[HN Gopher] Let me pay for Firefox
___________________________________________________________________
Let me pay for Firefox
Author : csmantle
Score : 693 points
Date : 2025-07-13 08:38 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (discourse.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (discourse.mozilla.org)
| MzHN wrote:
| Yes! My pet peeve is people keep saying "no one would pay" or "it
| wouldn't work" but the thing is, as far as I know, it has never
| been tried.
|
| 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...
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It would be death for Firefox given the scope of its mission
| rvz wrote:
| First of all, your donations to Mozilla don't go to funding the
| browser.
|
| Even if they did, it isn't even enough to sustain the company
| to continue developing the browser.
| MzHN wrote:
| > First of all, your donations to Mozilla don't go to funding
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> as far as I know, it has never been tried_
|
| 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?
| rounce wrote:
| Weren't they also (at least in part) acquired by Chinese
| investors at some point in the not too distant past?
| arp242 wrote:
| Yes, Opera has done a Theseus and is nothing like it was.
| throw8394i4484 wrote:
| Opera corporation had most of income from embedded devices.
| Presto engine (and something they had before) could run on
| low end CPU without MMU and floating point math, with a few
| megabytes of memory! Browser wss just a side gig for them.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| I think it's fascinating how languages shape our society. In this
| case, the ambiguity between free as in "at no cost" and free as
| in "freedom" is probably hurting the FOSS landscape. In French,
| there are two very distinct terms for this: "gratuit" vs "libre".
| And it doesn't sound as an oxymoron to pay for a "logiciel
| libre".
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| "Gratis" meaning "no cost" is an English word, albeit an
| uncommonly used one.
| yawpitch wrote:
| Technically that's a Latin word that just happens to have
| kept the same spelling and meaning in English.
| dpassens wrote:
| > kept the same spelling and meaning in English
|
| So it's also an English word, then?
| yawpitch wrote:
| Arguably it's really only an English word once it
| deviates from the original spelling and meaning. Like how
| the original British English "Aluminum" is now the
| American English word for the metal represented by the
| newer British English "Aluminium", all of which borrowed
| from, but didn't outright steal, the Latin roots.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You've made the faux pas of presenting the spiel that a
| word's etymology or genus means it cannot be English.
|
| 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)
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| English has not been in its final form forever, therefore
| there was a language or languages that preceded it.
| English words derive from one of these previous
| languages. Since a word from another language cannot be
| an English word, English does in fact not have any
| English words except ones that sprang arbitrarily out of
| nowhere.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > English words derive from one of these previous
| languages. Since a word from another language cannot be
| an English word [...]
|
| You sabotage your own argument with these two sentences.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > Since a word from another language cannot be an English
| word
|
| This is false, so your argument is also false.
| yawpitch wrote:
| I'm enjoying the schadenfreude (note, the English word,
| not the German one) of watching this thread unspool.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Technically it's now both a Latin and English word. And
| several other languages as well.
| triska wrote:
| On the other hand, how come that the desired connotation is not
| the immediately prevailing one _in the land of the free_ which
| is not the land of no cost.
| awestroke wrote:
| Nobody thinks of it as "land of the free" nowadays
| awstruck wrote:
| > Nobody thinks of it as "land of the free" nowadays
|
| 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...
| photonthug wrote:
| Well, the prompts used in testing (
| https://github.com/t3dotgg/SnitchBench/tree/main/prompts)
| are pretty serious and basically about covering up public
| health disasters with lobbyists, so I'm not sure this is
| the kind of freedom you might want.
|
| 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
| latexr wrote:
| > though neither is the world
|
| 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.
| GLdRH wrote:
| That has been true for a long time, even when liberals
| were happier with american policy.
| edoceo wrote:
| I do. Bit of a rough patch at the moment tho.
| immibis wrote:
| Consider re-evaluating your beliefs.
|
| The more someone has to tell you that you're free, the
| less you actually are. C.f. North Korea.
| edoceo wrote:
| I will not reconsider. I will work to make my belief
| reality.
| layer8 wrote:
| It has become quite a stretch.
| latexr wrote:
| > _in the land of the free_ which is not the land of no cost.
|
| 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.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Freedom isn't Free. There's a hefty fuckin' fee
| grishka wrote:
| In Russian as well, svobodnyi vs besplatnyi. Free software =
| svobodnoe PO, free beer = besplatnoe pivo
| GLdRH wrote:
| Isn't English actually the only language where "free" can also
| mean "at no cost"?
|
| 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").
| eurleif wrote:
| The German "frei" can mean "free of charge" sometimes:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frei#Usage_notes
| GLdRH wrote:
| How could I forget about Freibier. Unverzeihlich.
| emmericp wrote:
| (Native German speaker here), it's a very rare use of the
| word "free" and usually only used in fixed terms like
| "Freibier", it wouldn't even work for other drinks, e.g.,
| you can't say "Freisaft" or "freier Saft" for free juice,
| it has to be kostenlos there.
|
| 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.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "Freier Eintritt" seems to be used quite often.
| layer8 wrote:
| "Frei" can have the meaning of "kostenlos"
| (https://www.dwds.de/wb/frei#d-1-1-7), but these are
| limited circumstances that are usually perceived as
| metaphorical idioms. "Freie Software" has no direct
| connotation of being "free as in beer" (unlike
| "Freeware").
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I think in some way it has become that, but I assume the
| roots are different. People might have said "Freier
| Eintritt" before it became associated with money. One
| might be able to see this in "Portofrei" which does not
| mean "free as in beer" but no postage required - for my
| feeling it doesn't feel like "Freier Eintritt" yet, it
| does not have as much money connotations (though when it
| wanders to the front like in "freiporto" it feels more to
| be about money).
|
| 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).
| GLdRH wrote:
| The use as a suffix "-frei" is something different I
| think. I'm pretty sure it has kept its meaning of "-los"
| ("-less") since a long time ago.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Spanish has separate words (gratis and libre) and so does
| Dutch (gratis and vrij).
| rwmj wrote:
| Japanese: muryou (cost free) vs. jiyuu (freedom)
| crabmusket wrote:
| I have seen OS projects use the word "libre" in English before
| to distinguish between "free as in beer" and "free as in
| speech" uses of the word. But I can't remember which projects
| I've seen using that.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| LibreOffice?
| amoshebb wrote:
| is an "as in free beer" project.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| The intention was great, but I find the word awkward.
| Leebraayyy
|
| It looks/sounds foreign and feels a bit pretentious to use in
| conversation
|
| .. or I feel like some gringo speaking broken Spanish
| latexr wrote:
| > It looks/sounds foreign and feels a bit pretentious to
| use in conversation
|
| "Entrepreneur" is worse on both counts, yet I don't see
| those complaints about it. Must be because it's associated
| with money.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| Sure sure, and Omelette, but once the word hits everyday
| usage it starts to feel different. There is a awkwardness
| hump to get through - and libre has a large one. So I
| feel it'll never catch on unfortunately
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It already caught on once. It's already in the dictionary
| (though OED suggests it is obsolete). Though English was
| probably much closer to the Norman/French influence then.
| It may be the Tudor influence on unifying England under a
| common language was what killed the historic use of
| libre.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's a popular line of fragrances from YSL. ;)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| In British-English "libre" is French from Latin roots (
| _liber_ ). Though Spanish has the same word, I'd guess all
| Latin languages do.
|
| We get liberty, liberal from the same root.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libre gives a pronunciation
| which matches my own (lee-bruh).
| goopypoop wrote:
| Lee-breh?
| kube-system wrote:
| I think people on tech forums overestimate the significance of
| this in today's world.
|
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| Let me donate, at least...
|
| By the way, how do you prove that a paid for version has no
| tracking?
| Kuinox wrote:
| By releasing the source. FOSS software doesn't mean gratuit.
| nottorp wrote:
| Not enough since you get binary builds. The sibling comment
| is a solution.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| What stops someone else from just offering a download of
| release builds for free?
|
| I understand FOSS can be financed when the customer is a
| business, but when it's a user?
| notpushkin wrote:
| Nothing, but it doesn't work for closed source software
| either.
|
| 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.
| morsch wrote:
| Nothing, just like nobody stops people from releasing
| modified builds now in fact people do (waterfox, ...).
| Trademark law provides a moat, as do fees to get into
| proprietary app stores.
| wongarsu wrote:
| By shipping the source code and doing reproducible, signed
| builds
| moltar wrote:
| Yes!
|
| 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.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Telegram also introduced ads, but yeah, it's a good example.
| (It does however suck, but for unrelated reasons.)
| eMPee584 wrote:
| .. as of yet, promises aside.
|
| Someone should try porting the open source TG clients to the
| matrix protocol by the way..
| sebastiennight wrote:
| You might want to be more specific on the definition of "not
| sold your soul" when praising a messaging app that holds the
| encryption keys of their homemade encryption scheme on their
| closed-source servers.
| c0l0 wrote:
| I realize it's far from a perfect solution to finance the
| creators of the only browser I consider usable today - but I
| subscribed to Mozilla's VPN service some two years ago, even
| though I virtually never use it, and mostly to help them make a
| bit of a buck through me. (And still, it is nice to have the
| _option_ of geoblocking circumvention at the ready, although I 'd
| wish for them to just support "ordinary" wireguard/wq-quick as a
| client option).
| amelius wrote:
| Hmm that might make them reallocate developers from the browser
| to the VPN ...
| Ayesh wrote:
| I could be wrong, but Firefox VPN is a relabeled Mullvard
| VPN, which probably has enough engineers to keep things going
| well. Plus, it's a VPN service, I imagine a small number of
| developers is all it takes to keep it up to date.
