Let me pay for Firefox
discourse.mozilla.org
discourse.mozilla.org
I just want Firefox to be faster. I'm donating to Floorp (a Firefox fork), at least they seem focused on making the browser better.
I interpret it in a way that he tries to cultivate an environment where a good leader/successor/main-whatever emerges somewhat naturally.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/990534/ [2] https://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/torvalds-say...
(Prime example of my personal behavior which I really don't like: Put a half-baked assumption/hearsay on the internet. Get 2 replies. Start actually researching the topic only afterwards.)
But these are fundamentally different type of projects. Many businesses and products run on top of Linux and/or PostgreSQL. There is a very clear and obvious incentive to contribute, because that will help you run your business better.
With user-oriented software such as a browser, this is a lot less clear-cut. Organisations like Slack, or Etsy, or Dropbox: sure, they've contributed resources to stuff they use like Linux, PosgreSQL, PHP, Python, etc. But what do they get out of contributing to Firefox? Not so obvious.
I think this is one reason (among others) that Open Source has long been the norm in some fields oriented towards servers and programmers, and a lot less so in others.
There's always a large overhead of adding something new and it's always the experienced devs on the project that know where the right balance is.
Is it? IME Linux kernel development is a somewhat toxic place.
I think that's why it's healthier. A bit like the human immune system.
It would be interesting to see how it collaborates / competes with the origin project, how fast and how far they diverge etc.
They're kept in existence as a cost of doing business for the likes of Google, purely to ward off browser monopoly claims, and absolutely do not deserve to be taken seriously, or be given private funding.
I'm genuinely curious, no experience in any of that.
Also worth reading: Reinventing Organisations by Laloux.
Incredible book - absolute book of the year for me. They talk about the history of organisations and how organisations can be run differently & better. And they research companies who are trying this stuff out today, and talk about what they do. The modern CEO idea is pretty silly on the face of it. We take the - ideally - smartest person at a company, divorce them from grounded reality, then burden them with all the hardest decisions your company has to face. All while disempowering the people on the ground who do all the actual work. In many ways it’s a pretty stupid way to run a company. There’s plenty of other options.
Just the other week the economist did an interview with the CEO of Supercell, a Nordic video game company. They have the same idea - the ceo in many ways doesn’t run the company, which frees him up to do actually useful work. And it lets the team leads take initiative and lead. Much better model in my opinion.
Meanwhile you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing, and it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
[1] including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF, making it more of a vanity project - it’s already thirteen years old at this point
They integrated at least a couple of components from Servo into Firefox before they cancelled it, so I don't think that's fair.
> it’s already thirteen years old at this point
Mozilla only developed it for 8 years.
> The parent is referring to things like
> you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing
> it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
My friend worked at Mozilla 15 years ago, arguably during their golden years and he said it was a joke how much money they wasted because they had to spend it.
The problem, of course, is that all of these side projects just flat out failed. Maybe they were self-indulgence projects or maybe they were pursued in earnest, but either way, they failed.
No, it's obvious. Google Pays for Firefox. Google doesn't want Adblock Extensions.
There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
They got rid of extensions in August 2020 and brought them back in December 2023.[1] Fenix has lacked full extension support for more than half of its existence since release, and it has been less than two years since extensions were brought back.
1. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-lov...
I use Firefox, but I'm curious about whether I'll 'feel' a difference with Floorp, in terms of performance.
So once they get away with nag screens on the world's biggest billboards, CEO pay is suddenly 'justified'.
But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
Certainly when it comes to Wikipedia: there is oversight. I know people don't like the fact that Wikipedia spends money on things other than server racks, but spending money on developing the community is a pretty legitimate thing to do! How else can you maintain such an encylopedia? You need to attract knowledgeable people to write and review articles!
It's also obscenely disingenuous to ask for donations like they do with this current model. Downright insulting.
The objections are primarily around the aggressive and deceptive fundraising.
Wikipedia collects donations by essentially saying (in some years more directly, otherwise more implying) "if you don't donate Wikipedia WILL DIE", rather than "Please give us some money so we can build an even bigger community to make Wikipedia even better".
They are also making the banners incredibly obnoxious. From "donate or ask later", full-screen interstitials, to delayed popups that interrupt you after you've started reading, and with increasing frequency. During their "yearly" fundraisers (I think it's actually 2-3x a year, masked behind "local" vs. "global" campaigns) they pop them up every few days on every device you use, and now they're introducing "experimental" banners every month (again per device) so several times per month, and more frequently if they delete cookies. [1]
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Proposed_ch...
I think what you are asking for is better steering of the Mozilla foundation. And maybe better steering for Firefox development. Possibly with less opinions. We might be better off supporting servo devs instead.
Like, in general, I find that any HN thread where most of the comments are just agreeing, one-upping and yes-anding while invoking the same talking points and terminology (CEO ghouls, etc.) is probably a topic we might need to chill out on.
Let's start hating and discussing how much Chrome leads are paid too.
> I get why people are pissed at Mozilla
My issue is that when you try to have discourse but everyone’s on the same side, it can easily devolve into a circlejerk where everyone is trying to see who can most dramatically burn the strawman. These kinds of feedback loops are just bad—it doesn’t really matter who the target is or how malicious they are—because they cause the participants to drift further and further from the reality of the conflict.
In the best case, if the target really is bad, the participants may just look foolish when they later deploy their anti-strawman ballistic missile against someone who actually has a slightly good pro-target argument they hadn’t thought of. In the worst case, this is how mobs work themselves up to eventually justify violence against a target that’s totally harmless.
One thing’s for sure though, once a circlejerk like this starts, rational thought ends.
So basically, you're a part of the problem you're complaining about. You're just being the contrarian looking down on the rest of us for having an opinion.
Tell me, why shouldn't we criticize Mozilla? What wonderful things have they done over the past several years? How does their behavior and performance make Firefox's cratered market share understandable and ok and reasonable? How is their failure to find alternative revenue streams, over and over again, ok and reasonable?
Many people in these threads are listing concrete evidence of Mozilla's poor behavior and performance, and you're just continuing, over and over, to whine about some sort of circlejerk you've imagined up. Either actually argue a useful point about Mozilla itself, or just stop posting about this.
The parent isn't saying Firefox and Mozilla are without problems. In fact, they actively recognized them! So I'm not sure why you respond as if they don't.
The parent is saying that the complaints are often used as social signaling. The fact that this happens makes it harder to address legitimate issues. Which Mozilla, without a doubt, has issues.
The result of all this is very apparent: it helps Google. You can even think Mozilla is evil, but you have to ask: is Mozilla more evil than Google? It's hard to argue yes. Frankly, they don't even have the capacity to do as much harm
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theve...
I still use it, but I lost all respect for the management. This level of tone deafness should cause everyone on the board and c suite to personally write an open letter of apology to the users, but instead we got a half-hearted victim-blaming non-apology:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozi...
This is really rather telling. Here is how Mozilla articulates what they think users have a problem with:
> We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on.
Mozilla is willfully inept. They think that pre-loading third-party non-free code and ads without my knowledge or consent is not an issue! Moreover, Mozilla thinks that this doesn't conflict with Mozilla's interpretation of what opt-in means and the values it embodies.
Mozilla is looking more and more like controlled opposition. Mozilla undermined their own users' faith in Mozilla's add-on/extension capabilities and act like releasing the source after the fact resolves any issue at all regarding doing this without consulting users or receiving prior affirmative consent.
This comment is getting long enough as it is. I'll just leave this here.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-col...
Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.
The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.
Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.
But if you do need to have a CEO, and offering 2-3X gets you zero qualified applicants...then you are forced into strategies which have undesirable side-effects.
The issue I have is a lot of CEOs appear to be wholly unqualified for their positions and their salaries are completely unjustifiable. So many of them don't even have a glancing understanding of the product or company that they are in charge of. Their primary role is getting a higher stock valuation so the board can be happy.
A good example of this is how many tech CEOs have dumped ungodly amounts of money on "AI" because that's what the market demands. Or how many CEOs hire and fire based on what other companies are doing, not what their company needs.
The fact is, "qualified" is often at odds with "competent". Most of the 30x CEOs are only qualified in chasing stock prices, not competently running a company for the long term.
By objective measure I’d agree with you but you can’t deny the reality of the job market.
If someone is a truly effective CEO they’d be able to get many, many times more than 2-3x staff engineer salary at pretty much any other company out there.
2-3x staff engineer pay is a LOT of money. More than enough.
2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.
Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade.
Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others.
Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone.
They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.
There's no reason to believe that. But it's still better than someone whose heart isn't in the right place and can't execute.
The one thing I do notice is that on some very poorly built websites there will be a bug and it's because they haven't checked in Firefox or because I am blocking things that are no longer blockable on Chrome, but this is rare.
I am on Linux though. Perhaps Firefox on Windows or Mac fares better. But these problems are from the last year or two and don't happen in chromium also on Linux.
thanks to AI crawlers, every browser is now considered suspicious
I've noticed this as well. Also some banking sites don't even work with it anymore.
It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.
Yet many over here are getting paid double that.
Salaries are rarely based on value created. They are based on what others pay.
