Mozilla shuts down even more Firefox services
neowin.net
neowin.net
* their revenue comes mostly from Google, they need to diversify
* but nobody will pay for a browser, so they need to offer other services
* then everyone criticises that they shill their other services and should instead focus on the browser
Realistically, what should they do to stop relying on money from their competitor and be continue their mission?
- The Mozilla Foundation should be publicly funded, with Firefox being considered a reference implementation for all web standards; Google should be considered a "gatekeeper", and fined for introducing de facto "standards" into mainline Chrome without going thru the W3C. Perhaps the W3C should be regulated as well.
- Efforts like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive should be considered public libraries, and publicly funded.
- Privately-owned platforms with vast libraries of knowledge - like Youtube - should be required to allow easy and on-demand export to the Internet Archive (subject to the copyright owner's chosen license).
The question is, who is the "public" in "publicly funded". The EU and the US could cover the majority, but considering that the entire world's population is reliant on those products/services, perhaps that's a matter worth raising with the UN.
Am I exaggerating here? Heck no, livelihoods of billions of people depend on these things. It takes one of the "top 5" corps to pull the rug and cause worldwide chaos.
Who is the worldwide authority that has the power to declare Firefox a web standard?
Google being "fined for introducing de facto "standards" into mainline Chrome without going thru the W3C" is... wow, a leap of legal imagination. That is not how anything works.
None of this is realistic. We need attainable goals, using concrete steps. Getting Google declared a monopoly: one step. Keeping that ruling intact through the following years: another step (Hello, Microsoft in the 1990's). Establish web standards, beyond the current skeletal concepts: a BIG step.
It isn't about politics, or even corporations simply having control over our daily lives. At some point, it has to be recognised as a necessity, not just for the sake of our culture and legacy, but for our survival as a species. There's no other piece of digital infrastructure as important as the web, and there's hardly anything we do nowadays that doesn't depend on something digital.
Well you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.[0]
Surely it makes sense to have overarching goals, that you can then divide up into little concrete stepping stones.
Whether or not your big goal is possible or worthwhile is something you can keep examining along the way.
Incremental change is the only kind that you can make happen, but without big-picture direction you'll just skitter around local maxima.
A lot of libertarian types’ arguments against publicly-funded infrastructure is mostly against that public funding being centralized.
I don’t think Mozilla becoming publicly funded, with money taken in from the EU, US, Russia, India, and China, would end up being good for users.
However, I do think that each of these entities having their own branch of Firefox/Iceweasel/whatever, with their own teams focusing on their users’ needs, contributing upstream, with a small team to handle the “mainline” version, would be pretty ideal.
The same should probably also be happening for at least one Chrome/Webkit browser, too (though, the mega-corps do seem to have its support system much more reinforced).
Arguably, they get more revenue than what they need to fund browser development. So they could be banking a fair amount. That would allow them to build an endowment that might keep them funded in perpetuity.
I think there’s an option where they don’t diversify and don’t act like a tech startup and do fine. Maybe Wikipedia is a model for them.
Tl;dr -- They do make more money than they spend on software development. They save a bunch of it and have a decently sized account (not near endowment levels though: they'd need to 3x+ it). They also spend a lot on other random shit, and compensate their executives well for how poorly they're doing.
People who have a problem with Mozilla the org tend to have a problem with Wikipedia the organisation too in my experience.
The thing is that I fully believe that Mozilla has a lot of experts in web-related software development, and have no reason to believe they have any particular competence in AI tech. So all the AI stuff seemed immediately off to me, like they were just jumping on the latest bandwagon.
I also don't believe their AI projects are particularly valuable.
* Summarizing pages -- okay, this might be rarely useful. But I don't personally have much need for it, and I believe that the competition is probably better. I understand the privacy angle, but I don't think it works for my case. If I was summarizing all the things, then yeah, probably I'd be concerned about the privacy implications of feeding a good chunk of my web traffic to ChatGPT. But I don't. My needs to summarize are rare and mostly things like lengthy public news articles. And in such cases I don't want to sacrifice quality, so if ChatGPT does a better job there, that's the tool I'll go with.
* Fakespot and Deep Fake Detector to me are fundamentally fishy in that I don't believe they can possibly work properly. I have very little trust in such services and have a feeling they may be doing more harm than good.
