Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Below I’m listing some of the projects I donate to:

DownThemAll, a browser extension that makes multiple simultaneous downloads from a page easy: https://www.downthemall.org/howto/donate/

Free Software Foundation (FSF): https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate

LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

Mozilla Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/

Soundswitch (Windows application to switch default playback devices and/or recording devices using simple hotkeys): https://soundswitch.aaflalo.me/

Tab Session Manager browser extension: https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/

Tor Project: https://donate.torproject.org/

VLC media player: https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html

View on HN

Wow, I remember DownThemAll from...2005?

If you had asked me, I would have said with confidence "that no longer exists, modern browsers have had this feature one click away for years". But I suppose the truth is they don't, and I just haven't had a reason to use this in a long time.

But modern browsers do have this feature, don't they? I can do this on Chrome and Firefox, at least.

I use DownThemAll on firefox.

The main feature I use it for is queueing multiple downloads, which I don't believe either chrome or firefox offers out of the box.

Highly useful when downloading from archive.org or other sites which block multiple concurrent downloads.

Seems way less suspicious than jdownloader to me.

Say a website links to 20 images and a dozen mp3s (and other files not in your interest). How would you without an extension like DownThemAll grab these files all at once?

Exactly what I thought when I saw that too! I had no idea it was still around. It was a godsend back in the day, but now that internet speeds are a lot faster, downloads are more reliable, and browsers have an 80% solution already built into them, I haven't really felt a need for it in many, many years.

I, personally, would find it hard to donate to Mozilla knowing the CEO is paid $6 million a year. Compared to the size of the firm that’s a huge amount of pay.

At this point I plan to donate to Ladybird instead. Excited for that project.

Thunderbird donations go directly toward funding the Thunderbird project, not the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Corporation.

I think that there is a reasonable argument to be made that, among other reasons, choosing this kind of structure means that precisely this kind of argument can be made to solicit donations to help fund certain parts of the picture yet therefore but indirectly allow more of other income to remain available for allocation elsewhere.

Hence the allocation of that “other income” is still very much a related concern, but with just enough indirection that Mozilla can evade scrutiny of it when it comes to executive pay.

Difference between mozilla the company and the organization

Yes but is it not always that simple? You see this a lot. I mean, OpenAI is controlled by a non-profit. There are ways to structure things as a firm deems to their advantage and companies are very good at this sort of thing.

To me it just somewhat communicates a kind-of bad faith in company spending priorities and demonstrates that my donations might have greater impact elsewhere. That’s all.

And the donation goes to the company according to that page.

Does VLC even have new releases? Where is 4.0, whose beta I had tried out years ago?

Not aware of their org's other works, but I feel like their most popular product (VLC media player) could be improved. Rather than offloading work to plugin devs (surely less than 1% of users use non-default plugins anyway), they could add features to the core app. I'd like to have dual subtitles with different languages for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com