I was offered a job at a big tech but I'd have had to move to the US to their campus because they hate remote work. And they offered only 120k (they probably figured that sounded like a ton of money to a European). But I started looking at the cost of living there and it was insane. I'd have had to share a flat and it would have to be far away, not a few km from the office like I'm used to. No way.
Of course then Trump started happening and I was so glad I didn't move there. I'm kinda LGBTQ too so I'd be royally screwed if I'd been there now
Depends on the specific job, company (big tech vs not), and city. Seattle, NYC and a handful of others may pay on par with bay area.
For a senior at random faang or equivalent, that might mean $300k-$500k / yr. More for some NYC positions in the finance industry.
If you already have a platform in use by the entire world, that matter of scale makes it much easier to find value adds more than a sole proprietor could ever dream of.
It's for these reasons I'm wary of talking about "value add" only being from the developers directly implementing a feature. Without support, IT, security, Product, HR, etc, I could not deliver that value add.
It used to be incredibly common in the UK - half the decent devs in London were contractors making 2-3x what permanent employees made. It’s now uncommon because the government nerfed it with IR35 rules.
It's illegal in most of EU but several countries do not check. So I know PWC in italy hires external contractors but tells them to be in the office at 9 and so on… just a scam to not pay sick leave, parental leave, vacations and pension basically.
Also, as others have already mentioned, salaried with is much more stable.
At least these are my primary reasons, and those of some others I've spoken to on the matter.
No billion-dollar-a-year business? No million dollars of value created.
You have to spend large amounts of time finding clients and being a salesman as you sell yourself and your services to them.
Once you do that, you have to prove that you're the person you promised. Unfortunately, most clients reaching out to freelancers are very....difficult.
After you've done the job, you have to be your own accountant and billing department. I should mention here that collecting from a lot of clients is often a frustrating endeavor and you will almost certainly be scammed at least once (at which point you have to do the math on handing most of your profits over to a lawyer and risking getting a bad reputation as a legal risk).
Because you're contracting, you are on the hook for higher taxes than normal to cover stuff like social security. Unless you are getting bottom-dollar insurance (the stuff with a $10,000+ deductible where you still get bankrupted if your medical bills are bad), you are probably paying tens of thousands in health insurance.
Want holidays, vacation, or just a day off? That means you are missing a paycheck (at least missing a bunch of billable hours) and may have upset clients. If you need to make $100,000 at a corporate job, then you'll need to charge at least $150,000. If you want to work a normal 2,000hr/yr, then you are going to have to sell your client on $75/hr while they're seeing $25/hr or less from some overseas "talent".
Also don't forget that lots of the highest-paying jobs aren't open to freelancers. Even if you contract, you'll be going through an agency charging big money then giving you a tiny fraction of what they take in.
After I got married and had kids, I was busy enough without running a business. I want to spend time with my kids while they are still kids. I may make less as a FTE, but I work a lot fewer hours and have way less work stress.
If US programmers were to organize into a union and add some level of credentialism to keep out the fake programmers with no skills, I'm fairly convinced that you would see salaries increase dramatically.
Instead, because there's no unified representation, you get Microsoft laying off 9,000 people then (allegedly) trying to apply for over 14,000 H1B visas to suppress wages even further knowing there's nobody able to speak out against it.
Easily I'd say close to half would make quite a bit lower than 300K.
At least, that's probably how Google determined value added when deciding if it's worth the return when they funded (read: paid for development at) the Mozilla Corporation.
I, and many good or great SWE's, wouldn't even begin to entertain such a low offer. Your numbers are a little off.
CompSci graduates have a noticeably high unemployment rate at the moment.
I agree that it’s not like everybody is losing their jobs, but the layoffs aren’t because of some cataclysmic economic event like in 00 or 08. Tech companies are choosing to lay off software engineers. Either these companies genuinely don’t need those engineers at all, which would drive down comp because it strengthens management’s negotiating position, or they do need them but have enough money to get by with skeleton crews until the cost of software engineers goes does, which also itself drives down compensation because it strengthens management’s negotiating position.
Either way there is downward pressure on SWE comp, and it’s being exercised by folks that can outlast every last one that insists that they wouldn’t even look at 150k. If your bosses decide you’re worth 70k max and nobody in your industry is unionized you will be looking at 40k being competitive
Most developers make less than $150k in their local currency. A lot of the ones claiming to make more than that are inflating their numbers.
And this was before the mass layoffs that have been pushing down dev salaries.
No good CEO would entertain it either.
That's the excuse given to make you accept those higher salaries. The truth is that there are not infinitely many positions for a CEO. There are certainly more people who can be competent CEOs than CEO positions.
If you give an indecent salary to your CEO, you will get a CEO who looks for a crazy salary. That doesn't mean it's the most competent CEO you could get. Try offering a decent salary and you'll see that people still apply. You may not get the typical narcissistic profile, but it's probably not a loss.
In a startup, the CEO also convinces VCs to invest. And again it's interesting: VCs have no clue about the technology, so you would think they try to invest for CEOs who set a good company culture. But instead they get convinced by the CEOs who bullshit them the best. Which makes sense: not only VCs don't have a clue about the technology, but somehow they think they actually do understand. I have heard a few discussions between CEO and VCs in startups (talking about the technology I was actually working on), and it was hilarious.
> If people work less as a result they don't really care.
They just don't know. Even if they genuinely try to ask feedback from the employees, it's biased. Employees generally don't give honest feedback because it's a risk for them (especially if the company culture is bad, which is where the feedbacks would matter the most).
Laura Chambers is just an interim CEO. I am not sure how Mozill Foundation/Corporation is exactly linked in the decision making. But the key people are still Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker who is the Chairwomen of Mozilla Corporation.
If Laura is getting paid lots like Mitchell Baker, it is still an issue. But, wouldn't she be just a scapegoat? I am pretty sure as Chairwomen, Mitchell Baker still has more power than Laura the CEO when it comes to Mozilla Corporation. I have felt this is just to chill the uproar against Mitchell Baker. Now everyone will blame the next CEO. But I wonder how much power she has. I could be wrong of course.
They invested BILLIONS of dollars on things like:
* Firefox OS * Mozilla Persona * Mozilla VPN * Firefox for TV (e.g. Amazon Fire) * Lockwise * Mozilla Hubs
Did anyone ask for those things? What a huge waste for all of that to be built and abandoned.
> The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend.
I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job.
Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.
If the “bad” CEOs don’t take pay cuts or subsequently struggle to find work, then that thinking is obviously not as “incredibly” incorrect as you claim.
Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns.
It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.
Nobody else got that kind of raise at Mozilla and they probably were much better at their jobs.
But hundreds of millions it was not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1j07hrt/heres_how_...
That alone is enough to disqualify all of them. Now look at mobile - the biggest market ever. Firefox does not exist on mobile. That is a reason to remove the leadership and the board with it.
I've been running into both pretty much daily. As a long time Firefox users (since 2.0 almost exclusively), it didn't used to be like that, it's a recent phenomenon.
Much can also be said about them removing features and not implementing things people keep asking for for decades; for example, the vertical tab feature request was there for more then 20 years, I think?
It's not a criticism of developers, they're doing what they can, it's obvious set by managers.
I still use it because it's the least bad option. They have a long history of ignoring the community in favour of the mainstream, ironically a user group they have lost a long time ago. So now they're just alienating their remaining supporters in order to cater to users that don't even remember they exist.
Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I'd argue the latter.
Further, CEOs and wannabes have a strong incentive to structure organizations such that they depend ever more on the CEO, justifying massive compensation and of course feeding their egos. But I would argue that beyond a certain size, having to route everything important through one guy is an organizational antipattern. So yes, I'm very willing to argue most CEOs shouldn't exist. Or at least most CEO positions.
Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Musk, and Amazon without Bezos.
Moving on from founders, we saw the cardinal difference between Balmer and Nadella for Microsoft.
So there’s some merit to their role. One could argue that from a shareholders perspective it’s the only role that matters. Every other role is an opaque “implementation detail”.
Right, that explains why Tim Apple got 100 million dollars in 2022, he was just that good at channelling the spirit of Jobs.
However it shouldn't be a 268 to 1 ratio with the median worker like the SP500 average. There is no way the CEO is worth that much money to the company.
Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for results. That range of results is very wide for large companies.
Guess who turned Sears and J.C. Penny into what they are today?
From that, I’d conclude that CEO capability and effectiveness really matters and paying up for a good one is worth it.
Also possible is that the CEOs grossly overcentralized the companies such that they increased the apparent importance of CEO decisions and then just took some big gambles. Heads they get paid a lot of money; tails their bets pay off and they get hailed as geniuses who get paid even more money.
However, most ceos aren’t genius superstars. And I don’t think CEO pay really makes sense given supply and demand. I think there’s plenty of people who could do at least as good a job as many CEOs do, and would happily do so for a lot less money.
I suspect a lot of CEO pay is an arse-covering exercise by the board. If the board hires a super expensive CEO, and that person turns out to be terrible, the board can say they did everything they could do to get the best ceo. But if the board hires someone for much less money who turns out to be a turkey, they might be blamed for cheaping out on the ceo - and thus the company’s downfall is their fault.
Is the Mozilla CEO really so amazing at their job that they deserve such insane compensation? I doubt it. I bet there’s dozens of people at Mozilla today who are probably smart enough to do a great job as CEO. They just won’t be considered for the role for stupid reasons.