| amelius wrote:
| But then your payment goes to this Mullvad company although
| maybe Mozilla gets a small fee.
| scns wrote:
| Subscription to their email forwarding service Relay is another
| possibility.
| pabzu wrote:
| The post seems to present a false dichotomy:
| FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices.
| Paid software ensures quality assurance.
|
| I believe counter-examples exist for both models. Many FOSS
| projects have avoided becoming tools for user exploitation, while
| numerous paid software products have deteriorated due to
| corporate greed.
| foxfire21 wrote:
| The poster worked at Mozilla Corporation, so I think they're
| saying that unless you pay for Firefox, it's getting funded in
| other ways that aren't in its users' best interest, like MoCo
| selling user data, which they've admitted to.
|
| 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.
| pabzu wrote:
| Fair. My main disagreement is with the "general principle"
| the original poster used to support their argument regarding
| MoCo.
| chii wrote:
| > what would stop them from both taking my money and selling
| user data?
|
| 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.
| r_sz wrote:
| I don't think 'FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and
| bad practices' is implied by the article. What the article
| implies IMHO is that relying too much on ads leads to
| enshittification and bad practices.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If anything the average is the exact opposite. Venture capital
| ensures enshittification to recoup costs.
| rthrfrd wrote:
| The problem is that a lot of the most influential FOSS only
| exists because of VC capital (or other dysfunctional
| markets), either because they sponsor projects directly, or
| they pay the salaries of the people who happen to do it
| themselves. FOSS has become a form of economic dumping that
| could be causing more harm than good. If Google couldn't
| "dump" Chrome for free, or Facebook couldn't "dump" React for
| free, maybe browsers or front-end frameworks would be
| regular, functional, competitive markets. Making it "FOSS" is
| just an inoculation against what would otherwise be
| considered an anti-competitive practice.
| petepete wrote:
| I'd pay too for a version without sponsored shortcuts and
| suggestions.
|
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| Who's going to tell him about Mozilla's situation?
|
| > 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.
| mzhaase wrote:
| We need more paid stuff. Making everything advertising funded has
| given advertisers too much power over society. We don't see real
| human opinion anymore, we see advertising friendly opinions.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is my kept-warm take on Signal.
|
| 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.)
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Germanys healthcare systems goes Matrix
| crabmusket wrote:
| That is cool! https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germany-s-
| national-health...
| captn3m0 wrote:
| This is the Threema business model: https://threema.com/en
|
| Public app, and a separate business offering - both with E2EE
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, and we are still paying money for it. In fact, now we pay
| twice, once with our attention and then ...
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Firefox is free, none of its users are paying for it.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's not easy when the purchasing power of the working class
| has been falling steadily for the last 45 years. We have now
| blown past Gilded Age-levels of economic inequality and there's
| no signs of stopping.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > when the purchasing power of the working class has been
| falling steadily for the last 45 years
|
| Yeah? How much did an always-on pocket sized computer
| connected to the internet cost in 1980?
| zetsurin wrote:
| This is a weird strawman and it has almost nothing to do
| the parent's claim. The guilded age is 1870-1890's.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I was replying to the bit I quoted?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Even if you _had_ managed to come up with a point by
| selectively quoting the post, that would still be bad.
| The good-faith way to engage with somebody's post is to
| reply to the meaning of the overall post. It might be
| necessary to cut some parts out for logical flow, but
| that shouldn't change the meaning of what you are
| replying to.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Attacking a point by attacking its supporting points is a
| pretty standard way of going about arguing.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sure, but not just by contradicting arbitrary sub-
| sentence snippets of text devoid of context. An attack
| against a supporting point should be related to the way
| that it supports the overall argument.
| petesergeant wrote:
| It's fully the first half of the comment rather than a
| few words taken out of context
| izzydata wrote:
| Manufacturing a pocket sized computer has become
| equivalently easier as it is cheaper to purchase.
| homebrewer wrote:
| This is a very, very Western-centered take. It's been growing
| in most other areas of the world, although from a much lower
| starting point. I'd say it's been "reverting to the mean".
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Agreed. I'd pay PS10/m for a browser that fits with my use
| case. I imagine there's a critical mass of other people willing
| to do the same.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Nothing can compete with the ad model + ad blocker.
|
| 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).
| baby wrote:
| Did you notice that chrome removed the ad blocker extensions?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Google is also getting pretty aggressive about blocking
| people with ad blockers from YouTube. I think it is great.
| I ad-block everywhere, but if people don't want me around
| for that reason, that's their right. If I wanted to watch
| short videos, I'd actually have to become a paying customer
| somewhere!
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Ad blockers still work in Chrome
| thrance wrote:
| Ads have many more perverse effects than wasting your time or
| being ugly, and you can't fix all of those with an ad
| blocker. They're a constant pressure to make everything
| retain your attention for the longest time possible, or to
| editorialize out content that would detract from clicking
| them.
|
| 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.
| benjaminoakes wrote:
| Hard agree. I pay for monthly hosting like FreshRSS, Wallabag,
| etc and support the devs who make those projects. Privacy and
| developer support. And it's not that much.
|
| Definitely interested in making Firefox, Thunderbird, etc
| sustainable too.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Welcome to the world of MacOS X, where there is a very healthy
| ecosystem of pay-once apps made by everything from giant
| corporations, to boutique software shops to individual
| developers.
|
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| JUst pointing out that apple dropped that "X" off in 2016
| cuillevel3 wrote:
| I paid for Mozillla Pocket Premium and they canceled their
| product within a few months, did not properly open-source the
| server, did not export my "permanent library" and refunded 6$. As
| the websites in the "permanent library" are partially offline,
| that data is now lost. No thanks, not buying again.
| kayxspre wrote:
| I suspect that they don't actually maintain the permanent
| library, but rather a formatted view of the content that used
| to be there. Some of the sites I have the URL saved have
| transitioned to paywall and/or merged, goes offline or
| disappeared for some reason, so I can't actually read many of
| the links I exported from it. Though for the one that actually
| catches interest, I'll look for it in archiving service, but
| it's a tiresome work to search for it one by one.
|
| 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.
| cuillevel3 wrote:
| The permanent library was strange. Not very transparent what
| happened there. I am still shocked they did not invest in the
| original idea (tag and archive web page), but instead tried
| to build another content stream with recommended articles and
| such.
| throw8394i4484 wrote:
| Someone should fork Firefox, strip all copyrighted stuff, and
| severe all ties to Mozilla. Worked great for Rust, Servo,
| Thunderbird and several other projects dumped by Mozilla.
|
| 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!
| nicoburns wrote:
| There is also Servo which shares some code with Firefox (Stylo,
| Webrender) while rewriting significant parts.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Thunderbird is de jure still a Mozilla project (through a
| subsidiary, MZLA).
|
| 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.
| throw8394i4484 wrote:
| My understanding is Thunderbird is self funded from
| donations.
|
| > 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...
| notpushkin wrote:
| I mean I do agree - donations plus endowment should work
| pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549144
| lenkite wrote:
| I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but _not_ to Mozilla
| Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and
| operations - not to pad the CEO salary.
| delusional wrote:
| Yet we happily do that for everything else.
|
| 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.
| lenkite wrote:
| I think you are being too pessimistic. Maybe it is difficult
| for this to happen for Firefox due to its system already
| subverted. However, it is not true of OSS in general. Folks
| already directly donate to creators/maintainers with no
| executive in between.
| delusional wrote:
| That's true, although I will point out that we've long had
| a funding crisis in OSS. Tons of very valuable, very
| necessary OSS work is being done for no or little pay.
|
| 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".
| vladms wrote:
| Isn't this the idea of charity though? To give without
| expecting something in return? I think open source
| software had a tremendous positive impact even if some
| companies also made profit out of it. How would it have
| been otherwise? Only walled gardens with no possibility
| of doing anything (like forking) and probably a miserable
| developer experience.
|
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Happily? We seem to have a choice here, ergo the expressions
| of preference to exercise that choice.
| archerx wrote:
| >There's no version of this where you can pay for a service,
| but also dictate how that money is spent.
|
| Well then I'm just not going to pay.
| delusional wrote:
| What I'm trying to get at is the irony that making that
| choice just incentivizes everybody to not give you that
| choice.
| closewith wrote:
| We almost always have that choice. It's just unpalatable
| to some.
| npteljes wrote:
| I think that's because those everything else are products
| with an opaque structure, and Mozilla, and for example
| Wikipedia, are more transparent. Really highlights why some
| people don't open up, either themselves, their source code,
| or their organizational structure: it's just inviting endless
| criticism.
|
| 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.
| delusional wrote:
| This has been part of my conclusion too.
|
| 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.
| agilob wrote:
| >Yet we happily do that for everything else.
|
| Is it because we're >happy< to do it, or there's no choice?