I also have a monthly donation to Internet Archive, which I highly recommend everyone do. It's a very important service; if you use it occasionally I'd recommend at least a one-time donation, and if you use it regularly, a recurring one is even better!
Ladybird should be interesting once it's ready; I'm happy to see a fully-new browser entering the space. That gene pool has gotten far too shallow.
I'm not so sure this is true. There are a few successful for-pay browsers. What's crazy, though, is that even though I'd be happy to give Mozilla money for Firefox, they don't provide a way to do that.
Mozilla Corporation develop Firefox. You can give them money by subscribing to Mozilla VPN, Mozilla Monitor, Firefox Relay, or MDN Plus.
Few for profit companies like Mozilla Corporation accept donations. The compliance costs would exceed the revenue in most cases.
Isn't that just funding those services? Why should I have to subscribe to services I don't want or need instead of paying for the product I actually use? That's nuts.
> Isn't that just funding those services?
No. The purpose of selling services was to reduce Firefox's Google dependence.
> Why should I have to subscribe to services I don't want or need instead of paying for the product I actually use?
The costs of supporting your precise preferences would exceed the expected revenue probably if the existing options are unacceptable to you.
Would you pay for a Firefox edition with features you didn't need? Other browsers have parts of Mozilla's services for free. Safari, Brave, and Opera can hide IP addresses. Safari, Chrome, and Edge can monitor passwords. Safari can hide email addresses. Mozilla's services are Firefox Plus.
Or you could make the services a gift to someone who wants them. Everyone would benefit.
Most people will not pay for something they can get without payment. Few people willing to pay for something they could get without payment will refuse if something they don't need but can ignore effortlessly is added to the exchange. People opposed to paying for something they don't need but can ignore effortlessly have further demands often. Firefox must be Mozilla's sole product. Donations must be Mozilla's sole support. DRM support must be removed. Mozilla must allocate donations to specific features.
Kind of sounds like Arc. But nowadays we rarely get new features and when they do come out, they’re often unpolished, so I wonder if the browser has much of a future. They’d have to step up their investment in FF to be competitive for sure.
All I can say is that spite plays a big part in why I’m using FF, not good if you want to gain users and make money.
A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly, but not to a browser which includes proprietary components, first-party ads and first part-spyware.
Also, such a huge proportion of their income goes to fund their C-suite, it’s ridiculous.
The developer of the ladybird browser has a pattern page where he makes £760/month [0]. That wouldn’t even pay rent for a 1 bed flat where I live.
If 200 people donated £10/mo, it still wouldn’t be minimum wage for me in the UK. So realistically, how much would you donate and how often?
Meanwhile Mozilla makes it literally impossible for me to donate to Firefox development as they only accept donations to their foundation which they don’t use to fund Firefox, and have Firefox under their for profit corporation which I can’t donate to.
> I donate $50/mo there for example which is not counted in your number
Great, we just need 149 more people to commit to that for a year for it to be viable.
> You’re ignoring their main source of donations from users which is Donorbox
Which I don't have numbers for.
> and significant money from larger sponsors which pays multiple dev salaries on Ladybird
I'm not ignoring them. I'm specifically responding to the comment of "A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly". Based on their sponsors page, there's (at least) $400k of sponsors there. That's what paying for 7 full time developers.
> Meanwhile Mozilla makes it literally impossible for me to donate to Firefox development as they only accept donations to their foundation which they don’t use to fund Firefox, and have Firefox under their for profit corporation which I can’t donate to.
I never said otherwise. You're the person who who decided to bring Mozilla into a thread of privately funding donations to work specifically on Firefox and _not_ mozilla.
Except that it is viable because they’re literally working on it full time right now with multiple devs.
> Based on their sponsors page, there's (at least) $400k of sponsors there. That's what paying for 7 full time developers.
Exactly, and they’re making great progress with just that. Imagine what Mozilla should be able to do with the money they have, or with the money they could have if they allowed donations to fund Firefox development.
> You're the person who who decided to bring Mozilla into a thread of privately funding donations to work specifically on Firefox and _not_ mozilla.
Firefox is part of Mozilla, and this is a post/comment thread about Mozilla and Firefox. I’m not sure why it’s strange I mentioned them. It’s in context with the discussion.
Paid for by the corporate sponsors.
> Firefox is part of Mozilla, and this is a post/comment thread about Mozilla and Firefox. I’m not sure why it’s strange I mentioned them. It’s in context with the discussion.