If you just do nothing, you'll be better than the last 10 years of Mozilla's CEOs.
Yes. This is absolutely true. Most CEO’s are not worth this kind of money. In fact, most CEO’s could disappear overnight and cause zero disruption to the operation of the company.
I think the complexity of the job is _far_ overrated, and the main reason people think they’d suck at it is because they have no/less confidence.
People that become CEO’s are purely better at faking that confidence. If you are lucky, the confidence is built on skill instead of bluster, but they both get paid the same regardless.
In reality they don't do all that much. And most of the decisions are driven by data and advice from Gartner that just recommend the highest bidder, not some magical insights.
After all the CEO works for the board which is made up of shareholder representatives. They have very little industry knowledge and they just want the company to jump on the latest hype and "industry practices". They're usually very risk-averse.
So the CEO is kinda tied by what's happening in the industry anyway. The only CEOs that are capable of breaking that are the ultra confident ones like Jobs or Musk.
How does that make them "worth it"?
> but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company
Look, I've interacted with CEOs and frankly the job isn't nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. The most important aspect of the job is socializing, not managing the company like you might assume. It's putting on a good show and making potential clients like you. It's every bit just being a good salesperson.
There's a reason, for example, my CEO currently lives in California even though his company is halfway across the country and has no offices in CA.
Now, that isn't to say the Job of a founder CEO isn't a lot more difficult, it is. However, once a company is established the CEO job is a cakewalk. There's a reason companies like FedEx had a CEO literally in his 80s that gave up the reigns right before he died.
If you have the ability to schmooze, sit through meetings, and read power-points. Congratulations, you have what it takes to be a CEO.
In that case, for every CEO there's literally a dozen other people at that company alone who could do their job. Why do we keep repeating that good CEOs are in short supply?
Moreover study after study has shown little correlation between CEO pay and quality of decision-making. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer#Yahoo!_(2012%E2%...
And finally, rich people eventually look for other ways to feel valued. Status is a big one. Having the top job at the company is a big perk in and of itself. If they don't feel privileged to be the CEO, why the hell even take the job?
Yes indeed. There is no CEO in existence worth 30 of the employees that work under them. It's certainly true that good and bad CEOs exist, and that a good CEO can be a force multiplier that deserves higher compensation. But 30x (and often more!!) is an insane overinflated view of CEOs' worth to the company. The only reason they get away with it is that they are hired by the board of directors, which is.. other CEOs. So a good old boys' club is keeping salaries high completely divorced from any actual value provided.
* no spatial browsing, not even as an extension. This feature alone I would use literally thousands of times a week. * no fit to width * no cycle display images enable/disable/cached * cannot edit menus or icons as simple configuration file * no tab thumbnails * reader mode that actually always works every single time, not just when the browser feels like it * no editable key bindings * no shortcuts for highlighting next/prev URL, next/prev heading, next/prev element * no presentation mode * no panelise web page * no navigation bar
You feel that Firefox doesn't have a bunch of features that you would use - but those are not bugs. I recognize this is HN - where there will definitely be a higher percentage of power users, but an open source project not having the features you want doesn't make it a second-rate browser, it just means it would take more work for you to customize. Listing cred of having used FF in the Mozilla days is the same as saying Linux is second rate because you installed Caldera back when people were still scared of Y2K.
As a daily FF user - Firefox is great. And more users should give it a whirl, especially ones that haven't used it in a decade.
Chrome hasn't been the best browser for most of its market share lead.
Internet Explorer 6 was never the best browser despite leading market share more than any browser in history.
I know Mozilla does worse on benchmarks, but I never complain about performance. Recently I tried some sites from one of the spammiest sectors on the web and found I couldn’t move the mouse without my Chrome lighting up like a Christmas tree and navigating me to crap sites, but the Firefox experience was that I had to click on something for all hell break loose.
We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah. It performs great on Chrome and lags pretty bad on the fox. That’s the only bad screen, and we have a lot of screens.
Personally I don’t like it that they have an office in San Francisco. Emotionally I think, “the only thing anybody should be building in San Francisco is a homeless shelter.” Practically though, I think a browser company can’t “think different” if is steeped in the Bay Area culture, not least if they can get in a car and go visit people at Google and Facebook. If they were someplace else they might have a little more empathy for users.
The latest crap is that it now requires me to sign in every single day on Firefox. And often after I sign in it immediately goes to "hang on while we're signing you out". Meanwhile they're pushing edge heavily as a vehicle of copilot promotion. So I'm pretty sure this is just intentional breakage..
Read over the various web platform blogs out there, and keep a tally of how many times you'll see "Firefox gains support for XYZ in 139, bringing it to widespread availability. Chrome has supported this since 32 and Safari since version 16"
And many of these are fantastically useful features. Sure, they're not ground breaking building blocks like in the old days when IE didn't even support certain types of box model, but they're echos of the past
Component level CSS is simple enough that I didn't really have to go out of my way to do anything above and beyond, and if I had to I could just use a loader that uses sass or postcss or something similar, but it was a bit surprising.
That said, I have really enjoyed Lit. I wrote the original components for this project in 2023, and haven't really touched them till earlier this week. Bumped all package dependencies, and did the usual things you'd do for an upgrade, and they have had a stable API over the two years they've existed.
Regarding Dialog, a few years ago, when it was brand new, I was working on a project that used LiveView and SurfaceUI. We had a few modals that were used throughout the app, and I was in the process of migrating them to use Dialog before getting laid off. The tricky part, at the time, was that a Dialog invoked through pure HTML, no JS, lacked certain features that were available to the JS APIs. The HTML side has caught up, and the JS APIs have improved, but I've not touched frontend professionally in that time.
Crazy, no; a loop over 40,000 items should take a fraction of a second, and at 1KB per row it’s less than 1% of a 4GB memory stick.
The 1 billion row challenge leader parsed a billion rows of CSV - 10 GB of data, through a Java/graal VM - in 0.33 seconds!
There has been one debugging niche where I've found Chromium preferable: Chrome sometimes gives better WebRTC signaling error messages than Firefox.
Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation.
So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox.
For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox.
There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.
That's sort of the point. Firefox is an excellent, even amazing browser. But because of the way Mozilla has handled it, it's become largely an also-ran, and its continued existence seems highly dependent on its primary competitor in the browser space. That's just incompetent given the quality of Firefox.
I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).
For example, Chrome had process in tabs when it was released in 2008. Firefox had a ticket in bugzilla open by the community that had been ignored by Mozilla for years, before Chrome was released. Even when it was released, Mozilla's first reaction was "meh, we don't need that".
I hate that Firefox is so irrelevant that most web devs don't test on it. For many sites that's fine, because web standards are web standards, and Firefox supports them quite well. But whenever I run across a broken site, or even one that mostly works, but gives me papercuts, and then fire up Chrome and see that it works fine there, a little bit of me cries inside.
Mozilla should be focusing a lot more on user acquisition, and on figuring out why so many of their users have left.
Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come.
Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation.
I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released.
I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not.
[0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!
Completely agree, Mozilla and Chrom is a lot like a president election, they both suck hard, you're kinda stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. I mean Kamala isn't great, but me, as a dainty woman who happens to have a penis and does not happen to have documentation surrounding my residency in the US, Kamala isn't so bad in comparison! Kamala is firefox.
All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser?
In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.
These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.
“The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers”
And then, they changed it:
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduce...
Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said:
“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating”
https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/
And they changed it.
So- sure, sometimes people change their minds.
But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data.
Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”
I can buy a huge block of aggregate data that has some things of yours in it.
- Others buy that data.
- Big data companies and others aggregate this information.
- Cookie or IP are not necessarily required to identify users; thumbprinting, datetime, and behavioral matching can identify users adequately.
- Advertisers and analytics giants can ingest data that includes PII, if it’s encrypted, and that can be decrypted.
- New methods of tracking have replaced old ones and new methods are even better than old ones.
- This data can be used to group users in many ways, so it can know essentially who you are, when you do things, what you will do, and who you’ll do them with.
- This information is used for targeting ads, but can be used for other purposes.
- Technology to utilize this data has been evolving much more quickly.
- Why just target ads? Why not provide users with a version of reality that optimizes their consumer behavior?
- Why attempt to ensure control through enforcement? Why not control motivation and thought?
- Why have political elections? Why not control decisions?
If they can't survive off of donations, then they don't deserve to exist. If they want to sell user data or search defaults, Mozilla should fork Firefox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H8wx1aBiQ
When Zuck said this, I could feel the smarm, but I respect his honesty, and I know what he's not saying. Mozilla is trying to spit the same game about its Google search default deal, as if that is the same thing. It's not, because when Facebook does it, it's a for-profit corporation selling out its users. When Mozilla does it, it's a nonprofit organization selling out its users to the single largest for-profit web property in the history of the Internet.
Google is a monopolist. They should lose the right to pay off their competition.
Selling user data isn't what Firefox is; it's what Mozilla is. Firefox is free software.
They’re outsourcing the liability and accountability of gathering the data in the first place while saying they value my privacy. I know they do: they’re cashing the checks.
I was in grad school when VRML came out, I used it for things like visualizing 3-d slices of 5-d energy surfaces embedded in a 6-d phase space. I almost went to the VR CAVE to try it out but didn't quite, ironically I work in the social sciences cluster now and the former CAVE is our storage area and still has some big projectors on the floor which were expensive once.