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Or in slightly less fatalistic words: In any entity with more
| than 1-2 employees you need someone to make decisions and be
| accountable for them. The normal solution is to have a
| director/CEO for this. You may be able to get away with
| paying them slightly less than market rates if they are doing
| it for a good cause, but if you want someone competent you
| will need to pay them a relatively high salary to compete
| with other employers.
|
| Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike
| pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not
| reasonable.
| dartharva wrote:
| Firefox's entire appeal is that it is not like every other
| corporate entity. Its legitimacy hinges on how far it can
| separate itself from intrusive corporate interests.
|
| If Mozilla goes the same way, Firefox loses all goodwill it
| gathered over the years and stops being an option against
| Chrome et al.
| lucb1e wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before
|
| 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 50EUR 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"
| m-schuetz wrote:
| I can't get around doing it for good products that are better
| than their competition. Firefox isnt that. I'd pay if it
| meant supporting enthusiastic engineers that try to make the
| best browser and strive to compete with Goliath. I'm not
| going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a product
| that is worse than the competition.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes exactly! Except for developers who I don't like and except
| for the development of features I don't like and except for
| certain functions within the code which I don't fancy, and also
| they have to use tabs instead of spaces if they want my hard
| earned money! Also which text editor is each developer using?
| DangerousPie wrote:
| How are you expecting to run an entity with developers,
| support, and operations without any leadership?
|
| 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.
| reidrac wrote:
| It can be done; an example is Igalia:
| https://www.igalia.com/jobs/
|
| > 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.
| simsla wrote:
| I've been in organisations with great developers but no
| leadership. It's a shit show.
| rs186 wrote:
| > If there's enough money to go to the developers actively
| working on a product to make it sustainable
|
| 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.
| sltr wrote:
| They wrote "pad the CEO salary", not "support any leadership"
|
| Compare to Torvalds. You may or may not like his leadership,
| but nobody feels sour about his salary.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Three examples off the top of my head -- PostgreSQL, FreeBSD,
| and Debian -- are doing just fine without someone "taking
| responsibility" (when have Mozilla's CEO ever done that?).
|
| 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.
| rs186 wrote:
| I think all of these projects have contributors who are
| getting paid at other companies for the work, notably
| Linux. Not quite so for Firefox. I mean, tell me where does
| Linus get his income? You think that can be fully
| replicated for Firefox?
| DangerousPie wrote:
| PostgreSQL is just a community of volunteers as far as I'm
| aware, not full-time developers employed by the project.
|
| 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
| walls wrote:
| All of the people on Postgres, FreeBSD, and Debian
| combined make a tiny fraction of what the Mozilla CEO
| does.
| AJMaxwell wrote:
| Like what?
| a3w wrote:
| I agree that probably the three mentioned projects don't
| total a 6 million USD budget, which is the CEO salary at
| Mozilla, but is only close to it.
| gtsop wrote:
| > don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that
| lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set
| a strategy
|
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think you need a CEO, you just don't need a CEO that is
| paid $7m/year. That's ludicrous. What amazing decisions have
| they been making that were worth that amount? Have they
| really contributed more than a team of 70 developers could?
|
| There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for
| far less, like $200k/year.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be that. Take that and bump it 5
| times like a million dollars. Throw in more cash if they
| can increase Firefox's market share. Have clauses to
| penalize anything about opt-out telemetry or anti-privacy
| features. I'm happy to add more carrots as well as more
| sticks.
|
| All said and done, that will still be way more reasonable
| than that ludicrous salary.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I would be fine with $6 million if it was making at least
| that much more in revenue because of the CEO, but I highly
| suspect that it is not. I think $600K would be PLENTY and
| would pull in talented execs and managers.
| nicce wrote:
| CEO is typically needed for-profit purposes on a scale.
| Donating for devs to build browser without that purpose does
| not need CEO. Just a lead engineer and accountants.
| ho_schi wrote:
| Leadership doesn't mean earning more money.
|
| 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.
| vladms wrote:
| Worth thinking of it also "the other way". As long as some
| people (developers) accept an MBA above them getting 38x,
| without adding much value, this will happen.
|
| 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.
| os2warpman wrote:
| I'm worked on many larger teams and leadership is independent
| of compensation.
|
| 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"!
| rc_mob wrote:
| If the CEO changes his salary to 200k then fine I have no
| problem with that. CEOs are overpaid relative to skill and
| that does not sit well with my sense of generosity.
| a3w wrote:
| If dev work is paid for by the community, the CEO payments
| can increase since the budget of Mozilla will stay the same
| but now have less cost to carry elsewhere?
| jm4 wrote:
| I don't know, but ask Mitchell Baker or the board because
| that's exactly what happened during her tenure.
| ghusto wrote:
| > How are you expecting to run an entity with developers,
| support, and operations without any leadership?
|
| Unfortunately, CEO is not always leadership.
|
| Aside from that, leadership can come from the people doing
| the work. It is working in many cases.
| stefan_ wrote:
| It's bizarre. In Japan, the custom is to revere your elders,
| in the US its apparently whoever is titled "leader". All of
| HN shivers in exaltation at the mention of the word.
|
| 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.
| its-summertime wrote:
| I don't think paying for Firefox is going to lead to Mozilla
| making decisions that benefit Firefox.
|
| 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.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| I used to want to donate to Mozilla Foundation, but I've long
| lost any hope that the corporation would spend that money in a
| way that makes sense to me. The pessimist on me would expect
| donated money to be spent on more built-in "campaigns", "studies"
| or ads. Or maybe a bonus for their executives.
|
| 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.
| skywal_l wrote:
| It's kind of disheartening to see what happened to the Mozilla
| Foundation. And it makes me kind of afraid of what's going to
| happen to linux once Linus is out. It seems that a great
| project requires a great BDFL, otherwise it _will_ be taken
| over by ghouls.
| WHA8m wrote:
| Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized
| than Mozilla? We're so so blessed with Linus and everyone is
| afraid of the moment the project has to stand without him.
| But I'm confident he's aware and working towards that point
| in time. I'm not too much into it though, so this is more or
| less assumptions.
| Gentil wrote:
| Linux is a trademark of Linus. Which is why Linux
| Foundation which is run by corporates like Microsoft,
| Google etc is staying aside. After Linus, it would like
| corporate board memebers changing CEOs at their wish.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| The Linux Foundation also runs several other projects,
| none of which do I see being ran terribly poorly from a
| corporate meddling point. I can only hope that is a
| strong signal of things to come.
| Gentil wrote:
| Did I say anything is run poorly? Or good for that
| matter? The difference is intent. Run for community and
| run for corporate are both different. Currenlty Linus is
| the only thing standing in the way of LF pulling another
| Rust Foundation. Cos it's run by corporates as well. Time
| will tell.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| What do you mean by "pulling another Rust Foundation"?
| Gentil wrote:
| Rust foundation has not been very community friendly.
| That's cos corporates run it. There was a fork of the
| language called crab or something cos of this at one
| point. Take Linus out of the scenario, it's the same
| thing that's probable about Linux Foundation.
| mycatisblack wrote:
| Has he ever hinted about successors?
| WHA8m wrote:
| I did a quick search. Names were named by him here [1] in
| 2024 - but not as successors per se. More like candidates
| for important roles in the future. This [2] interview
| from 2020 touches the subject as well.
|
| 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.)
| arp242 wrote:
| Same with e.g. PostgreSQL.
|
| 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.
| blackenedgem wrote:
| With PostgreSQL my biggest concern is what happens when
| we no longer have Tom Lane, Petere, etc. Rather than the
| project dying I see the opposite happening; it gets
| feature crept by contributors adding in their own custom
| behaviour and it becoming too complex.
|
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| No project or development style is perfect and they all
| come with their own set of upsides and downsides.
| PostgreSQL is no exception. Maybe the PostgreSQL 20 years
| from now will be a different type of project with
| different types of trade-offs. That doesn't mean it will
| be worse. I'm not so worried about this.
| sealeck wrote:
| > Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and
| decentralized than Mozilla?
|
| Is it? IME Linux kernel development is a somewhat toxic
| place.
| kbelder wrote:
| >IME Linux kernel development is a somewhat toxic place.
|
| I think that's why it's healthier. A bit like the human
| immune system.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| GHOULS doesn't even begin to describe the people who take
| over these foundations. They are parasites who seek out
| nonprofits to infiltrate, and once they gain a position of
| power they bring in their pals and set up shop. Suddenly the
| CoC is weaponized to crush dissent, the decisions are made
| behind closed doors, and the organization starts contributing
| to political organizations that help their class of parasites
| spread. And there are WAY more of them than there are good-
| hearted honest people starting foundations. When a new
| foundation is created, these parasites line up to see who can
| corrupt it first.
| immibis wrote:
| It would be possible to create a new foundation that works on
| Firefox and is not Mozilla.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| It is possible to create a new foundation that works on a new
| browser product based on Gecko indeed. You just can't call it
| Firefox because of trademark ownership.
|
| It would be interesting to see how it collaborates / competes
| with the origin project, how fast and how far they diverge
| etc.
| altairprime wrote:
| You can if you arrange with Foundation to license the
| trademark under non-profit terms. Not that this is likely
| to be done by anyone, but if anyone could do it, I'd like
| to think the Servo group could.
| weego wrote:
| The sheer volume of sidequest projects they've put resources
| into that were clearly self-indulgence projects from internal
| staff, that had no obvious market need or target user-base put
| me off years ago.
|
| 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.
| pca006132 wrote:
| I feel like these are stuff that the C-suite needs for
| justifying their pay. If it is "boring browser development",
| it will show that they are doing nothing, redundant, and
| cannot have bonuses and salary raise.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I'd argue you don't need a C-suite to develop firefox and
| that's the root of the problem.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| So a foundation model instead, like discussed in: [Open
| Source Security] Open Source Foundations with Kelley
| Misata of Suricata #openSourceSecurity
| https://podcastaddict.com/open-source-
| security/episode/19338... via @PodcastAddict
|
| I'm genuinely curious, no experience in any of that.
| josephg wrote:
| Yep.
|
| 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.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| They have cut back on those a lot now, haven't they?
| nabakin wrote:
| They're trying to diversify their revenue so it doesn't all
| come from Google. All these 'self-indulgent projects' are
| attempts to actually make enough money to compete with a
| multi-trillion dollar company's resources because they know
| they can't compete long-term.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The parent is referring to things like Coop (social media),
| SkyWriter (IDE), Persona, Solo (website builder), "data
| futures", Servo [1], "big blue button", most of them have
| little to no potential for revenue.
