific "donate to Firefox only" would probably end in disaster. They might end up in a situation where they're forced to waste money on Firefox because that's what the donations are for while not having enough money to keep the lights on in offices. For a fun example of what happens when you have fixed budgets that don't have any flexibility, Atlanta's MARTA was founded with an agreement providing public funding, with a fixed 50/50 split between capex and opex. So they found themselves with brand new trains because there's capex budget to spend, but falling apart infrastructure because 50% wasn't enough for opex.
The money flow between the for-profit that develops Firefox and the non-profit foundation is one-way: From for-profit to non-profit. This is because it is illegal for the non-profit to give money to the for-profit.
Any donations you make go to the non-profit. They are not used and cannot legally be used for Firefox development.
Edit to add: Mozilla chose this legal structure. Mozilla chooses to disallow donations or payments directly to the for-profit. For example, nothing prevents using a shareware model, where Firefox is free but you can choose to pay for it. And Mozilla chooses to avoid mentioning this structure when accepting donations from you.
I'd reason that there's no consensus on this at all. Some things might be perceived as good, some neutral or bad, and many might be perceived as well intended but ineffective.
No, I'm stating that it's good that Mozilla has non-Firefox activities and is trying to diversify. I've only used Pocket from them and it's good, but don't have an opinion on any of their other activities.
They have enough money that they could throw it all in the S&P 500 and maintain Firefox indefinitely off the growth. That’s what they should do.
If memory serves right, the biggest slice of expenses were in C-level compensations & shortlived pet projects. The organization has to focus on growing a cadre of good engineers and product teams for their core offerings (just like the ones who rewrote large chunks of Netscape code into a fledgling Firefox ~22y ago).
One can't be expected to donate just to eventually subsidize a penthouse purchase for the CEO or their swanky McLaren.
Their total expenses were ~$40M, and their CEO made over $6M in compensation. So out of a $100 donation, $16 goes directly into the CEO's pocket.
The total compensation for their top 10 employees is close to $10M. They all are President of this and VP of that and Director of thus--my strong guess is none of them write Firefox code. So $24 of your $100 go into their pockets.
1: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-fo...
I would not give a penny to a company that looks to sell me out.
After a few years (like 4) I would probably consider buying "Mozilla 2" for another one time payment up to $20 if the mozilla I bought becomes "end of life".
I would never buy "mozilla" from a microsoft store or android/apple appstore. I would not give a cent or continue using mozilla if ublock origin becomes not supported. Any kind of forced ads or restriction on adblocking will make me forget mozilla ever was a thing.
> as far as I know Steam purchases also have fees like 30%
perhaps firefox could ditch google and get picked up by Valve? (in terms of funding/ownership)
Carving out Firefox means Mozilla is dissolved as none of their other activities make any money.
It’s like saying, yeah I solved cancer, but my vision is so much bigger than that! I also invented an Excel formula that allows shoe stores to advertise 2% less expensively to dogs.
We really need an alternative browser. We have one. But the people running it want to use your donations to do other things that are 100x less important.
1. Zero telemetry. I mean ZERO: remove all telemetry code from the codebase. They can ask me about features the old-fashioned way - surveys!
2. Focus on privacy and security. Put these to the top of the list.
3. Stop paying your CEO millions! Not worth it imo!
4. Stop with all the other Mozilla shit! I am interested in a browser (and perhaps an email client... I'll let you work on that too!). No more Pocket, VPN and all that other shite.
5. ZERO, I mean ZERO data capture at all! Nothing. Not a single bit except when someone clicks the link to download Firefox, you can capture their userAgent and whatnot. But the browser, Firefox, should not be capturing a single byte of data from me once installed (except perhaps a periodic version check and you can pass in the version like this: https://firefox.com/update?v=123.568).
6. For sync, allow me to sync an encrypted file to Dropbox, OneDrive, Local drive, Whatever.com. That way my passwords, bookmarks etc. can be sync'd from MY location that I control, not yours!).
7. Have a "Block all shady JS tactics" button. This would include fingerprinting, location and such. Perhaps you could send bogus, random data when it's asked for instead. That'd be fine too.
I think that's it :)
For a browser that did this, and was properly audited to prevent anything shady from creeping in, I'd pay $30 a year for it.
Edit: To clarify - I wouldn't pay the current Mozilla a single penny!
So no crash logs or similar issues? Logging is seen as a subset of telemetry
I agree with most of your points but you missed out an important one: active lobbying to counteract or reduce google's dominance on the web. As long as Chrome reigns supreme, Firefox will always be playing catch up as Google can break the web for non chrome devices by regularly adding apis that are only in chrome and forcing devs to use them
I'm fine with that.
Telemetry to me is knowing what I'm doing, like clicking a button, using a feature etc. They record that shit! Also, sending data about my websites back to the mothership so they can sell ads (or sell to ad companies... same thing).
That's what I mean when I talk about telemetry.
True. But there was a time when we managed to program software and not send every keystroke back to the mothership.
It's possible to have a daily/weekly/monthly popup that says "We've detected a few bugs over the last week, can we send the reports to the mothership?"
It's as simple as zipping the text files and sending them to an API endpoint.
I have no issue with this. Hell, you could even make it automatic where I can check a box that says "Automatically send weekly crash reports".
I have a massive issue with the devs thinking that it's ok to send telemetry back about every single thing I do in the software I've installed on MY computer so that they can "improve my experience" or whatever bullshit they use to justify it.
It's time for that to stop.
C-level compensation is not a problem unless it’s a problem. Linus Torvalds is compensated handsomely, and it’s okay, because he still delivers.
all the other Mozilla shit also isn’t a problem until it’s a problem. It’s a problem in Mozilla’s case because they neglect the browser.