A grad student who sat next to me, who I had endless arguments about "Linux vs Windows" told me that VRML was crap and the evidence was that it wasn't adequate to make 3-d games like Quake.
Today I'd compare A-Frame to Entity Component Systems (ECS) like Unity. A-Frame still has an object graph and it still has the awful primitives that VRML had that Horizon Worlds is stuck with, but you can make complex shapes with textures and import real models.
My one trouble with it as a developer is memory management, if you load too much geometry on an MQ3 it "just doesn't work." I got stuck on a project with it, I've got a good idea how to fix it but it was enough of a setback that I've been working on other things sense.
I did learn a lot more about the ECS paradigm this year when I was in a hackathon and joined up with a good Unity programmer and a designer to make a winning game (brought my mad Project|Product Management skills as well as my startup-honed talent of demonstrating broken software on stage and making it look perfect.) Now I play low-budget games and have a pretty clear idea how you'd implement them with an ECS framework so one day I'll put down the controller and make another crack at my VR project.
They're currently running a REDIS advertisement that looks like a critical error. The ad is a bright red toast!
_Speaking personally_, MDN is Mozilla's most valuable resource. It is the only resource I want to survive Moz's leadership.
Checking the Wayback Machine, looks like my subjective time was quite warped then: I had read the course around 2010 (which was actually called the Web Standards Curriculum[1,2], oops) and was sure it had been memory-holed with a redirect to MDN (along with the rest of Dev.Opera) when Presto was still alive (so before 2014), but it turns out that that did not happen[3] until 2018, matching your timeline.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100119040913/http://dev.opera....
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20111128034924/http://www.w3.org...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20171013125336/https://www.w3.or...
>Google's illegal monopoly
>Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor
As someone who switched from Firefox to Chrome a while ago, these remarks made me curious enough to research the case.
The judge ruled based on "billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets".
The crime of the century laid bare before our eyes. A search engine company caught red-handed paying companies to set its search engine as the default search engine as everyone everywhere knew and saw for decades. Utterly reprehensible.
https://economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/ad-v...
*Strictly in an ethics and fairness sense. It might (or might not) be worse for consumers. Just worse in a kind of boring rather than nefarious or deeply harmful way.
I'm of the humble view that it's at least as important to enforce the law when it comes to the most powerful corporations in the world, as it is to enforce it on the average person.
But maybe you see things differently.
The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud or murder rather than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts with technology product providers and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations.
Oh, they also did that [1]. If a bank did this kind of stuff, perpetrators would see jail.
>In September 2022, a ruling in the case dismissed claims there was collusion between Google and Facebook regarding the matters covered in the agreement.
In essence, all that it says is that this lawsuit is limited to Google's fraud and monopoly behaviour, and does not extend to Facebook.
In many other matters, the judge allowed the litigation to go forward. Just check out the document below [1] and ctrl-f "the complaint plausibly alleges".
[1]: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising!
That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.
It literally was not.
The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale.
Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades.
Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
> Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness.
There sure is good reason to criticize Firefox but what's crazy to me is that this generally leads to using Chrome. You're not a rebel if you turn to the enemy, you're a saboteur
I love Firefox, and I’m happy that there’s a foundation working on it that magically gets funded, but I see that money going to things I don’t care about far too often to be comfortable with it. It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
I'll bet if Mozilla thought they could get away with canceling Firefox, they would.
It feels like Firefox is treated as lead generation for whatever new boat Mozilla builds to sell Firefox users down the river on next time. It's "finished" in that regard; it is a widget that passes network traffic to Mozilla and third parties, and in exchange, Mozilla gets a pittance from Google. How any of this is supposed to be accepted with a straight face is beyond me.
I think it's similar to NGOs like Greenpeace. I respected them when they were using rubber boats to blockade toxic waste dumping. Now they have a millions earning CEO rubbing shoulders with the pollutors and ostensibly "changing the system from within". Which creates watered down measures and too much dependency on the industry. Just like Reagan's "trickle down" fallacy this doesn't work. Money and power corrupts.
Also yes a lot of us use Firefox but not because we still love it so much. But because it's the least worst option. Kinda the only option if you want to run the real Ublock Origin now.
I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities.
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”
Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.
Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about.
(That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)
On the flip side though, I know there are a ton of readers who only occasionally Read the interesting story, who are part of today's lucky thousand who haven't heard yet. For that reason, my position has become somewhat moderate in that I think the hyperbolic hate posts are still ridiculous, including some informative and reasonable comments is probably good. To be clear though, The majority of this thread is not that :-D
Maybe stop ascribing incorrect motivations to those of us who are angry but also care very deeply. I'm so tired of others assuming some sort of ill intent or virtue signaling or whatever, and using that as a way to derail a conversation.
Like it or not, that's the end result. Hacking on a chromium browser doesn't de-googleify the internet, it deepens the moat.
Did we forget the old joke?
There's two types of programs:
- Those with bugs
- Those that nobody uses
Do we really want to hate on Mozilla so much that we'd lick the big boot just out of spite? I have plenty of problems with how Mozilla has handled many issues, but it's laughable to compare these to Google or Microsoft. Seriously, WTF
Like a pool where we donate and money goes to devs to work on user-centric features (eg: I’d also want to exclude those working on first party spyware and adware).
Mozilla has consistently been losing donor trust for over a decade.
Ladybird has a chance to become a new truly open source browser written from scratch.
> Ladybird is currently in heavy development. We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
I'll do my part and use it as soon as it's "released" alpha. This is very cool!
They only reverted after community backlash (or being “inspired” if I recall correctly). You’re comfortable supporting a project that actively betrayed open source principles, whilst writing off Mozilla for issues like executive compensation.
It doesn’t strike me as more morally consistent than supporting the organisation that actually develops the underlying engine?
But Firefox (+ forks) is a lost cause. One simple non-statistical reason, I mean it seems so, is that whenever I see that “I donate to Firefox fork” mentioned somewhere, it’s almost always a different fork. So maybe now Firefox will die a 100 deaths.
I went there to find out how they're tracking upstream releases, because that's my major heartburn about any fork of one of the biggest attack targets on a personal computer. Since 12.0.14 doesn't tell me anything about what version of Firefox it's built against, I guess https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp/blob/v12.0.14/brow... is the best one can do and since it says 128.anything and the current production release is 140.0.4 I got my answer
You have an orders-of-magnitude smaller non-profit-ish thing going toe to toe with THREE of the hugest and most powerful companies to ever exist -- and generally holding their own for freedom.
It's good to be critical and influence, they do make bad decisions sometimes.
But COME ON, given what they're up against, most of the time I want y'all to just shut up and keep giving them money.
Yet when you search for "donate to firefox" you will first find one of two Mozilla Foundation donation page... Just making it possible to actually donate "to Firefox" would probably help a lot...
Either software developers have to figure out how to out compete the CEO ghouls (without becoming CEO ghouls themselves), or we just have to accept that the CEO ghouls will take their cut. There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.
Add to that the value capture that happens outside of that exchange. We may say that valkey is well enough funded to continue development, but that doesn't account for the immense value that is being captured by the big cloud providers charging a premium for hosting it. Azure, AWS and GCP are only as valuable as they are because there's some software you can run on them. The cheaper that software, the more they get to charge.
This is sort of a general problem with the American system of "philanthropy". We can say that the Linux Foundation is developing the Linux kernel independently for free, and that various other companies then donate, but that ignores the fact that the Linux kernel has been tremendously valuable for those same companies. In a more real way, they are paying for the development of the kernel, but they are not paying anything even close the value they are deriving from it. Value is in that way being extracted from the Linux kernel outside of the Linux Foundation, and that looks a lot like "an executive in between".
You give the examples of Azure, AWS and GCP - do they really have that much secret sauce? My impression is that AWS is mostly giving a new name to open source stuff. If all would decide tomorrow to double their prices competitors will appear immediately. And my guess is that their profit is due to forgotten or over-provisioned resources of other organizations anyhow.
I think we should focus on the benefits for society of open source, not on reducing the profit that some will make from it here and there.
Well then I’m just not going to pay.
Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.
There's an irony that in providing people the option of not paying, you are also inviting them to find flaws in your organization to avoid paying. We are all aware that Microsoft sucks, yet there's never any doubt that you'll have to pay for a 365 subscription if you're a serious business. At the same time we'll also gladly accept that small companies don't donate to the Linux foundation, because they have to pay their bills.
By using the control we advocate for (forking projects, reducing funding, etc) we only harm the projects that afford us that control. Not paying Mozilla does nothing to reduce the control of Google over chrome. It only hurts the one browser that gives you the choice.
Is it because we're >happy< to do it, or there's no choice?
Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.
If Mozilla goes the same way, Firefox loses all goodwill it gathered over the years and stops being an option against Chrome et al.