|
| 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
| IshKebab wrote:
| > including Servo here since it seems to have had no real
| roadmap to become integrated into FF
|
| 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.
| its-summertime wrote:
| I think that would be believable if a massive portion
| wasn't spent in venture capitalism based gambling, where
| they put 90% of their eggs in the AI basket, of which, 70%
| are small unknown groups, 30% is just hugging face which
| really doesn't need their money, but at least that was a
| good bet.
| blindriver wrote:
| Because they are a non-profit, they have to spend their money
| every year. That's why Mozilla is/was over employed and
| following all these projects that die, because they need
| these engineers to work on something.
|
| 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.
| dontTREATonme wrote:
| That's not how NFPs work. I'm on the board of a NFP, we
| absolutely are able to save money year to year. The big
| difference between us and a regular corp is we don't have
| shareholders or paid board members.
| kelnos wrote:
| Charitably, I'd like to believe that all these side quests
| were in search of actual, real, substantial, alternative
| revenue streams, in order to reduce dependency on Google.
|
| 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.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Agreed. Until I upgraded phones and just couldn't be bothered
| anymore, I kept around an old build of Firefox from before they
| messed up extensions. I have to run nightly now to get my
| extensions and just pause updates at relatively bug-free
| builds. It's absurd how they took the one selling point and
| lost it. I've even switched to edge canary because it gives me
| extensions and didn't have a few regressions (that eventually
| got fixed) that prevented smooth video watching
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| > It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost
| it.
|
| No, it's obvious. Google Pays for Firefox. Google doesn't
| want Adblock Extensions.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| No, contrary to you and GP, the stable version of Firefox
| for Android (on the Google Play Store) supports all Firefox
| extensions, including ad blockers.
|
| 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.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > 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...
| layer8 wrote:
| The article doesn't advocate for donations, however.
| mrjay42 wrote:
| Oh well, thanks for mentioning Floorp, I'm gonna try it right
| now.
|
| I use Firefox, but I'm curious about whether I'll 'feel' a
| difference with Floorp, in terms of performance.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| I don't feel that firefox is slow on anything I use it on
| other than Android. Its reasonably responsive on all the
| machines I have ever used it with including some pretty old
| laptops. It seems pretty smooth, its been a while since I
| used chrome.
| EasyMark wrote:
| The only thing that firefox seems slow to me on is some of
| the online browser benchmarks. Day to day? I don't even
| notice. One thing that I noticed that -can- slow down firefox
| rendering a lot is using dark reader, but that isn't FF
| fault.
| hengheng wrote:
| There is a sad parallel to Wikimedia Foundation, rooted in the
| same argument: We _don 't know_ the correct price. These
| entities are effectively monopolies with no competitors, and
| there is no public negotiation on what the annual budget of
| these entities should be.
|
| 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.
| sealeck wrote:
| > 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!
| hengheng wrote:
| If only.
| sealeck wrote:
| A very informative comment.
| Levitz wrote:
| The exact same way it always worked.
|
| It's also obscenely disingenuous to ask for donations like
| they do with this current model. Downright insulting.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I don't think there are objections to Wikipedia developing
| the community.
|
| 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#Propos
| ed_ch...
| nashashmi wrote:
| It might not be that hard to finance Firefox improvements. We
| should establish a Firefox improvement group. And then set a
| plan for bug improvements roadmap. Then publish that roadmap
| and set up a fund for the programmers.
|
| 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.
| Uehreka wrote:
| I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like
| people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is
| becoming a hacker tribal signifier. 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)".
|
| 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.
| agilob wrote:
| > It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate
| the others or to add a layer
|
| Let's start hating and discussing how much Chrome leads are
| paid too.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| You imply it's the hackers or Hacker News that has changed to
| create a negative atmosphere. From my perspective, however,
| it's the direct result of a very long series of hostile-to-
| hackers decisions made by Mozilla.
| Uehreka wrote:
| To quote myself:
|
| > 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.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| This was probably the day that Firefox jumped the shark for
| me:
|
| 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...
| tempaccount420 wrote:
| Or maybe... Mozilla has to change?
| ericpauley wrote:
| Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I've
| been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much
| just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!)
| extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes
| hundreds of tabs.
|
| Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they've
| done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Firefox works, but it's got thousands of annoying issues
| (many of them just paper cuts, but still).
|
| 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.
| sealeck wrote:
| The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same
| as 30 developers - good leadership can make a difference
| worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially
| in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is
| that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which
| makes the high salary especially difficult to defend.
| It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high
| salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x
| the average staff engineer would make sense.
| bell-cot wrote:
| This.
|
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think if you are paying 30x engineer salary you are
| always going to find CEO's that optimize for money.
| shswkna wrote:
| This should be the top comment.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Pretty much.
|
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| What does it mean to be qualified?
|
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| That's a problem with your selection process, not the
| lack of qualified applicants. It's funny that the
| qualification that people require often seems to be 'has
| done this thing to no great success elsewhere'.
| afavour wrote:
| > It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely
| high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like
| 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
|
| 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.
| Groxx wrote:
| If they're in it for the money, instead of the mission,
| then I say good riddance. That's how we get where we are
| now.
|
| 2-3x staff engineer pay is a LOT of money. More than
| enough.
| afavour wrote:
| I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay
| because they believe in the mission is a recipe for
| disaster. Very likely you'll end up with someone whose
| heart is in the right place but can't execute.
|
| 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.
| Groxx wrote:
| As opposed to now, where you've got someone who is
| willing _and able_ to tank the entire project, but it
| looks good on paper? Is that the kind of person you
| _want_ to be competing for?
|
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| It's not clear CEO pay is driven my market forces at all.
| Pay seems almost completely divorced from competency.
| bobbob27 wrote:
| There's people in the FOSS realm running VERY competent
| operations for simple living wage, or less.
|
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Very likely you'll end up with someone whose heart is
| in the right place but can't execute.
|
| 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.
| rafabulsing wrote:
| Or, arguably even worse, someone whose heart isn't in the
| right place and _can_ execute.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| But they're not. Firefox market share has tumbled and I'm
| getting more and more captchas because my browser is now
| so rare it's considered "suspicious". It's not a flaw in
| the product itself but it does affect its usability.
| Marketshare of at least 5-10% is crucial to be on the
| radar of web devs. Especially because the competition
| besides Safari is basically all one single browser
| because they share the engine.
| afavour wrote:
| There's a difference in arguing that Mozilla should pay
| market rate for a CEO and arguing that the current CEO is
| worth market rate. I'm arguing the former, not the
| latter.
| dimmke wrote:
| Idk I switched to Firefox earlier this year and it's
| honestly been really painless. Not sure why a CAPTCHA
| would trigger based on browser ID when those are so
| easily spoofed. Why would someone be running a bot on a
| less popular browser? I have not noticed any change.
|
| 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.
| sealeck wrote:
| I think there is a small set of people who would do a
| good job running Mozilla. Of these people, a very large
| chunk would do this for $500k annually (this is still
| enough money for almost anyone to lead a very comfortable
| life). Being money-driven might make you _worse_ as
| Mozilla CEO.
| bobbob27 wrote:
| Great point. A company that needs to be steered by
| morality needs leadership that is willing to take the
| helm because their values align.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely
| high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like
| 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
|
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley.
| I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make
| that much.
|
| 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
| dmoy wrote:
| > I think that factors in cost of living in silicon
| valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US
| make that much.
|
| 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.
| eloisant wrote:
| That's the other way around - life in SV is expensive
| because of all those high salary workers.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It doesn't matter what the cost of living is in SV. Their
| employee in a low cost if living area is as productive.
| hajile wrote:
| If salaries were based on value added, a lot of software
| dev salaries would be orders of magnitude higher.
| pcai wrote:
| Hmm if this is true why is it so rare that software devs
| quit their jobs and make more money freelancing or
| starting their own companies?
| Diti wrote:
| We all cannot afford job instability, with mortgages to
| pay.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Also a lot of value add comes from corporations which
| produce things of complexity greater than the sum of
| their constituent parts.
|
| 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.
| pcai wrote:
| I 100% agree! It's almost like income stability is
| valuable!
| jen20 wrote:
| It's uncommon in the US because freelancing means having
| to source your own - usually both expensive and crappy -
| healthcare.
|
| 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.
| elcritch wrote:
| What are those IR35 rules all about?
| LtWorf wrote:
| Probably something along the lines of "if you only have 1
| customer you're an employee"...
|
| 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.
| dspillett wrote:
| Devs are often either not good business people and/or
| don't want to be. Freelancing, in any industry, involves
| a lot more than just doing the actual job.
|
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| I make my employer a million dollars a year by making a
| 0.1% improvement in a billion-dollar-a-year business.
|
| No billion-dollar-a-year business? No million dollars of
| value created.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Maybe 5% of them?
|
| Easily I'd say close to half would make quite a bit lower
| than 300K.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| Nobody pays for Firefox, so I'm not sure how you would
| determine value added. Development could also stop today
| and most of us would never notice the absence of
| upgrades.
| rantallion wrote:
| You could probably calculate it based on how much ad
| revenue one can gain by having your own default search
| engine be the default in Firefox.
|
| 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.
| urda wrote:
| > It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K
| total compensation for a good SW engineer.
|
| I, and many good or great SWE's, wouldn't even begin to
| entertain such a low offer. Your numbers are a little
| off.
| bboygravity wrote:
| All engineers in Europe (except maybe Switzerland) would
| kill for 150k a year. ESPECIALLY remote.
