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Comment by dest | Hacker News Reader

If only we could pay for Firefox so they could get rid of that Google funding…

has any browser ever made that work? Opera has to be the most popular by a mile and even they couldn't keep that business model going

Not in my knowledge. It would be hard to have the same amount of funding as they have now from Google.

especially when you pay your executives 7 figure salaries

That’s what a good executive costs these days. You could try to hire a CEO for $100,000/yr with the expected quality of applicants.

> That’s what a good executive costs these days.

maybe they should go get some then

Good executives that have achieved an ever shrinking market share while continuing to piss of enthusiast users? At this point they could pay someone with zero experience minimum wage and would probably do no worse. Have you considered that a "good executive" (i.e. someone good at maximizing shareholder values and his own compensation) is the last person Firefox needs?

People just expect browsers to be free. And there's no way that can be more than Google money.

That's because browsers should be free. They are infrastructure, just like bridges. And nobody wants a bridge troll sitting on the single bridge crossing the internet river, demanding money from everyone.

I mean, bridge tolls are absolutely a thing.

My area has roads w/o bridges that have a toll.

If things keep going as they are, my area will soon have a bridge, several bridges, and no roads.

But it will still have tolls.

Bridges are not free

No but they are available at very reasonable prices in prime locations.

If anyone's interested I have a very pretty one listed in Brooklyn. See my Google search ad for details. :P

They are also not funded with blood money.

You pay for bridges with tax. Tax funded browser sounds good in theory, but I don't trust the people managing my tax money to run a tech project like Firefox. Most likely it gets handed to the lowest private sector bidder, with the stipulation that any privacy preserving — sorry, I meant criminal hiding — features be removed.

Orion (by Kagi) is still new, but seems to be trying.

Orion is webkit-based though, not a whole independent browser like FFox.

To be fair, Firefox on iOS is also WebKit based thanks to Apples’s rules. Much of a muchness in this aspect.

I'm not criticizing Orion for that; I actually enjoy it quite a lot (and will do even more when they will have ironed out all the UI bugs).

Also I'm eager to see how it will behave on Linux when they will have finished their port; I hope we will finally have a really low-energy consumption browser then.

What exactly is the problem? I understand a browser is a complex program but is the claim it is impossible to build a browser without continual dependence on advertising toxic dollars?

> a browser is a complex program

A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.

I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.

My Linux kernel is not riddled with ads?

Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.

> My Linux kernel is not riddled with ads?

And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?

Does your hypothetical kernel make it easy or difficult for you to install add-ons that block ads? Does the organization that build it have a conflict of interest regarding advertisting/surveillance interests such as Google/Meta/...?

Not sure what your point is. My comparison was not made to be stretched infinitely. Next question may be "does your kernel render web pages?", but I don't see where it is going.

But to give an answer: if you wanted to bake an ad-blocker in the Linux kernel that would prevent programs from showing ads in a transparent way (the ads just don't show and the programs still work and look fine), I think it would not be trivial at all.

But I don't see the point of going down that discussion.

Look, Windows (apparently) displays ads to some users. So even for OSes, if they can get away with it, they will shove ads in our face.

Linux is a highly complex piece of software. It is OSS. And it does not shove ads in face of its users. So my point is if there is a will there is a way.

The question is then why aren't we all getting behind a solid OSS browser? Specially now with AI coding assist, this should be even more feasable.

> The question is then why aren't we all getting behind a solid OSS browser?

Like Firefox or Chromium? Seems like we aren't, for some reason.

We're this conversation so Firefox is not up to task. And Chromium is connected in some way with the poster child for ad tech and surveillance capitalism.

So the point stands: OSS community has shown itself capable of tackling some of the hairiest technical challenges (Linux) and we should not let the notion that 'browsers can only be developed by corporations' stop us from creating OSS alternatives to the current offerings.

> OSS community has shown itself capable of tackling some of the hairiest technical challenges (Linux)

Has it though, say in the last decade? My first intuition would be that Linux was in a very different situation when it started. And it's not like there are 10 similar open source kernels that were created in the last decades and that got usable enough to be replacements for Linux...

Perhaps not riddled but Mozilla has added ads to Firefox itself and considering their acquisitions and behavior in general you can expect them to add more.

Yeah, if everyone gave $10, that would get them at least $50.

LOL

(and I love ff)

Me too, but we are few. Google paid $585M in 2024. I don't think Mozilla can get 58 million users to pay $10 each. That might even exceed the FF user base. Even if they could, they would use it as extra money, not to get rid of Google.

There's dozens of us ! So 120$ should be pretty realistic.

Mozilla has had a lot of funding over the years. They wasted most of it on useless side-projects. If, instead, they had saved up into a foundation, they could have been financially independent like a decade ago. Do not try to pay for Firefox; they'll just waste that too.

Just.. use different search engine? Startpage if you still want the Google's search results but with vastly superior privacy

If only we could open source it and load it onto the phone with Sideloadly.

... if only their donation links would let you specify your donation goes to Firefox development and no other mozilla service ...

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