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Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

You can't monetize a browser. They have to keep trying to create new products, but they inevitably fail. Pocket, FirefoxOS, Persona, all dead. This new stuff will fail too, because Mozilla has no USP and no way to create a best-in-class product in any market. So they rely on imitating what everyone else is doing, but with more "crunchy" vibes ("values", "trust", "we're a nonprofit") because that's the only angle they can compete on. They missed mobile completely so even their browser is bleeding users and dying.

The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.

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I'd pay $10 a month for a browser, I pay that much for music and TV shows and I spend more time in a browser. I'm sure the market doesn't agree with me but I pay more for things that are less useful.

Kagi and Orion have entered the chat.

Let's see if you are telling the truth. I will sell you a browser for $10 a month. DM me.

> You can't monetize a browser.

You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.

What they could do is get funding from sovereign tech funds.

I don't think the rest of the world likes their dependencies on US companies and their love for surveillance.

Of course, to do it right means ensuring there's enough non-US organizational structure with the know-how to take over the project should things go pear-shaped, and oversight to spot of the pear is taking shape.

But that's what governments can do, assuming they don't want to be under the thumb of the US. ("Oh, you think tariffs are bad? We'll do to you like we did those ICC judges and shut off all your accounts.")

They already do monetize it, every search engine included by default paid to be there. They forcefully remove those that don't pay from existing installations without the user's permission, as they did with yandex.

Fork Firefox, bundle uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block et el and sell it is a consumer web security product (that's not complete shit) with a monthly subscription. Use some of the proceeds to support the devs working on the underlying tech, similar to what Valve are doing for Wine, Proton and Fex.

Bonus points:

1. Multi layered approach to dealing with ads and other malware.

2. A committment to no AI or other bloat - that's not what I'm paying you for.

3. Syncable profiles.

Charging for a browser died with Netscape in 1998

I think that's false, with the current state of internet, advertising everywhere, enshitification and monetization of users private data, some people are ready to pay for services that were considered "free".

I am paying for kagi, and I would pay for a good, private browser (I know they make onion but I'm on linux, not macos or windows).

Vivaldi is a decent option if you aren't specifically looking to get off Blink as the engine. It has an integrated adblocker and many other privacy-related features.

I'm specifically avoiding chrome-based browser as form of protest against google's monopoly.

Currently using waterfox, but might go for librewolf... In any case I'm very interested in servo, even thinking of contributing to it.

But I'm not pitching a browser. This is a web security product which people do pay for - it's a billion dollar product category in fact. The only functional difference is that the malware and fraud protection it provides is demonstrably superior to all of its competitors.

They dont have to.

They could be lean and focus on firefox only.

Now they get 150m from google, spend just a part on firefox and rest on failures and hobby projects to get promoted.

If they were focued on core business, 1) they would have a war chest 2) they could leave off donations

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

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