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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that there is no way to make Firefox economically sustainable without Google (or some other search provider, but google won that war comprehensively). Browsers are fully commoditized and subsidized. Funding the browser with a combination of outside revenue sources and search deals is the way everyone does it.

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It can, they just need to approach it not like a big corporation with a multi million dollar a year CEO but as a grassroots project.

If something like KDE can build a whole desktop on a shoestring budget with some donations, Firefox can too. And I'd gladly donate to it. Problem is I can't because you can only donate to the foundation. And I don't want to fund their dogood distractions, just firefox.

Besides, the search deal will end one way or another. Either Firefox will lose so much marketshare that Google no longer bothers, or the DoJ will finally ban the search deals. Relying on it is ultra stupid.

With all due respect a web browser is much more complicated than a desktop environment. Firefox is like 30 million lines of code, much of which is active attack surface. A high performance JIT JavaScript engine alone might be more complex than KDE. Random people can fix UI bugs and contribute to simple desktop apps in a way that they likely cannot in general do with the deep internals of a browser.

With all due respect, that's all the more reason to put all the resources they can behind browser development, rather than scattering it across unrelated projects.

KDE includes a web browser. Which spawned Safari in fact.

KDE removed KHTML and KJS. Falkon is a QtWebEngine wrapper.

Yeah but they did make it. They just dropped maintaining it because it wasn't really being used.

KHTML and KJS weren't really being used because KDE couldn't keep them useful.

And Chrome!

KDE has already created a browser engine, a browser, and a JavaScript engine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814523

I like KDE. But their small funding hurts development.

How so? I think it's pretty perfect as it is.

> Mozilla is focused on deploying its roughly $1.4 billion worth of reserves to support “mission driven” organizations, according to a new report.

Back of the envelope math says that's worth 50-70 million dollars a year, taking into account inflation. A cracked developer is worth 1/2 a million per year, both of Mozilla's core offerings are OSS so benefit from free code contributions. Is that not enough for a dozen highly paid software engineers, a well paid CEO and infra? This is ignoring future donations.

> Back of the envelope math says...

It sounds like you haven't looked into Mozilla Foundation's history regarding CEO salary, bonuses and overall use of funds.

what is the math you're doing, exactly?

also, I don't think a dozen devs is enough to support a competitive browser

anyway, companies are far(!) from just devs

I think an important outside revenue source they haven't tapped is sovereign wealth funds from countries that want to ensure there's a way for its citizens to use domestic web sites without depending on an opaque binary blob.

Of course this funding would come with some pretty big strings attached. Including perhaps "no AI in the core system."

If it focused JUST on Firefox and appealed to the privacy conscious tech community which is relatively small but wealthy, they could make it sustainable via a combination of open source support and donaitons imo.

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