| atq2119 wrote:
| From personal experience, it's definitely possible to
| earn more than 2x that in total compensation before taxes
| as an individual contributor in Europe. Maybe not all of
| Eastern Europe, but I can't really speak to that.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Possible probably, but not at all common.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Thousands of software engineers have been laid off in the
| past few years and the trend doesn't seem to be slowing
| down. I expect that there will, at some point, be quite a
| large number that would entertain a hundred and fifty
| thousand dollars versus no job.
| Jach wrote:
| It can be tricky to narrow down definitions but there are
| at least a million and probably less than 5 million
| software developers in the US. The last few years have
| seen ~100k students graduate with CS degrees each year.
| Thousands of layoffs over the timespan of years isn't
| going to impact it all that much. If you played your
| cards right you could get a $100k+ starting salary at a
| BigCo (not necessarily a FAANG) 10 years ago, I only
| expect that to have expanded, and anyone with a handful
| of years of experience is going to be above that and
| should consider shopping around for >$150k if they aren't
| there already.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| As one of the people at a corporation who sees the
| actually salaries people get paid...
|
| 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.
| palata wrote:
| > They are based on what others pay.
|
| 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.
| Gentil wrote:
| > Mozilla CEO
|
| 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.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Baker left the board in early 2025
| https://www.theverge.com/business/615977/m
| dmazzoni wrote:
| Has it been good leadership, though?
|
| 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.
| sealeck wrote:
| Did you read my comment?
|
| > The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been
| great, which makes the high salary especially difficult
| to defend.
| rs186 wrote:
| > The CEO's salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs
|
| 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.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Real talk: what are the issues with Mozilla's? I hate
| plenty of CEOs so I'm familiar but I've never heard...
| really anything, good or bad, about Mozilla's.
| alternatex wrote:
| Raking in 100s of millions and not improving Firefox is
| one thing. Another is spending those millions on
| acquiring companies that produce no revenue, aka setting
| money on fire.
|
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's not 100s of millions. The previous CEO made between
| 2.4 to 7 million (she was really good at giving herself
| raises) and wasn't there long enough for that to add up
| to even one hundred million. Still she was very overpaid
| with the marketshare ever declining and the new one gets
| even more.
|
| 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.
| akho wrote:
| I think the GP comment is talking about Mozilla Corp
| under her leadership, not her personally. She also didn't
| buy other companies for herself.
| stefan_ wrote:
| This is desktop market share, their "stronghold":
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1j07hrt/heres_h
| ow_...
|
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| So I see the logic, but at the same time, I'm wondering
| why it's important for Firefox to gain a lot of users
| on... any platform, really? Like it's broadly good for
| more people to use Firefox, but also, is that Mozilla's
| actual mission? Because I would personally say that
| Mozilla is not out to make "the most popular browser,"
| they're out to make "the best browser." Ideally the best
| would be the most popular but there's a lot in the way of
| that that doesn't necessarily mean anything negative
| about Mozilla or Firefox.
| homebrewer wrote:
| You can have the best browser in the world, and it's not
| gonna help you if nobody tests for it because its market
| share is approximately 0%. We're already seeing people
| getting stuck in endless captchas because they're using a
| weird browser that behaves differently to 95% of other
| users, and shitty websites inadvertently relying on bugs
| in Chromium which results in stuff not working, or
| running slow as molasses, in FF.
|
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Those things go hand in hand though. If they truly were
| the best people would line up to use it.
|
| 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.
| Maken wrote:
| Without market share you are irrelevant to influence web
| standards. Part of the Firefox mission is to defend a
| open internet, not to lag behind Google implementing
| whatever APIs their services need to the detriment of
| every other player.
| owebmaster wrote:
| which is quite ironic as Firefox Mobile is better than
| Chrome as Android Chrome does not implement many
| features, the most important one being extensions.
| 42lux wrote:
| Well just look at that one CEO instead of doing the same
| mistake you accuse others of.
| wpietri wrote:
| CEO pay has grown wildly in recent decades: https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_the_...
|
| 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.
| sssilver wrote:
| My understanding is that every employees compensation
| (from the janitor to the CEO) is basically a function of
| "how different would the outcome for the shareholders be
| if this person was replaced with someone else".
|
| 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".
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > Obviously Apple wouldn't be Apple without Jobs
|
| Right, _that_ explains why Tim Apple got 100 million
| dollars in 2022, he was just that good at channelling the
| spirit of Jobs.
| eloisant wrote:
| CEO should exist, and it's normal that their compensation
| is the highest of the company.
|
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I disagree (not a CEO). What's the median worker at a
| company like Walmart or Amazon paid? To think that a CEO
| of those couldn't improve (or degrade) the company's
| performance by many thousand times more than a Walmart or
| Amazon worker seems strange to me. They're paying them to
| not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.
|
| Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for
| results. That range of results is very wide for large
| companies.
| walls wrote:
| > They're paying them to not make those companies into
| Sears or J.C.Penney.
|
| Guess who turned Sears and J.C. Penny into what they are
| today?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Jeff Bezos? The Internet?
| sokoloff wrote:
| A mix of bad CEOs at those companies and good CEOs at
| Target, Walmart, and Amazon. I don't believe the median
| worker held any blame at those companies.
|
| From that, I'd conclude that CEO capability and
| effectiveness really matters and paying up for a good one
| is worth it.
| wpietri wrote:
| That is a false binary. It's also plausible that those
| individuals had as much effect on important outcomes as
| the guy at the front of a marching band does on the
| music, with other factors making the difference.
|
| 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.
| hluska wrote:
| Jeff Bezos competed Sears to death.
| josephg wrote:
| At a very large company, I think some individual
| decisions the CEO makes will have much more impact on the
| company than the work output of 268 employees. I think
| some CEOs really are probably worth that kind of money.
| People like Steve Jobs.
|
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| > I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO
|
| If you just _do nothing_ , you'll be better than the last
| 10 years of Mozilla's CEOs.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs
| shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation.
|
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Everyone's acting like a competent CEO is some kind of
| rocket scientist unicorn.
|
| 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.
| calgoo wrote:
| I have seen CEOs that where earning 250k in the EU with
| thousands of employees. The issue is an entitlement
| issue, where today's world makes people think that they
| deserve millions of dollars for leading a company, same
| issue as developers expectings hundreds of thousands for
| their work. Its a corruption of the system which is both
| a effect and a cause of the current death of capitalism
| in the US.
| cogman10 wrote:
| How did your CEO become CEO? Mine got there because he
| was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing
| buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with
| the company that ultimately bought out my old CEO.
|
| 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.
| hluska wrote:
| This is a remarkably short sided and inexperienced
| sounding take on what that position does.
| triceratops wrote:
| In theory, every one of the CEO's reports (other than
| their administrative staff) is capable of stepping into
| the CEO's job. If they aren't capable (albeit some with
| coaching and support) that calls into question the
| company's overall hiring and promotion practices.
|
| 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?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| So like every other piece of software!
| tomalbrc wrote:
| lol market share doesn't lie
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| lol of course it does? Every day at every scale of every
| category of every product or service.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I think you're going to have trouble defending this
| position.
|
| 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.
| Cloudef wrote:
| I feel like the only people who hate firefox are frontend
| devs
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'm more of a full-stack but I develop "Firefox first" on
| my projects if I can and leave it to my tester to see
| that it works on Chrome. X-browser issues turn up rarely,
| I wind up having more trouble with Safari than anything.
|
| 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.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Like you I have found Firefox to work pretty well in real
| world applications. The one place I found it did fall
| over was Microsoft Office Online. FF runs like molasses
| in a large online Excel spreadsheet vs Chrome.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Microsoft is absolutely terrible at Firefox support. I
| feel like they do it in purpose. In fact when I set my
| user agent to Edge half the issues in O365 disappear!
| Suddenly things actually work.
|
| 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..
| paradox460 wrote:
| This works because you're deliberately targeting a set of
| features Firefox supports, and the overwhelming majority
| of the time they're a subset of what Chrome (and
| increasingly, Safari) support
|
| 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
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Worse than that, where I work I can only install an LTS
| Firefox so I am stuck with relatively old features, but,
| hey, I'm in React land using components with some time
| lag in their development that don't use these new
| features. I was kinda shocked to see that mainstream
| toolkits aren't using <dialog/> given that it is a huge
| leap forward for accessibility... screen readers _do not_
| see anything they're not supposed to see, end of story.
| Trouble is that it does cause trouble for frameworks that
| depend heavily on portalization.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _We have an internal app that has screen with a
| JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally.
| Crazy? Yeah._ "
|
| 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!
| bevr1337 wrote:
| Just my two pennies. Firefox is the best vendor for
| adhering to spec. In contrast, Webkit drags its feet
| while Chromium releases and deprecates experimental API
| willy nilly.
|
| There has been one debugging niche where I've found
| Chromium preferable: Chrome sometimes gives better WebRTC
| signaling error messages than Firefox.
| ksec wrote:
| It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in
| sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself
| dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more
| sense.
|
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > As if the product itself dont matter.
|
| 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.
| dralley wrote:
| Chrome's marketing budget is nearly as large as Mozilla's
| entire budget. They spent a couple of years actively
| targeting Firefox users with Chrome ads on the frontpage
| of google.com, and got Adobe Flash and Java and most of
| the free antivirus solutions to auto-install Chrome and
| make it the default browser.
|
| 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).
| immibis wrote:
| The hate on _Mozilla_. This _entire thread_ is people
| saying that Firefox is great, but Mozilla is shit. Why do
| you think that hate on Mozilla is the same as hate on
| Firefox?
| eloisant wrote:
| The thing is that in 2020 it was too late. Firefox have
| been lagging behind Chrome for so long, that the
| headstart they had when Chrome was launched didn't
| matter.
|
| 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".