I replied to a comment saying: "A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly, but not to a browser which includes proprietary components, first-party ads and first part-spyware" with "I’ve been writing c++ and working in web adjacent space for 15 years. I’ve regularly thought about setting up a kickstarter for 6 months of my salary that if I reached it, I would start a patreon and work full time on Firefox, in public." and your response is "but I can't donate to mozilla to fund Firefox". I'm not talking about that, I replied to someone who wasn't talking about it. Mozilla has nothing to do with what either of us said, until you brought it up again.
Doesn't matter the project. Mozilla, KDE, anything Canonical does, Gnome, Debian... someone will say "this isn't ideologically pure enough" and then not donate. But they're bullshitting you - they never would've donated.
Why will no one pay for a browser
Why are web browsers available for free
I'm submitting this comment using software I downloaded for free, like a web browser
But it is not a web browser like Mozilla's
The software I'm using is not supported by advertising
No developers were paid to write it
What makes Mozilla's software different
Is it really better than software that is not supported by advertising
Better for www users, better for software developers, better for advertisers
What if it is better for one group but worse for another
I'm in the www user group
And these are just a few simple income directions that are pretty common in other OSS projects. Instead they did braindead ideas like being a VPN reseller, giving away Pocket, and other things no one wanted or asked for.
The problem goes beyond them making it impossible to donate purely to browser development: they have arranged their structure such that you cannot donate to browser development at all. The Mozilla Corporation develops Firefox; it is a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, and donations to the foundation can't be used for the for-profit browser development subsidiary at all.
They've built their entire legal structure around reliance on Google's payments.
You can fund Mozilla Coporation by paying for Mozilla VPN, Mozilla Monitor, Firefox Relay, or MDN Plus.
Of course Thunderbird's budget is in a different magnitude than Firefox but I'd guess the amount of users is also in a different magnitude.
As far as I know there has never been an attempt to fund Firefox by donations. You can _only_ donate to Mozilla, which does not go to Firefox development.
People keep saying it wouldn't work but it has also never been attempted so we do not know for sure.
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
People paid $7B through Google for a browser. The money did not come from the private bank account of Google executives, it was payment for people going to Google with their search.
"then everyone criticises that they shill their other services and should instead focus on the browser"
I agree it's way too late now, but had they put $7B into the foundation to pay for browser development, they could develop the browser for the next hundred years with no other income.
Advertisers paid $7B, for access to captive eyeballs. Users paid $0, directly.
Not as long as it's illegal to do so. You'd literally have to hack their bank account to pay for their browser.
We don't need strategy, we don't need vision, or any of that kind of bullshit. We just need a team of good developers sitting down and write a browser.
"The sailors on board a ship don't need a captain; they just need to sail." Admiral Nelson could have been replaced by democratic voting and focus groups.
Reality: Anarchy only works in very small settings.
1. Ladybird isn't currently competing with Mozilla or anyone, so this is hypothetical.
2. It's a different problem space, because Mozilla is maintaining a decades old browser.
3. Mozilla is developing a very good browser considering how much money they have. They're competitive with Chrome on features and performance, while Google is dedicating much more money towards Chrome.
* Fakespot
* Deep fake detector
* Orbit
I feel that this is a good thing. Have not used any of them, have been annoyed by Pocket integrations, just want a browser.
It felt very much going back to read a newspaper of interesting articles. I wonder what replacement will be available on Kobos.
Governance is the job of the foundation. Thunderbird has been spun off. So why does Mozilla need 750 employees? Correct me if I'm being naive, but that seems like 10 or even 20 times the number of employees they ought to have.
If you take a look at everything Mozilla does, it feels like Firefox itself is a side project that they do. In their most recent rebrand, Firefox was mentioned exactly once.[0] It's like they want to do anything else other than make a browser. But the problem is that I only expected them to do one thing: make Firefox. I can't be the only one.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o...
I'd be shocked if the executives spent more than 30 minutes a month thinking about Firefox instead of shilling VPN subs.
> So why does Mozilla need 750 employees?
Because it's not a browser company, it's a "non-profit" that happens to also own the codebase of a browser.
All of the activism, all of the politics belong in the foundation, not in the company. Which is the reason for my question: WTF is the company doing with 750 employees? They need to run a website, they need to coordinate with Google, they need to maintain their code (and coordinate pull-requests). That sounds like 30-40 people to me, not 750.