I'll need to think about this more but one difference that comes to mind after giving it some thought is that donations are a choice. Buying food is not really optional. I'm not going to the store and giving them 50€ because I hope they continue to operate, I give them the money as an equal exchange
There is a group of people who would choose to shop more frequently at a certain place, or tip more, if their favorite place is having trouble, but as far as I know this is only a small effect and market forces decide for 95% whether a place can continue to pay its bills. With open source software development like at Mozilla, barring other income sources, they rely on those 5%. The donators don't need to accept that their money is spent on drugs and mansions¹, the way that they do when buying groceries and the big boss might indeed use the profits in that way
¹ I have no clue what else you would do with the 7M USD a year that someone else quoted. Even at a 50% tax rate (idk what the tax rate is for someone who operates a non-profit in the USA), an average person could literally retire after six months of telling others what to do at this "non profit"
I don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy, but in my experience that is almost always a disaster.
> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.
If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.
That's a big if. AFAIK most open source project developers don't get remotely enough donations to support them working on it full-time. The ones that do are the exception, not the norm.
Compare to Torvalds. You may or may not like his leadership, but nobody feels sour about his salary.
Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.
There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.
FreeBSD seems to have three paid directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/our-team/
Debian has a leader and also seems to be more a volunteer organisation than a full company: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.
I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.
There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.
All said and done, that will still be way more reasonable than that ludicrous salary.
I’m fine with twice the amount of a developer. Taking into account responsibility, public involvement and special clothing. Travel costs and so on are separate. The developers are doing the hard work.
There is not “team” if a MBA or lawyer gets 38 times the wage of an actual person doing the work.
I don't personally like it (so generally did not allow to happen to me), but if some people feel "safer" getting lower pay (less chance of getting fired, easier to get re-hired as there are more low paid positions than high paid positions), the natural result is that it will happen.
My experience is that both high and low paid positions are not as "safe" as people think they are (seen multiple changing in various organizations types), so people should care more about finding a reasonable organization.
The fact that "high performance leaders" need to make tens of millions of dollars is one of the greatest lies being told in the modern age.
Right now my chief in the fire company where I volunteer makes the same amount of money I do: $0.00. He is the greatest leader I have ever personally met, and I've been around for a while.
When I was in the Army, my company commander (a Captain) made ~4x what the newest private did. The highest-paid officer makes ~9x.
There are government senior executives and university professors running labs with budgets and teams that make Mozilla look like a lemonade stand for practically nothing.
Mozilla should ask the Linux Foundation what their budget is, what their leadership structure is, and do that.
Mozilla, no matter what they say or think or try, is and will always be a web browser developer. A web browser. Anything else is a side project, a hobby. A distraction. Every single molecule of fuel used by their brains while at work and every single microwatt of power used by their infrastructure should be wholly and aggressively dedicated to building the tools and organization needed to create the best web browser possible.
Bloated payrolls are tolerable if the decisions made are wise, responsibility is taken, and strategies exist and make sense.
Mozilla seems to have none of these.
But man they're spending a shit-ton on "AI"!
Unfortunately, CEO is not always leadership.
Aside from that, leadership can come from the people doing the work. It is working in many cases.
The reality is that Firefox would have done much better had Mozilla fired their CEO 15 years ago and never hired another one. All of them executed significantly worse than mere government bonds did.
They specifically targetted two things:
1. directing funding towards Firefox development. Mozilla have been criticised for spending large portions of their income on non-Firefox endeavours while not publishing breakdowns of Firefox-specific spending in their annual reports
2. The CEO's salary: the commenter said nothing about not wanting the CEO position to exist, merely a desire for the funding to the Foundation to not be excessively funnelled into salary increases while the company's resources contract. Which seems reasonable.
Signal personal should continue being free. Signal needs to develop a business line for enabling authenticated, private communications to individuals on Signal.
There's at the very least an entire area of secure healthcare messaging which is full of terrible bespoke systems, or just goes over SMS, which would more effectively and with better user experience go over signal (i.e. the ability to send longer messages, encrypted attachments etc.)
Public app, and a separate business offering - both with E2EE
Yeah? How much did an always-on pocket sized computer connected to the internet cost in 1980?
The suckers can watch the ads, and we can ride for free. (And we can complain that the content progressively caters to the suckers and not us).
You also end up paying for all this advertising indirectly, in the price of everything you buy. So you might think you get free content, but you're really not. And let's not even mention the insanity of constantly pushing everyone to consume more trash in a world that really doesn't need it.
Definitely interested in making Firefox, Thunderbird, etc sustainable too.
I have found that whatever software I need or want, I can always find the best-in-class option to buy for a very reasonable price.
The best part: If you experience a bug or a problem, it's usually fixed within a few days at most after you report it.
I don't mind side-projects, I mind that Mozilla looks completely directionless from the outside. It might even look like a Google-funded adult daycare. I can't trust that.
According to their latest financial transparency report[1], software development as a line item is about 60% of their expenses. However, your question wasn't about where revenue has gone, it was about where new donations would go. That lead me to the donation FAQ which reads:
> At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. The Mozilla Foundation programs are supported by grassroots donations and grants. Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all. This explains the lack of Firefox on their website. Any mention of it as a product of the foundation would be misleading about where the donations go. From the point of view of the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is just another revenue stream for outreach efforts.
This really bums me out, because I'm a huge fan of Firefox. It's my go to browser on my computer and my phone. I advocate for it as much as possible. I've donated before, but I've likely never actually financially supported development of Firefox. I support the EFF, so it's possible I could have donated to this foundation on its own merits. But I didn't.
[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
[2]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...
Yes, this is what so many people here on HN have complained about for years :) and is also being raised by the OP:
> To be clear, I very much support the Foundation, and it does amazing work, but I want to know this money in particular would directly support Firefox development.
"In the early 2000s, the Mozilla community built Firefox. We toppled the browser monopoly, gave users choice and control online, and helped create a healthier internet.
Twenty years later, Mozilla continues to fight for a healthy internet — one where Big Tech is held accountable and individual users have real agency online."
They list a bunch of projects on the site that are kind of all over the place. It's almost as if they don't know yet what they want to do. Mozilla is synonymous with Firefox and the Mozilla browser before that, but it is clear from the site that browsers do not fit in with their future. I'm not even sure they know what their future is. They look like a research organization that's dong research for the purpose of finding something to do? They are also accepting applications for funding.
The only purpose Firefox has in this organization is to fund exploratory research via the Google search deal. There is no plan. These people don't deserve our money and are not responsible enough to be custodians of a project as important as an independent browser.
A new organization should fork Firefox, rebrand it, contribute real resources and monetize it enough to keep it healthy. I'm not talking about junk like Zen or Floorp where they just put a skin on Firefox and have no real development resources to speak of. Someone should do to Mozilla what Mozilla did to Netscape.
Personally, I think that's a more worthwhile approach than what Ladybird is doing, although I'm rooting for them to succeed.
Right now, if you were to take away Google's money, Firefox would not be able to compete with Chromium and Safari. It would die.
All these side-projects are attempts to find a source of revenue aside from Google and are necessary to Firefox's survival. So saying they should stop doing them, completely misses the point.
Unless we want Firefox to die, we should understand Mozilla's situation and encourage this exploratory process, not hate on it.
I think the only way for it to prosper is to take away Google's money. I firmly believe it could do better browser development on 5% of the income it's currently receiving.
It'll be a heck of a culture shock at the foundation, though.
They got rid of everything. Relay and VPN are both five years old. Other than MDN, everything they've done, including "browsers and browser accessories" have been killed. For company as old as Mozilla, if your two oldest offerings are less than a quarter of your lifespan, what does that say?
And on the browser front, they're really not making a whole lot of anything. Ignoring fixes and web standards work, the latest version has.... Vertical tabs? Which there's been an extension for since pretty much forever. Some AI stuff? Changing the background of the New Tab page? I'm supposed to be excited for this? This is supposed to make me want to give them money?
Meanwhile there are startups like The Browser Company who are actually doing exciting things with the web (that people use! that are exciting enough to raise funding for!), and users love it. You can't say "we're building the best browser" and then not even ship anything.
What gets people excited are quality of life improvements, like video chat picture in picture, or new ways of grouping and managing tabs (your reminder that Mozilla killed Tab Candy). Firefox only got a cookie cutter clone of Chrome tab groups on v137.
There is no shortage of ways browser vendors can ship features that make browsing the web better without getting in anyone's way. Hell, they could have a build of Firefox that just has all the new stuff and merge it back to trunk when it's been proven out.
The thing is, for people like my mom, every other browser has features she uses and likes. Firefox hardly does more in the core experience than it did fifteen years ago when they started shipping every six weeks. My mom has every single department store's app installed on her phone, she's not choosing a browser based on how much it may respect your privacy.
So it's also an English word, then?
While an entrepreneurial view, this mammoth disinformation is equivalent to plaza cafe sofa schmooze.
(I know this isn’t the most coherent post I’ve ever made, but I wanted to make a point by cramming in as many borrowed words as I could)
You sabotage your own argument with these two sentences.
This is false, so your argument is also false.
I feel like it is, but it’s not headed that way, though neither is the world:
https://github.com/t3dotgg/SnitchBench/blob/main/snitching-a...
Still, the contacted_media field in the JSON is pretty funny, since I assume it's misfiring at a rate of several thousand of time daily. I can only imagine being on the receiving end of that at propublica and wapo. That bitch Katie was eyeballing Susie again at recess and she hates her so much? Straight to investigations@nytimes
That doesn’t excuse or justify it. And the reason the world is headed that way is in large part because of the US doing it. Clearly it was a mistake to trust one country to do the right thing. When they proclaimed themselves “leaders of the free world”, the rest of the free world should’ve raised an objection. Worse still, the US is so high on their own supply they believe they’re the best at everything, despite ample evidence to the contrary, which breeds stupidity and arrogance in a vicious cycle. And like every other junk produced in the US, they’re exporting that attitude too.