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't hate Firefox. It is my daily driver. I hate that
| Firefox went from the dominant browser by market share,
| to the minor, insignificant player it is today.
|
| 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.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is
| taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners
| and having your costs inflate to match these donations,
| rather than something, anything to help the sustainability
| of Mozilla.
|
| 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!
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| Mozilla is making my cost inflate? That's weird. I
| started using Firefox a decade ago paying 0 and I'm still
| paying 0. I guess 10x0 is still 0.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| How is Firefox making cost inflate at all? That is not
| explained.
| matteoraso wrote:
| I'm in the same boat as you. Even if there's slight issues
| with Firefox, being able to synchronize my profile with my
| phone using the Firefox app outweighs all of that. AFAIK,
| Chrome doesn't have that.
| arp242 wrote:
| Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting
| standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm
| of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being
| compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission
| when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I
| realise that HN has different people posting different
| arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the
| years.
|
| 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.
| danotdead wrote:
| It's not about getting overly vitriolic. It's simply that
| they said this:
|
| "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_introduc
| e...
|
| 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."
| chillingeffect wrote:
| I cant buy your firefox data.
|
| I can buy a huge block of aggregate data that has some
| things of yours in it.
| throwaway6473 wrote:
| - Advertisers buy user data from Firefox, who can then
| resell or provide this data to others.
|
| - 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?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Firefox isn't supposed to be a business to begin with.
| Mozilla is a nonprofit organization, isn't it?
|
| 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.
| safety1st wrote:
| The reason Mozilla is criticized on every front is because
| they've failed on every front. Their market share has
| cratered, none of their other projects have taken off, they
| haven't even succeeded at providing plausible cover fire
| for Google's illegal monopoly.
|
| They're losers, plain and simple, in the unembellished
| sense that they have lost every battle they've fought; and
| people don't like losers. I'm sorry if that offends you.
|
| Why don't the rest of us start a browser? Again, has that
| "Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition
| and is now awaiting sentencing" point escaped you? Google's
| criminality is the one mitigating favor that would lead me
| to have some empathy for Mozilla, actually; but it would
| still be empathy for a loser.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This is great: https://aframe.io/
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| That's very... VRML of them. Not that VRML was bad as a
| concept, just surprised to see it make a comeback.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Kinda inevitable after we got good VR headsets.
|
| 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.
| prurigro wrote:
| A-Frame is awesome; I use it to share all the
| photospheres I take with friends and family. I'm not
| aware of another easy, cross platform way to do that.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Not every front, they gave us MDN and Rust, both of which
| will probably outlive them. KaiOS (the continuation of
| Firefox OS) is very popular in less developed areas of
| the world. Not that they managed to make anything off
| that.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| MDN was a consolidation of several vendors' web
| documentation efforts (I still remember Opera's Web
| Fundamentals course fondly), which they collectively
| decided to put under Mozilla's stewardship because surely
| Mozilla, among all of them, would maintain it neutrally
| and for the public benefit. It was a good run and Mozilla
| did do a good job at the maintenance for the last decade,
| but with their recent monetization efforts around MDN,
| I'm not hopeful for the future. (This is also why I'm
| incensed by Google's web.dev--it's not just the domain
| name, it's that they are reneging on that old agreement.)
| bevr1337 wrote:
| Their handling of MDN has been disappointing. Laying off
| their staff, asking for unpaid contributors, and selling
| more advertising space was greedy business.
|
| 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.
| hoseja wrote:
| The Mozilla corporation made sure to wash its hands of
| all those successes.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| kaios is basically dead
| arp242 wrote:
| Thank you for proving my point.
| safety1st wrote:
| If you think what I said was a vitriolic personal attack,
| I have no idea what I could say that you wouldn't
| construe as one, and honestly, don't care enough about
| Internet debates to try; best of luck.
| meowface wrote:
| >Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed
| competition and is now awaiting sentencing
|
| >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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| IMO buying defaults isn't as bad as Google's rigging the
| ad market. At least others have outbid them for search
| defaults in the past and in other markets.
| meowface wrote:
| That one is definitely a lot worse and a danger of a
| monopoly/extremely powerful market player. I would argue
| that a monopoly is not inherently "bad"* but has much
| more ability to do bad things if it chooses to, with not
| much potential recourse from others.
|
| 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.
| safety1st wrote:
| Okay. If you think they should be above the law, that's
| who you are. Those are your values. Thanks for letting us
| know.
|
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| Sure, the law should be enforced against them. The law's
| the law. I wasn't trying to imply they should not face
| the full penalties the law requires, here. Obviously they
| should. No one is above the law.
|
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Aren't you implying that _actual fraud_ , as well as
| things like copyright infringement, would be anything
| more than an organization using its money to put itself
| in a position to make more money via consensual contracts
| and running afoul of "wait, you can't be _too_ good at
| running a business " regulations?
| pyrale wrote:
| > The tone of your post just carried an impression of
| criminality in the sense of wanton fraud
|
| Oh, they also did that [1]. If a bank did this kind of
| stuff, perpetrators would see jail.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
| bitlax wrote:
| > Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left
| over 11 years ago) yet?
|
| So now we're at "Why are you obsessed with this? It
| happened so long ago."
|
| No one is having a "flamewar". This has long been a
| discussion that has been appropriate on the site. Now that
| we've seen the consequences of the decisions it's
| appropriate to discuss them.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3793012
| isaacremuant wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Not until those calling it a flame war or something that
| shouldn't be surfaced admit it was a mistake and that kind
| of thing shouldn't happen. But I guess it's the kind of
| thing that people who are partisan/or tribal fanatics think
| is fine, to poison every open source project with their
| politics in the name of inclusivity and actually seeking a
| powerful monoculture.
|
| I want internet to be free and Mozilla Firefox to be for
| the entire world and not have to fight the US partisan
| philosophy of the day, which increasingly wants to censor
| everything or restrict access to the Internet with the
| typical "feel good" excuses.
|
| The hackers who treat information and people as equal and
| deserving predate a lot of the fake inclusivity which is
| all about power dynamics and divisions.
|
| I will keep bringing Brendan Eich and censorship up and I
| will keep using firefox since it offers more freedom to the
| user. Both are not mutually exclusive. Mozilla as a company
| has been quite misguided for a long time.
| rapnie wrote:
| Though weighing "Let me pay for firefox" browser against
| potential conflicts of interest that Mozilla has wrt that
| browser is only prudent.
| wpietri wrote:
| > 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)".
|
| 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.
| halostatue wrote:
| > ... Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against
| corporatist awfulness
|
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think the reason for that is that we are still using the
| Firefox that was made 5 years ago. Then the whole team that
| was working on making the browser more modern and speedier
| was fired (as I understand it anyway).
|
| 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.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't really agree. By sitting at the big tech table you
| give up a lot of ethics.
|
| 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.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| > hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier
|
| 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.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| I love Firefox and will keep supporting it but I hate the
| Mozilla that fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, that
| become all about US woke partisan culture and decided that
| instead of everyone being equal, they had to discriminate
| based on their exclusionary ideology "to compensate". In a
| space that was super hippie and equal and free, they had to
| make it corporate and fake.
|
| They even went absolutely against the freedom of the Internet
| with posts claiming for censorship of wrongthink. Which one
| could easily tie to the Republican vs Democrat bullshit.
|
| Open source, Linux and a free Internet are not about those
| petty Western centric politics.
|
| I don't care if you don't like it. Many of us have lived it
| and used Mozilla from 1.x/2.x versions.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| He wasn't fired. He stepped down because of the uproar not
| in Mozilla itself but in the user communities. Because
| that's what the shareholders care about, disgruntled
| employees don't affect the share value but a dark shadow
| over the brand does.
|
| I was personally also happy to see him go. You can't be
| inclusive when you try to deny people you have nothing to
| do with their equality.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| They have ads on MDN. It's over.
| pxc wrote:
| _Using_ Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using
| Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully
| settled on the _name_ Firefox-- the days of "Firebird" and
| the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I
| used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I
| remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I
| was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages
| like about:mozilla. Firefox _is dear to me_ and it has been
| for a very long time now.
|
| 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.)
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| It's not just Mozilla. HN in general has become quite a
| hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.
| immibis wrote:
| It's not just HN. The public Internet in general has become
| quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.
| freedomben wrote:
| As someone who spends a lot of time on HN, I fully agree with
| you. I am beyond bored of seeing the same things just
| continually reposted and take over some good threads. I
| actually got to a point where I would not click on comment
| threads that had anything to do with anything that Elon
| touches, because it just got ridiculous.
|
| 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
| soulofmischief wrote:
| It's not so black and white. Firefox is my daily driver, this
| doesn't mean that I can't have concerns about the direction
| of the Mozilla Foundation or express them online with others
| who share those concerns.
| kelnos wrote:
| Or maybe we are genuinely upset that a browser we've
| supported and watch grow for decades at this point has fallen
| so low. Market share matters a ton, and Mozilla has been a
| very poor steward of Firefox's market share.
|
| 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.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| I wish there were a way to donate to the devs who work on
| Firefox directly.
|
| 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).
| EasyMark wrote:
| The devs who work on firefox as paid well by mozilla. You
| could probably donate to volunteers who make some of the more
| useful extensions that you use maybe?
| dartharva wrote:
| It's not the pessimist in you, it's your rational brain doing
| basic pattern recognition.
|
| Mozilla has consistently been losing donor trust for over a
| decade.
| exiguus wrote:
| That reminds me of the people who give money on the street and
| say "but not for drugs or alcohol".
| hahahaseattle wrote:
| Sounds exactly like paying taxes in Seattle...