A top notch browser looks like it would need just a few low hundreds of developers.
Wikipedia itself is easily funded for perpetuity.
The foundation needs millions every year to continue their philanthropy.
Or does the Foundation not employ Firefox developers? The relationship between the Corporation and the Foundation isn't entirely clear to me.
I don't know how many people who have say "commented on a pull request in the last 12 months" that mozilla employs. Maybe it is hundereds.
just couple hours ago loaded new Rasp Pi 5, and between Chromium and FF I of course chose FF (first time i built it, ie. Mozilla, back then in 99, and i really don't like Chrome and the ilk). The FF didn't took a bunch of keyboard keys while for every other application i used there the keyboard works just fine. Didn't have time or intention to troubleshoot, just switched to Chromium. Pity. Just another illustrative FF loss vs. Chrome in that downhill ride of FF losses under the stewardship of Mozilla, whether it is the company or foundation, doesn't seem to matter.
All the other services always seemed like somebody wanted to add a bullet point to their CV
Vertical tabs? That's a trivial feature that's been implemented by plugins for decades. I've been using vertical tabs for as long as I've been using firefox, probably since it was still called Phoenix or Firebird.
Smart search: what even is that? Is that the default garbage in the address bar that I have to disable on every fresh install? I don't want my browser to search. I've got search engines for that. I might want a better in-page search, with regex support. Maybe even with fuzzy search support. But that's probably not considered "smart".
AI-powered features: such as what? Why would this be a compelling feature? A better editor on saved form data would be actually useful. Editable, per-website autocomplete in forms would be useful. But I guess that's not as flashy.
If these are their best ideas for "the next era of the internet", they might as well throw in the towel.
I'm trying my best not to be too negative, but yikes they make it hard.
What's the bet that AI is where they're spending all their effort?
Maybe if Firefox' new tabs would suggest useful ethic things like this instead of clickbait and spam, Mozilla would be more successful in its goals.
But we'll have to wait until Google finally stops paying them for the default search engine. Maybe diverting resources on the Firefox Focus brand will be a transition phase.
This should be OPT IN, not out.
Also, long live udm14.
Defaults may differ by inferred country, for example.
I don't believe this remote-toggling can be disabled via config, even if you'd expect it covered by "experiments".
Orbit served me well for summarizing pages and videos. I tried to ask the ChatGPT in the sidebar to do the same, but it seems to lack the browsing context. Any idea how to achieve similar one click experience Orbit used to provide?
To enable: ctrl+alt+x to open, pick a model, then click the ... at the top and ensure "show shortcut on selecting text" is clicked.
To use: select text, then hover over the sparkles and click summarize
But we went beyond 'perfect competition' and now have Chrome or Safari, with Firefox as this poor kid that we have to cater for too. The problem with Firefox is that they have just enough users to be a blocker on features such as scoped CSS, which we really should be implementing right now, as it is the way to go. However, Firefox are not planning to do scoped CSS urgently.
Without them then we could go back to the IE6 days of no innovation, and I think we have that with Safari, which is also slow to implement some cool things that have been in Chrome for a while.
I used to use Firefox but nowadays it is the IE6 of the browser world, it still has to be accommodated, even though the world has moved on.
OTOH, are there currently any Firefox-related services that make money? Like a service I (or a company) can pay for to get something slightly-useful but the money goes to Firefox development?
They have a bunch of frameworks to deal with networking, layouts and JS. They maintain the second most used repository of Root CA. And all those projects all work towards the betterment of the browser, Firefox. If people think that MS with all their resources decided to use Chrome because it was cheaper, you will be missing the full picture: browsers are very complex beast that have to deal with swats of devices, platforms, interactive code, and all of that while being the biggest surface of attack for all your users. That's not easy, nor cheap.
Servo should have been pushed more, if it's truly meant to be the replacement for Gecko.
https://adguard.com/en/blog/mozilla-deletes-promise-to-never...
The trust is gone.
This is really bad. "Basic functionality" is typing something into a form, which Mozilla has no business spying on.
I'd pay for a browser that just follows the standards, does not change layout and menus in every release and does not spy on me. Also, I'd not finance an overpaid CEO.
In this instance though Mozilla is shutting down annoying services like Pocket, so maybe they'll recover.
Mozilla's marketshare has rather dwindled and i dont see them recovering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeikdFrx78k
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/campaigns/platforms-pro...
Mozilla is doubling down on their mistake.