The more someone has to tell you that you're free, the less you actually are. C.f. North Korea.
Maybe it is exactly what that means, and we’ve just been interpreting it wrong all this time.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8
> Free installation. Free admission, free appraisal, free alterations, free delivery, free estimates, free home trial, and free parking.
German is the same as French in this regard, we have "kostenlos" (literally cost-less) "gratis" (the same) and "umsonst" (which interestingly can also mean "in vain").
The other Wiktionary example of "freie Krankenversorgung" sounds wrong to be, but it seems to be used rarely in some more formal or legal contexts, no one would say it like this in a casual conversation. Google results also show a 4x difference between frei and kostenlos here in favor of kostenlos. But both are low since "Krankenversorgung" is already a very unusual word. I suspect many of those uses might be bad translations from English.
I do think there is a spectrum. Funny things like "Freifahrt" or even "Freifahrtschein", or "Freikarte", or "Freiexemplar", "Freiparken", "Freiminuten" or "Freivolumen" (people might use "Inklusivvolumen") - so I'd argue when used as part to form a new word it is a synonym for "kostenfrei" (not yet in "Freiwild" which changed a lot).
It looks/sounds foreign and feels a bit pretentious to use in conversation
.. or I feel like some gringo speaking broken Spanish
“Entrepreneur” is worse on both counts, yet I don’t see those complaints about it. Must be because it’s associated with money.
We get liberty, liberal from the same root.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libre gives a pronunciation which matches my own (lee-bruh).
Back in the early days of FOSS, when almost everyone who used software was also a programmer, it made a difference.
Today, nearly all people who would care about libre software licenses, are aware of their existence. The vast majority of computer users today are just attempting to do some other task and do not give a shit about the device or the legal consequences of using it, even if you warn them. They simply don’t care about software.
It would remove the awkward ad-hoc parentheses at every instance.
Besides: The Americans will LOVE it!
I still don't get over the fact Mozilla bought it and shattered it less than a decade later. Perhaps it doesn't make enough "impact" to justify their time and resources, and if this behavior subsists, I would be more discouraged to give them money ever again.
From day one Orion browser [1] has been designed with this business model in mind.
Napkin math also shows that if only 5% Firefox users decided to pay for it, Mozilla would not only replace Google search deal revenue but also align incentives with its users, leading to a better product down the road.
Asking these people to directly cover the cost of the services they use incurs a level of incredulity and anger on par with charging to breath.
Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.
Nebula for example is the choice answer to the enshitification of YouTube. Lots of the top creators push it to billions of viewers. Pretty much everyone who does the YouTube rounds knows about it.
Yet they only have ~750,000 subscriptions.
That is an awful conversion rate, and why these creators will be stuck making ad supported yt content for the foreseeable future. People overwhelming do not want to pay directly.
It won't happen overnight, but there are now viable businesses out there with non-ad business models. Yes they're not as large as Google, but I don't think they need to be either.
That said, your point about the incentives is spot on. It is the primary reason that I pay for Kagi: they have the incentive to deliver good results and even improve. They even talk about this on their website [1].
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
Cloudflare also seems to be OK to work with R companies...
My only real complain with Orion is that it's not open source. I get the rationale behind, but still I don't like it.
For example I pay Bitwarden $10/year for both myself and my wife. We will be moving to a Bitwarden family plan soon as our kids are getting old enough to have online accounts. Similar pricing structures for Firefox accounts would be totally reasonable!
Clearly some people would prefer a free way to use Firefox and that’s ok, too. In the same vein Bitwarden have a free plan. This kind of pricing structure already works in the market. Please copy it.
Mozilla, please stop screwing up and just make a great Firefox!
without google money,doing this maybe can be make profitable
People whined about search licensing and it now seems there is a court order imminently about to kill those deals. That leaves either running other services or putting ads in the browser both of which attracted much complaining.
And no, forking is not the answer. Mozilla does the lion's share of security work and maintenance. If the mother ship dies the forks will slowly wither and die as they don't have the funding to replace Mozilla. If Mozilla can't make the numbers work a fragmented mess of forks will not do better. A few of these forks have made the problem worse for themselves by insisting on bringing back and maintaining the exploit ridden mess that was XUL based add ons.
I don't believe this to be based on any facts, and it's certainly ignoring that MoCo makes money that doesn't come from the foundation. In 2023 Mozilla had over $650M in revenue and only $260M was spent on software development expenses.
Having a paid offering doesn't take away from search deals. Nor is it ideologically orthogonal.
Here's the thing: Mozilla is addicted to blowing cash on non-software projects. It's addicted to blowing cash on software that is far outside its core offering. It's a graveyard of projects that it buys or builds in earnest, gets the userbased hyped for (sometimes with resistance) and then kills the damn thing in a few years.
Other than Firefox and its various flavors like Firefox Focus, what actually even still exists? A HIBP front end, Thunderbird (again?), Bugzilla, Firefox Relay, MDN, and Mozilla VPN. No, SeaMonkey doesn't count.
The trail of bodies behind Moz as it lumbers on is worse than Google's discontinued products when you compare based on the size of the org. We joke about Google launching new projects, but Mozilla projects are almost certain to be killed. Possibly the single most valuable thing to come out of Mozilla in 20 years was Rust (and by proxy, Servo) and they've managed to not just let it slip through their fingers, but to yeet it as far away as they could muster.
You don't need an MBA to understand that this isn't how to run a software company. It's not about money! If they picked literally any one thing and whole-assed it and made sure users actually a) cared and b) liked it, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
The whining is because they have mismanaged so much. The only clearly visible strategic direction is to fire and keep firing developers, which does not bode well for the future of the product. All the side products and distractions seem to be experiments of business folks. The company isn't run by product people.
As an independent alternative, the Ladybird browser (https://ladybird.org/) is being developed and could possibly benefit from more financial support.
Give it another year or two and things may change, but if you daily drive it now you'll be either a beta tester or a volunteer part of the Q&A team.
Out of all the new and upcoming browser engines, I think the usability ranking is Flow, then Ladybird, then Servo, with none of them being a great daily driver yet.
I'll try it out once I've finally set up my virtual machine.
You'd be a pre-alpha tester
I mind that it's written in c++ less, than that their forum for feedback seems to be twitter, and they are trying to adopt swift as their language...
Hard pass.
1.Waste the budget on irrelevant side projects.
2.Neglect user expirience and cut features.
3.Add a price tag to alienate users.
4.Perhaps a humiliation ritual like mandatory 2FA and "Login to Firefox"
OneDrive was dead to me in the first week because (a) it was the default save location for Office and (b) if it was broken I could not save at all. That’s how to be sure somebody never uses a product ever again! It’s shocking to see how vertical integration can so utterly fail —- DropBox can make a product that doesn’t fail catastrophically on a large number of platforms, kernel integration and all dooms Microsoft’s product on their core platform.
I'm always fighting against it because the users hate it as much as I do, and usually I manage to get it stopped or watered down.
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who hates that.
5. Fire all developers that actually work on important stuff
It sounds hokey but, perhaps, Firefox should be trialware. Don't cut off the people who can't pay. Make a browser that just works and see how many people will pay for it even if they can use it without paying.
It seems like the browser only exists with a very important secondary motivation, for microsoft and IE it was tying the web and windows together with activex, and for chrome it was to give their ads/services a good presentation. The other alternative I wonder about is the Document Foundation with LibreOffice, where their offering is distinct from MS Office, and there's still space for other players to exist healthily.
Haven't switched since then.
I also have a license so I don't go to hell.
I was going to say "a better example is Reaper, a full-fledged DAW that has a similar business model..." then I realized even Reaper is probably a small piece of software when you consider what behemoth a modern browser is.
The sheer entitlement of Firefox users knows no bounds. They made a tiny little pocket button, which you can turn off, btw, and people shat on it for months on end and said Mozilla is dead and switched to Chrome. Because we all know Chrome, fucking Google Chrome, respects their users.
After a certain point we have to call a spade a spade. I mean, Mozilla could write every user a check for 100 dollars and assholes would still complain. The greatest adversary to Mozilla isn't Google, it's their own users.
See, the problem is that Chrome markets to the average Goo Goo Ga Ga internet idiot. To them, Computer is magic box, and a browser is an operating system. They don't give a flying fuck that Google records their location 24/7, or that Google builds profiles on them, or that Google killed Manifest V2, or whatever. Google could shit in their mouths and call it ice cream and they'd believe it.
Meanwhile, Firefox users care about privacy and the internet at least a little bit. That means Firefox is held to a standard 1000x greater than Chrome ever could be. For every 1,000 mis-steps Chrome and Google can make, Mozilla is allowed one.
And there, in parallel, there are greedy executive in Mozilla that took a big cut of the money, and wasted shitload of it in stupid and useless things that went to trash In the end, achieving really little.