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Donate to Ladybird, Firefox and forks are unfortunately over.
|
| Ladybird has a chance to become a new truly open source browser
| written from scratch.
| EasyMark wrote:
| ladybird is 5 to 10 years off
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| I'm regularly building and playing around with it and the
| progress is remarkable. I don't think they will need 5
| years before it's a usable alternative.
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| I maintain Waterfox, so I recognise this isn't a great look
| criticising another fork. But there's a contradiction in
| abandoning Mozilla over spending and leadership concerns whilst
| supporting Floorp, which initially used open source extensions
| to build up their USP, then switched to a non-open licence to
| prevent others from doing what they had done.
|
| 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?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I agree with your opinion of that corp which as of today exists
| solely to employ the highly paid CEO for doing less than
| nothing. Or something on those lines.
|
| 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.
| RataNova wrote:
| When donations feel like they're funding bloat instead of a
| better browser, it's hard to justify hitting that donate button
| mdaniel wrote:
| https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core [a submodule of
| their main repo] is noticeably missing any licensing
| information
|
| 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
| dustyharddrive wrote:
| That's the latest ESR (https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/organizations/notes/), which seems good enough for
| Tor Browser.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yeah, always thought this was incredibly short-sighted.
|
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I just want to see a pie chart with how they spend any
| donations. I also don't mind their forays into stuff like free
| speech and internet privacy, but beyond that they should stay
| out of politics. That said I have donated a few times since I
| use firefox as my primary browser. Their activities are far
| superior to anything that Brave and Google are up to
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| No worries, if you donate to "Mozilla", i.e. the Mozilla
| _Foundation_ , you're unlikely to fund built-in "campaigns",
| "studies" or ads. You're more likely to fund sociology-style
| campaigns and studies that have absolutely nothing to do with
| Firefox (https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/what-we-fund/),
| because the development is done by the _corporation_.
|
| 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...
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I would rather pay for Kagi/Orion if they ever went cross
| platform. I like the idea of paying for my search and browser
| package with LLMs bundled in. I don't want to get locked into the
| Apple ecosystem even more than I am so I going to need
| Linux/Android support at least in Beta
| notpushkin wrote:
| I would pay for Orion if it was open source (at least their
| WebExtensions implementation). Still a nice browser though!
| anon-3988 wrote:
| There should be a donation box solely for Firefox. If that
| exists, that is no different than paying for Firefox. We will see
| how many people would actually "pay" for Firefox.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| If I am a customer, not a donator, I have different rights and
| expectations.
|
| I want to be a customer. Of a Firefox that blocks ads, not
| serves them to me.
| nuker wrote:
| The risk with paid Forefox will be privacy loss, because the app
| will need to verify somehow the paid status. So there will be
| some unique, personal licence on the device and Mozilla can
| identify users using payment info.
|
| The licence will be likely checked via remote API on app start.
| omnimus wrote:
| Sell license keys... no need to check online.
|
| 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.
| rft wrote:
| Not trying to single you out here, I want to argue against how
| standard it has become to require a license server. A license
| server puts an expiry date on the software at an unknown point
| in the future. At some point the binary you downloaded after
| you paid for the software will stop working because the server
| got turned off, changed API, your internet connection is down,
| your local CA store got corrupted or any other kind of problem
| in the huge list of dependencies that goes into making a secure
| API call over the internet. Sure, you can put in safeguards
| against all kinds of issues, but that also comes at a
| development cost and you can never reach a point where the
| software will just continue to work, no matter what.
|
| 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...
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| This isn't the case with sofware like sublime text
| beloch wrote:
| It's become a meme, but consider WinRAR. Odds are, it's installed
| on your machine and you haven't paid for it. It just works. It
| brings up a polite nag box but it doesn't sell your data. It
| doesn't invade your privacy. It just works and makes enough money
| to keep getting updated.
|
| 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.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I'd wonder if there's enough willing to pay within individual
| consumers or professionals that would support a browser
| development team, and my impression is that file compression
| and browsers are pretty much a software commodity where they
| can be easily swapped with other options. I doubt there would
| be a lot of uptake on licensing within companies, and any
| bundling a licensed copy with an OEM build PC would probably
| involve mozilla paying them instead of the other way around.
|
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| Works for Sublime as well.
| Permit wrote:
| What is the size of the team that makes WinRAR or SublimeText?
| How frequently are these programs updated? I suspect web
| standards change more frequently than compression algorithms.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| Does anyone choose to install WinRAR when 7zip or the default
| windows options exist these days? I haven't downloaded it since
| the 00s
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| I do
| raincole wrote:
| WinRAR is such a simple app compared to a browser. It probably
| only needs two or three full time developers to stay updated.
|
| 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.
| RataNova wrote:
| The WinRAR model is actually a brilliant (and weirdly
| wholesome) example. It trusts users to do the right thing,
| doesn't punish them for not paying, and somehow it still
| survives
| McDyver wrote:
| There are many comments from people wanting to pay for Firefox,
| but not to Mozilla.
|
| As an independent alternative, the Ladybird browser
| (https://ladybird.org/) is being developed and could possibly
| benefit from more financial support.
| WHA8m wrote:
| Security is my top priority (even above privacy) when it comes
| to internet browsers. My impression has always been that
| browser technology is a very hard subject and incredibly
| difficult to do right. This approach is the main reason I keep
| a distance from any software that is not widely adopted. Even
| if it's innovative and novel. This being said: If I switch to
| ladybird today, am I a beta tester or is this a project I can
| count on?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Ladybird is advancing rapidly but I personally wouldn't use
| it as a daily driver yet. It's quite a small project in
| comparison to the giants like Chromium and Safari, but
| despite their talents and the from-the-ground-up approach
| free from legacy crap, it lacks a lot of functionality and
| performance enhancements for it to be a daily driver at the
| moment.
|
| 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.
| WHA8m wrote:
| Thanks for the respond! I'll definitely follow the project
| and happy to jump when the point is there.
|
| I'll try it out once I've finally set up my virtual
| machine.
| sedatk wrote:
| > am I a beta tester
|
| You'd be a pre-alpha tester
| nialv7 wrote:
| Ideologically I am all for this. The usuals: if you don't pay for
| the product then you are the product, and what not.
|
| But practically, this will likely just kill Firefox (and
| Mozilla).
| immibis wrote:
| Obligatory: Thunderbird improved its situation, including
| financially, and code quality, after Mozilla discarded it.
| Perhaps Mozilla is just bad, and we need a new foundation.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I'm going to bump this figure once again here: Mozilla has made
| $37.5M from investment income in 2023. [1] That might not be
| enough to sustain browser development alone, but it is surely a
| lot of money and charging for Firefox would likely be a drop in
| the bucket (considering many people would just stop using it
| instead).
|
| Cut the bullshit initiatives, fire the C-suite and put that money
| to work.
|
| https://mozillapetition.com/
|
| [1]:
| https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| Wouldn't the ones in charge of firing the C-suite be exactly
| themselves?
|
| I have no idea how to solve such an organizational problem.
| immibis wrote:
| The CEO is accountable to the board of directors and the
| board of directors is accountable to shareholders. As a
| nonprofit perhaps Mozilla's board is accountable to nobody -
| not sure.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Actually I have no idea either. In a for-profit company
| shareholders could do the firing, of course, but for
| foundations it's tricky.
| lvl155 wrote:
| I am always surprised Rust came out of that org.
| rwmj wrote:
| But not surprised that they canned the team & cancelled the
| project. It thrived outside Mozilla.
| bn-l wrote:
| How? How does one corp mess things up this bad?
| rwmj wrote:
| They're not a real corporation in the "making profit by
| shipping widgets" sense. They've been funded by a huge
| annual grant from Google. So none of the management
| understands in their bones how money is made or how money
| is necessary for a company to survive. They have never
| built a successful, profitable product.
|
| 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.
| bitlax wrote:
| That was Eich-era, and the org was very different then.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| There are so many privacy improving Firefox forks out there.
| These people should unite and start a non profit to handle
| further development that's in line with the least common
| denominators of what they all try to achieve and abandon Mozilla
| for good. Giving more money to this compromised entity won't help
| anyone. Mozilla should just die.
| kamikazechaser wrote:
| Why not fund LibreWolf instead? Or maybe even ladybird?
| immibis wrote:
| Librewolf is just mainline Firefox with a bunch of tracking
| patched out, so not much work happens there.
| OpenSourceWard wrote:
| Since 85% of Mozilla's current revenue comes from Google paying
| to have their search engine set as the default on Mozilla, and
| given that this is at risk due to last year's antitrust ruling
| against Google, they will need to diversify regardless.
| braiamp wrote:
| I'm going with a hot take: these kinds of products should be
| supported by tax dollars, not with individual donators/payers.
| The market doesn't solve the problem of public goods, it just
| makes it worse.
| demosito666 wrote:
| This is not "hot" take, this is correct take in itself. The
| problem is the execution: how do you ensure that development is
| of enough quality and efficiency? How do you ensure that the
| funds are not stolen? How do you make sure that the product is
| actually used and you don't fund a thing that no one uses? And
| so on.
|
| 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.
| braiamp wrote:
| > how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and
| efficiency?
|
| 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.
| mikhailt wrote:
| Then you get into the situation like in US today, where a
| party/person can just cancel it entirely out of spite.
|
| There is no one-fix solution for this.
| braiamp wrote:
| There's a framework that works, also, there's a framework
| that would prevent the current problems. Obviously, some
| problems are easier to solve if there's something that you
| can trust to fundamentally work.