I’ve switched to Orion by Kagi with their new Linux beta. It’s sadly WebKit, but with the increase in bullshit from Mozilla, the scales have tipped for me.
Crazy: The Orion iOS app has adblock.
Orion ios built on WebKit supports Firefox addons but Firefox own WebKit browser does not.
Survival of Firefox is critical (as of now more than Mozilla) for the open web to remain open.
I'll start (Receipt #: 51816267).
However as many others pointed out, there is no way to ensure that the donated amount is used specifically to fund Firefox.
It seems Google won’t be able to pay to be the default SE in any browser: Safari, Mozilla, etc.
https://askpandi.com/pandipedia/judgement-against-google-pro...
So I guess Mozilla is scrambling to find new revenue streams since 88% of their revenue comes from it.
I won’t fund Mozilla because it’s been forced to operate fairly.
They should build a product that makes me want to pay for it.
I think an open web is critical to our society. I think Chrome is the new IE and that Google cannot be trusted with controlling the engine of essentially every browser besides Firefox.
I have disposable income and would pay every month to support it…but only if Mozilla had new management. I have zero trust in Mozilla’s management and feel that most money given to them would be wasted rather than used for browser development.
[1] https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
I would find $5-$10 per month perfectly acceptable.
For now maybe donating to Ladybird [1] and Servo [2] makes more sense?
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[1] https://ladybird.org/ [2] https://servo.org/sponsorship/
We need Web-next which would be clearly defined in proper primitives and features that don’t suck from the beginning and need no further extension. And a reference implementation of it in a clean way, even if not very performant. E.g. fine if it takes 50MB of RAM just to start and show a welcome tab. Implementors will optimize it later.
At the end of the day, it's pointless to have a beautifully engineered browser if 50-60% of the websites don't work because they were designed for chrome. That's the future of the web unless someone stands up to them.
Unlike IE, a well engineered browser won't cut it anymore. I only see two paths going forward from here:
future 1. google goes full baddie and severely nerfs ad blockers to the point where over 50% of the time you get ads. This is a problem with technical solution thus easy win for firefox
future 2. google nerfs ad blockers but not hard enough to sway browser usage towards firefox. Bad scenario, Google remains dominant and free to nerf the competition by making chrome specific apis or other shenanigans that they know most websites will adopt
Why do you mean by "you"?
I bet there would be plenty companies who would give money to mozilla to improve their browser and at least answer their demands.
I don't really know the mozilla company as a whole and how it's managed, but in my view there might be some things that could be removed from mozilla, like trim the fat. I have the feeling a lot of marketing people have entered mozilla, and I don't like it.
I want an answer to the question "how many software engineers and UX people are involved in the process of developing firefox".
Just let users and especially companies tell mozilla what it wants in firefox, and go from there.
I don't know how many people are paid for the services like sync, pocket, VPN, etc, and if those services are profitable to keep them.
However, the latter situation opens the door for somebody to simply become the largest funder and start implicitly dictating its direction, like what Google eventually did with Mozilla.
Surely it doesn't cost $150m/yr to maintain security updates for a browser - is there a cheaper way to fund one? Functionally, it seems that browsers don't do anything more today that they haven't been capable of since 2015. W3C changes occur at a glacial pace too, it's not like there are always new things to be adding into the pipeline.
I could see this becoming a fully independent open-source project, and then supporting that.
However, due to obscene CEO pay during a massive decline in Firefox's market share, as well as very questionable privacy and diversification (thus loosing focus on their core product) moves over the years, I stopped donating a few years back.
If Mozilla were to lower CEO compensation, and shift focus more towards the browser, as well as position themselves better when it comes to privacy, then I would consider donating again.
Lastly, Mozilla should have a way for donations to be marked specifically for Firefox, rather than them going into a big pool.
I've said this often, I hold them to a higher standard, but they're not even matching the standard of companies I respect.
It's definitely compelling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43322922
Sites host ads, nobody else does it. They do it for pretty straight-forward economic reasons. If a site's too annoying, why visit it? Eventually, I hope it all settles down to a decent equilibrium.
Give me a Mozilla focused on Firefox with people providing funds regularly having a certain amount of votes that will actually be respected on bug reports/broader feature requests, and I'm in.
Mozilla has really lost their way and have not been a good steward of Firefox.
* If I were filthy rich, of course
You could regulate a lot of this idea. But financially, it just isn't there.
It was the day I switched to Brave and never looked back.
It just says his actions reinforced white supremacy, and you've got to admit, white supremacists do love Trump, and they specifically love him because of the words he says and the actions he takes.
Now donations directly to firefox that only are used for browser development would be a different story. I would donate +15$ monthly for that and over time much more if I I can see improvements.
They should have gotten into privacy centric groupware a decade ago: thunderbird, collaboration office suite, calendar, tasks, etc all baked into Firefox ala nextcloud but with Mozilla polish.
I’d pay for that, instead they fuck around with VPNs and other stupid services that are harder to use than other products and not as good.
I’ll miss Mozilla when they’re gone but there will be no question as to why they’re gone.
Mozilla was one of the first to accept crypto donations. Then some 3 years ago an ex-Mozilla employee posted a rant on Twitter on how this effectively makes Mozilla super evil. It went somewhat viral and Mozilla stopped accepting crypto.
To me this is a great example on how useless virtue-signaling is.
Nothing was improved. The crypto world happily moves on and you won't be getting part of that money. What a great win. But I guess it's fine to receive fiat money of which you don't have a clue either about its source.
You mean Mozilla is dependent on Google ? (in the voice of John Malkowitch): Fuck Mozilla, Fuck. /s