Yes firefox is a little bit better than in the past, but like just a single digit percent better compared to what it should have been if the money wasted was really used to develop the project. Interesting other projects that could have changed the world were underfunded, like thunderbird (that never thrived as much as now since the Corp is not charge anymore) and market shares are still as low as ever...
This is really just a long way to donate really in some sense directly to firefox somehow just because everybody feels like mozilla takes the donated money and tries on some "zanky" product
See The Ville_Lindholm comment really, those were my first thoughts too but I wouldn't really donate to mozilla like ever.
Ladybird's cool though. Maybe donating to them makes more sense but I understand they are not mature but that's exactly the point, they need way more funding (IMO) to get to a genuinely stable browser and need all the help that they can get as compared to the past.
Sure, we all like to stick the big firefox guy to beat the monopoly of google, but firefox/mozilla survives on a single deal by google, and if google ever stops the deal of paying for search engine, it can really shut down mozilla or maybe hinder it extremely.
I do hope that ladybird grows in a way where I can use it in compared to firefox in like hopefully 5 years since browsers are a mess.
Probably would take that money and immediately spent it more on https://mozilla.vc/
I'll happily pay when what happened to Netscape, happens to Mozilla.
This is not true for the vast majority of people leaving. It might be true in the hyper focused tech bubbles that we frequent, though they certainly don't represent the vast majority of users.
Ads make me the product. I do not want to be the product.
Have you forgotten that Firefox gives you a banner, a new tab, and a link to settings to simply turn off these features that upset you?
But I also need to believe that the money I'm paying is being spent wisely. Given how poorly Mozilla has been managed over the past decade or so, I wouldn't care to give them any of my money. I've watched Firefox go from nothing to the dominant browser and now back to a tiny minor player that gets dropped off site compatibility lists. It makes me incredibly sad that this is the state of affairs, but... there it is.
Mozilla needs to be spending a ton more money on user acquisition in order to become relevant again. I would be happy to support that, but I have no faith that's where my money would go, or that they'd spend it to that end effectively.
I want to be a customer. Of a Firefox that blocks ads, not serves them to me.
Instead of play-acting as a corporation, they might have decided to become a non-profit software foundation, which would have been a very honourable thing to do. But they have not, for example, built up a huge war-chest in case the Google spigot ever stops. Instead senior management has frittered the money away on their own salaries and absurd money-losing projects and acquisitions.
The licence will be likely checked via remote API on app start.
Anyway the boat has sailed here as every browser connects to dozens of places automatically and if you go to any bigger site you are basically cyber attacked so advertising companies can fingerprint and track you.
Even if you, as the company selling the software, can accept all of the above, a license server still is a liability. You sold someone a product and now you need to keep a public API running "forever" (as defined in your legalese). If something goes wrong on your end you are now denying the product you already sold to your customers who already paid for it. I know this is in the end all mitigated by some legalese, which is a whole different can of worms. You also need to make sure your license API is secure and can not leak user data or be twisted into exploiting your software during license checking. There is an ongoing cost to keep the infrastructure running.
As a sibling comment pointed out you can use local only license management like license keys or just nothing like WinRAR or FUTO Keyboard[1]. Yes, you will get users not paying for your software, there will be keygens out there. But even if you use a remote license check, there will be cracks on day 1, if your software is popular enough. I know this is an old and flawed argument, but if someone is willing to navigate a website full of malware infested, blinking ads to avoid paying for your software, they probably would not pay for it anyway.
As an example of what the end stage of hooking up every software to a remote API looks like, Stop Killing Games [2] has done a great job of highlighting just how bad it has gotten in the gaming market. I know there have been some heated discussions around the movement, but the core idea of being able to keep using the software you paid for, is something I absolutely support.
[1] https://keyboard.futo.org/
[2] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&query=stop%20kill...
Forget about Mozilla, donate to Ladybird—or another open-source non-browser project you like. If a competitor eats away the remaining market share of Mozilla's only "working" product, maybe they'll wake up.
In my opinion they are well on their way of enshittification and I moved to protonvpn.
Having an £1/month subscription that you could take any number of (including zero), would be easy and generate some income.
There have been some mis-steps to be sure, but also some cool stuff. People often focus on the negative.
I even theorise they could cut the Google funding. There are so many people who would donate to firefox, but don't, because 1) they dont need the money, and 2) the money wouldn't go to firefox anyway. I even remember talking to a long time Mozilla employee at fosdem, and him telling me donating was pointless for those reasons.
They're not a good steward of this project and imo they should let it fly free. The problem is Mozilla would die without it because nobody cares about anything else they do, so their donations would plummet.
For example Thunderbird is fully funded by donations.[1]
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.
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
Even if they did, it isn't even enough to sustain the company to continue developing the browser.
This is exactly my point. They should establish direct Firefox donations. I agree that it won't change anything overnight, but they need to start somewhere.
Opera, up until 2000, was trialware that nagged users to pay. At that time, they were one of the first browsers to support tabs. In 2000 they put ads for non-paying users, and from 2005 they removed ads and survived entirely on Google money. Then in 2013 they became yet another Chrome-based browser.
Obviously, that was quite some time ago at this point. Perhaps paid web browsers' time has come again?
> Charging for open-source software may sound hypocritical, but even the Free Software Foundation believes software fees and software freedom are completely compatible.
Paid support always has been allowed in free software. The issue here is two-fold:
1. When most people hear 'free software' they immediately think it is 'free' as in gratis (for nothing) and expect free support.
2. Especially for funding browsers it has always been an issue around who is going to pay for the long-term support without ads, tracking or VCs.
Cut the bullshit initiatives, fire the C-suite and put that money to work.
[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
I have no idea how to solve such an organizational problem.
Unfortunately, I am done pretending otherwise. I haven't seen anything that is indicative of otherwise. Especially after acquiring a behavioural ads company. I will believe when they make decisions that aligns with it. Not with marketing materials saying otherwise or cos of whatever Firefox fans are left is saying. I stuck through the Firefox abandoned phase until Quantum release even for work. It's not cool that Mozilla is doing this.
The problem is that Mozilla is so badly mismanaged that we don't feel paying for the current state of Mozilla. Mitchell Baker's tenure as CEO was disasterous, and the new CEO Laura Chambers had a bad start.
Those are the problems that every govt funded project faces, but they are particularly tough in software. We have many examples where it went very wrong so not many governments acting in good faith are eager to step into it. And you can't allow the government to intervene in development or management here, because this how you'll end up with government-mandated preinstalled browser on smart phones or with added backdoors.
One solution could be participatory budgeting where the end users will directly decide where to invest part of their govt-collected taxes. E.g., on your declaration you'd have a field where you'd like to invest X% of your paid taxes into project Y. This comes with its own set of challenges and admin overhead, but I don't see any other good solution for cases like this, because they are impossible to run under direct government control.
You don't. The state doesn't know what a project needs at a given time, and will try to apply cookie cutter solutions when they don't need it. What you actually do is two parts:
- Give a budget for each institution to spend on open source projects (defined by some industry criteria, or something)
- Force institutions to consider open source projects for free (as in no cost) digital goods, and a report as to why open source solutions when paying for a digital good or service. The later should be evaluated by a central organization that promotes the rational use of digital products, like the U.S. Digital Service, EU Digital Services Directorate, Digital Transformation Agency, European Data Innovation Board, Secretaria de Governo Digital, etc.
These two policies in conjunction would supply projects with the cash needed and foment projects to do useful things.
There is no one-fix solution for this.
Secondly, Mozilla would have to deal with Google - could be done, Google pays so a major browser exists, paid subscribers may help recover lost browser share for FF... And, that Google deal may be going away soon anyway. Probably negotiable.
Third, the free-tier and paid tiers need to be set in a way that everyone (OSS advocates included) are happy and there's tangent value for people on the fence for a paid subscription. Having people just pay because they want to pay for their browser is not a business plan, and Mozilla needs a real business plan moving forward.
I use Firefox out of principle, and might pay or donate to it if I felt Mozilla was the same organization that it was when it fought for the open, standards-based web. The handful of missteps along the way haven't increased user trust.
I had been donating to Thunderbird for a few years until I recently realized they paid $4,000 to be a silver sponsor at SCALE 22 https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x/sponsor/thunderbird. I was under the assumption they needed money for developers.
Uhh two of those are primarily services with dedicated clients not just software.
I totally agree with the article otherwise. I don't want to donate to the foundation to support Firefox. They'll just use it for side projects and it does nothing to reduce their dependency on Google. Just let me pay for a version of firefox that has a nice contributor badge, and doesn't have Google as a search engine installed. It doesn't have to be something that's worth the money.
Also they could make the sync service paid. And reduce the free version. I'd gladly pay for it. They've said they'll never make us pay for it but I don't understand why not. It's a service that costs money on an ongoing basis.
IMO they should also go back to a more community driven approach. Not treat themselves as a mega corp with an overpaid CEO. But more like a startup. Because really, size-wise they're only startup sized. The only reason they pretend to be a big tech is because they have so much Google money to throw strong. A project like KDE (Which I sponsor monthly) provides a lot more software without all this overhead, and works much better along with the community. This is how I would love to see Mozilla.
But maybe ladybird will be what I'm looking for.
FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices.
Paid software ensures quality assurance.
But, when MoCo sold out its users, they lost the ability to ask me to pay, because what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
I’ll gladly donate and have donated to an organizations whose products I use where those organizations would rather fail and be dismantled than sell their users’ data. I’ll even pay companies that don’t lie about it. But, Mozilla said they’d never sell out, and then they did.
nothing.
It's why i think browser (and other platform software, such as OS, or telephony/mobile platforms) should be FOSS funded by taxes, and "regulated" so that its always open access etc.
Relying on donation (ala, altruism of individuals) do not work at scale.
Telegram is a good example of a public app that was free, and bleeding, they introduced paid features and are profitable.
Never they forced you to pay for existing stuff, nor sold your soul on the way to profitability.
Someone should try porting the open source TG clients to the matrix protocol by the way..
At this point we should just fork Firefox or focus on IceCat instead.
But Google can see it happening and pull support overnight.
Mozilla cornered itself into this situation, any official effort to make Firefox "more independent" has to happen really fast if they don't want to get almost entirely de-funded instantly.
Mozilla needs to learn how to do the very hard thing and passively invest these donations. This is a viable long-term strategy. FF would have extra monetary momentum or inertia, and donation stall-out, however and whenever it occurs, would not be game-over for Mozilla.
This is why I too think we ought to migrate to Patreon-like direct sponsoring of individual (or vetted group) effort to generate some development steam for Firefox. It might make Mozilla deny these developers write-access to Firefox repositories for all I know, but a fork cannot be prevented.
I've been using Firefox since its "Phoenix" days (good memories!), but it's lagging behind the competition more and more, and while I'd be first to admit we don't need half the features Google is busy putting into Chrome which then "magically" appear in Edge (what a devious alliance, that), some of them are sound design but are absent in Firefox, to the detriment of developers. In short: Firefox is losing more ground faster than ever before, at some point the boundary conditions will cause it to no longer be a viable alternative for the average user, I am afraid. Which will cause a "cascading failure" where no developer will test for it, and you know what happens then (because we've been there before).
By the way, how do you prove that a paid for version has no tracking?
I understand FOSS can be financed when the customer is a business, but when it's a user?
Pirating a FOSS app would probably have less of a psychological barrier, but I think it would be more frowned upon instead. (I won’t judge you if you pirate Photoshop, but pirating Inkscape? Shame on you!) We’ll have to see how it plays out though.
I'd definitely pay that as its adding a lot of value.
I don't want Mozilla to sink so I see why they've done this kind of thing in the past, but I really don't like it.
However, I do want to pay for additional features and services, like a solid ad-blocker, integrated VPN-networking, privacy features like email relays or anti-fingerprinting, a safe and reliable cryptocurrency wallet, a smart cross-platform password manager, a privacy focused gmail alternative, integrated detection of fake reviews, bot messages and sloppy AI content, AI summaries, …
Add value to Firefox, in a coherent, meaningful and effective way to make using the internet secure, enjoyable and interesting again. Do that and take my money.
All Chromium forks.
Browser engines are special. Firefox is the only non-WebKit derivative with relevant market-share currently.
But practically, this will likely just kill Firefox (and Mozilla).
I'm reasonably sure that a small fraction of those 250 million people are even aware of the concept of "Free Software" or "Open Source", or how it relates to Firefox.
What stopped someone else from doing that in all those years?
I will substantiate that assertion with a simple argument in the form of a question: what were the most popular internet browsers in each period of history, for each platform, and why?
IE was popular because it came with Windows. Safari is popular because it is both Mac and iOS default browser. Chrome became popular because Google convinced you that IE was slow because it was IE, not because your PC was slow already.
For some reason I still cannot load unpacked extensions for more than 24hrs. I cannot load unsigned extensions unless i download a special build of firefox. Firefox doesn't support apple scripting. A stock install of firefox has more sponsored bloatware than Chrome. Great way to treat the power users.
But honestly Firefox has way too much technical debt. Starting new browser (Ladybird, webkit) seems like much better way to go! There are several independent browsers!
And no, severing all ties wouldn’t work – not unless you find a viable financial model. Selling access for builds (Ardour-style) might work, but I’m not too sure.
> not unless you find a viable financial model
First reduce expenses by several magnitudes. There is no reason browser should need more than a github project, build QA servers, and 10 paid core developers. But you would need much better codebase for that!!!
As for income, donations come to mind. You can still sell default search, just not to google.
20 years ago browser companies had income from selling their rendering engine for embedded use. They also did consulting...
Do you have every right to whinge here, roughly ever few months? Absolutely! Do I have a right to call you a bunch of wingers? Also absolutely!
I use firefox daily and while i'm aware of market share dropping, it's still a reasonable browser to use.
Is it just speculation now on the future of firefox?
I agree that Mozilla is problematic that past decade or so especially, but there is not a lot of other options. I do think it would be cool if buying Firefox as a product gave you a "voting share". 1 vote per user. I'm not sure how well that would work, but it would go a way to make it the browser of the people and not just "the org" which pushes whatever it wants on you regardless if you like it or not.
Everytime I try to get away from FF I find there's really not anything else out there at this point in time. Servo in theory "is coming" someday. But I am not holding my breath even though that would be my preferred option. Ladybird, well... I'm not keen on Andreas Kling's general approach to organization, but if it's a good browser that supports standards and plugins and has power to block ads, it would at least provide some flames to FF's feet to start taking things seriously and not just suck in Google's teat.
We have to get them away from Google. I'm honestly worried they're going to remove v2 at some point then we're really fucked. But I have to keep coming back, if only because I don't want to give Chromium based browsers more share, and since it's the source/main of derivatives, it's better IMO to just use that than a fork which may or may not break.
Sorry but that's just... delusional. Yes the moment Firefox would charge money and become a paid product 90% of people would switch over to Brave et al. The average internet user or even Firefox user does not now what Mozilla's business model even is because they're not terminally online.
A browser like Firefox if it wants to compete with Chrome and wants to have an impact on the internet needs to be free because the average internet user is willing to spend exactly zero dollars on software. If anyone could make more money charging for their software than not they'd already be doing it, unless you think they hate money.
Same goes for all the tirades about Mozilla's management. Again the average person has no clue about it, they don't read news about software company management. Firefox has been losing ground because Google owns half of all major sites on the internet and Android and ships as a default on tons of devices, it's that simple.
Ironically, one can pay for Brave.
It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).
I don’t feel optimistic for the future of Firefox given it seems they’re likely to lose their primary source of funding in the coming months.
What alternatives are there? The temporary benevolence of a mega-Corp with a vested interest in online advertising? Crypto mining in the browser? Replacing affiliate links?
I haven’t seen a solution that seems practical here but it seems clear to me that if privacy-motivated, anti-BigTech HN commenters won’t pay for it, no one will.
I think this is in larger part because people don't like the decisions they have been making. I think an executive team that had stayed focused on firefox or successfully brought in revenue to support it would have much less backlash on this point. People boycott other companies for similar reasons.
Free software of such magnitude could and should live only by source code contributions, not money.
The executive pay is disgusting and reflects in no way the performance of the products. This money should be going into engineering and outreach.
Yes, i'm aware of firefox profiles. it's implementation is hard to use and generally confusing. it requires going to secret pages, and quite frankly, i found it worked like hot garbage.
If Mozilla doesn't do it, I fear someone else will."
Why fear; competition drives improvement
IMHO, need more non-commercial browsers; I use a 1.3MB (static) text-only one for printing large HTML files^1; there are not many choices for such programs
The author makes a strange but persistent assumption; payment will stop surveillance
Payment does not necessarily solve the issues of sponsored content, telemetry, Google partnership or ads (not to mention non-telemetry data collection and tracking)
It is possible to accept payment and still perform surveillance and advertising services
"Big Tech" is already doing this; e.g, stop ads/tracking in one context after payment, but still collect data, track and/or show ads in other contexts
What is more lucrative for the "browser developer"
(a) payment from trillion-dollar market cap companies serving the advertising industry, or
(b) donations from www browser users, or
(c) both
1. It bloats to 7.5MB (static) with OpenSSL; one of many reasons I use a TLS forward proxy
"Personally, I'd be ok with opt-in telemetry if the information was used solely within Mozilla for product development.
The red line for me is sharing of telemetry data with advertisers."
These so-called "tech" companies offer no such enforceable promises; the absence of enforceable (cf. non-binding) promises is intentional
How does this commenter know Mozilla does not share telemetry with its other partners, e.g., Google.
"Product development" is for the benefit of Google^2 and anyone else who leverages Mozilla's work.
2. Chrome's initial development was performed by former Mozilla developers who joined Google. The idea that Mozilla is "competing" with Google or offers some meaningful alternative is bonkers. Mozilla's work has direct benefits for Google. By all means, use Firefox and warn against Chrome. But spare us the illusions that this somehow impedes Chrome. The companies are business partners; they share data under agreement
IMHO, all these popular "modern" browsers suck.^3 Too large, too complicated and effectively outside the user's control. The developers maintaining them are paid with profits from selling advertising services, or search data in the case of Mozilla. The resulting software is designed with advertising and tracking in mind. That is why we see bizarre ideas, e.g., from Google, Apple, about how make data collection, advertising and tracking "acceptable".
3. This comment was submitted without using a browser. I'm using vim 4.6, hunspell, a couple of custom UNIX filters, a TCP client and a tiny 54-line shell script