| countWSS wrote:
| "How to drop the Firefox market share to 0%?"
|
| 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"
| bn-l wrote:
| Mozilla Corporation is the problem.
| CjHuber wrote:
| 5. heavily push pocket and add annoying blank space left and
| right of url in the toolbar in the default settings
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Personally I really hated getting Pocket shoved in my face,
| but it seems some people missed it.
| TuxSH wrote:
| It was nice for its Kobo integration and (for now -
| apparently Kobo is considering alternatives) there is no
| direct alternative.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| No I didn't miss it but it made me hate it so much I
| wouldn't even try it. And I wouldn't have used it even if I
| liked it, in order to disincentivise this behavior.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'm used to this behavior in Microsoft Land. OneNote was
| pretty good but I'm sure they killed it by putting three
| icons for it on the taskbar and making the 'print' dialog
| print everything to OneNote if you didn't quadruple-check
| what you were printing to. I liked the local XML files
| cause I could write scripts that extracted stuff from
| them. Then they killed it for me by making it cloud only.
| Then they just killed it.
|
| 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.
| sedatk wrote:
| > annoying blank space left and right of url in the toolbar
|
| I'm glad that I'm not the only one who hates that.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| You missed 0. - where does the budget come from
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...
| remram wrote:
| You forgot the "claim a license on everything users do with it"
| and "promise to never ever sell data and then un-promise".
| jwr wrote:
| You forgot:
|
| 5. Fire all developers that actually work on important stuff
| fiji-flo wrote:
| If you want to help fund Firefox, you can for now just pay for a
| product https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ and not use it
| (if you live in a country Mozilla accepts money from). Be vocal
| about it that you do this to support Firefox (e.g. reply in the
| discourse thread). I personally recommend leveraging MDN for this
| as it's right now the closest to Firefox, as in it's part of the
| Firefox organization within Mozilla. I would hope down the road
| we could just directly for Firefox, but we need to put money
| where our mouth is.
| cge wrote:
| I was going to respond with my usual point that money paid to
| the Mozilla Foundation cannot legally be used to support
| Firefox, but it turns out you're right: MDN and several other
| products are actually part of the Mozilla Corporation. The
| exception seems to be Thunderbird, which is MZLA Technologies
| Corporation.
| fotcorn wrote:
| The VPN product is very good, it's basically a thin wrapper
| around Mullvad, arguably the best VPN on the planet right now.
| At least from a privacy standpoint.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's not anymore. They blocked port forwarding which
| interferes with torrents, are moving away from OpenVPN which
| I need.
|
| In my opinion they are well on their way of enshittification
| and I moved to protonvpn.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| After 30 years of Firefox, because of their wasting money and not
| improving Firefox, switched to Zen, very happy Zen user - hope
| they will switch to Ladybird engine if that ever becomes a thing.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _" Some might worry that people would flock to alternatives if
| Firefox became a user-funded product. I disagree. In fact, I
| think the exact opposite is true. Right now, people are leaving
| because they dislike Mozilla's business model_"
|
| 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.
| topspin wrote:
| > people would switch over to Brave
|
| Ironically, one can pay for Brave.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| you can pay for services they've tacked on the browser, just
| like you can with Firefox if you want to, but neither of them
| are, as the author demands, going to charge for the browser
| because they know perfectly well they might as well burn the
| office down
| Gentil wrote:
| Let us donate directly to Firefox development. That is the
| solution. You don't have to look anywhere else. Thunderbird is a
| good example of what can be done when the donations reach the
| project. I just hope they don't screw it up as well. I have zero
| belief in Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla leadership. And every
| decision they did to screw MDN and Rust among other things puts
| their competition in a better position.
|
| 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.
| Khaine wrote:
| Mozilla pushed out Brendan Eich because of his poltical ideals.
| Because of that I am unwilling to support them.
| bitlax wrote:
| And then they promised to be the browser which would "protect
| your privacy"! Then they went on to do opt-out telemetry and
| claim ownership of user data so that was all a joke as well.
| The org deserves so much worse than it's grappling with.
| bn-l wrote:
| I wonder how "political" that was and whether it was more
| office politics. Maybe he was standing in some people's way and
| they found an excuse.
| bitlax wrote:
| Undoubtedly that was part of it, but it also was a nationwide
| struggle session with articles in major news outlets.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| Are you describing banning gay marriage as an "ideal" here or
| is there more controversy I didn't hear about?
| sneak wrote:
| Nope, that's the one. They're upset that someone who is
| against human rights was ousted.
|
| Opinions and actions have consequences.
| bitlax wrote:
| Exactly! We're discussing so many of the consequences!
| thoroughburro wrote:
| Lobbying the government to restrict his employees' freedom to
| marry who they want was indeed a political "ideal", but its
| actual content is of course important to the context.
|
| You make it sound more noble than him trying to make his
| personal "ick" into binding law.
| treyd wrote:
| To clarify, by "political ideals" you mean thinking gay people
| don't deserve the rights straight people do, right?
| kbelder wrote:
| He supported prop 8, which was about same-sex marriage. It
| passed in California; the majority of voters agreed with
| Eich.
|
| I disagree with Eich, and opposed the proposition, but his
| position was the normal one at the time.
| baal80spam wrote:
| > Mozilla pushed out Brendan Eich because of his poltical
| ideals. Because of that I am unwilling to support them.
|
| Specifically - it was his PERSONAL ideals, not affecting the
| company in any way, shape or form. THAT's why it is so
| outrageous.
| wvenable wrote:
| Why do you assume that personal ideas are exempt from
| consequence and criticism?
| hooverd wrote:
| Which political ideals?
| bramgn wrote:
| Perhaps we should stop calling open-source software "free" due to
| the stigma that comes with it. It's no longer a selling point,
| nor should it have been.
| bn-l wrote:
| Open source is a good enough label.
| qpiox wrote:
| Open does not imply any freedoms. A software source could be
| openly put in the public but without license, hence you would
| not be free to use it nor to learn from it.
| fsflover wrote:
| It isn't: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-
| the-point....
| arp242 wrote:
| There are about 5.5 billion people on the internet. Firefox's
| "small" market share of ~5% is still about 250 million users.
|
| 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.
| wheybags wrote:
| Just let me donate directly to firefox. It's seriously about time
| this happened. Split off from all the Mozilla bs, it has its own
| independent management, and runs on donations, same as
| Thunderbird.
|
| 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.
| hackrmn wrote:
| I, too, have been saying this on occasion. In my observation,
| Mozilla has been in an increasingly suboptimal position with
| Firefox, for a while now, as Google and Microsoft have largely
| settled on splitting the market in between themselves where the
| core of Chrome is developed by the former and Microsoft spends
| their effort on what they are [better] at -- integration with
| Windows in the form of UX-level features and whatever else that
| they do with it to build Edge. Firefox is increasingly seen as a
| "fair" nuisance that is slower, and by comparison can afford less
| effort development-wise. Look at some of the practically critical
| issues in their Bugzilla database -- there are features there
| that have been waiting almost a decade for implementation, and
| the discussions point to a combination of code complexity that
| requires acute insight into the browser that is your typical bell
| curve distributed over developers familiar with it -- the number
| of developers who are able to actually deliver on those features,
| can probably be counted on two hands. And that is in part because
| most of these people are getting paid to do other things. In the
| very least Mozilla directs their effort in a manner that speaks
| for itself -- why are some of these features, like
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360870 that would
| be considered critical in today's Web development environment,
| not implemented after nearly a decade? -- If Mozilla _is_ paying
| the developers?
|
| 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).
| captainepoch wrote:
| Mozilla has already millions of dollars than can be put into
| Firefox's development instead of the business they're getting
| into. It doesn't need even more money, it just needs to put part
| of it into engineers who would make Firefox what we need.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| If I could pay Mozilla to _not_ do specific things, it 'd be
| pretty tempting
| yabatopia wrote:
| I have no intention to pay just for Firefox, the browser. A
| browser is not that special anymore and there are plenty of
| alternatives.
|
| 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.
| leonidasv wrote:
| > A browser is not that special anymore and there are plenty of
| alternatives
|
| All Chromium forks.
|
| Browser engines are special. Firefox is the only non-WebKit
| derivative with relevant market-share currently.
| hooverd wrote:
| They'd kill Mozilla for working on those instead of X.
| auxide wrote:
| The "paid Firefox" the author wants already exists, as LibreWolf
| ships almost the exact same code minus the telemetry, ads, and
| Google defaults for free. If people wanted that, they'd already
| be using it. The real problem isn't the business model, it's
| Mozilla's leadership, which has been compromised to hell and back
| at this point. No pricing experiment like this will fix the
| exodus.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Aren't they just piggybacking on Mozilla's work though? The
| point is to make the work that Mozilla is doing sustainable,
| not to pay someone else to ship a slightly modified version of
| it.
| auxide wrote:
| Yes, forks do indeed piggyback off of their code; that's the
| point of free and open source software anyway. And Mozilla,
| in its current state and current leadership, is not
| sustainable and still won't be with people paying for
| Firefox. Its marketshare is dwindling, and people are moving
| to forks such as Zen or to other browsers like Vivaldi.
| Adding a paid version will just make that trend go faster.
| And you don't even need to make a fork, because user.js
| tweaks such as Arkenfox or Betterfox exist anyway.
| watusername wrote:
| The point is that people want to fund the development of
| the actual browser engine which is more important than the
| customization scripts that those forks maintain. The engine
| is what people are worried about.
| jadams84 wrote:
| Discussions like this are exercises in true futility. Developers
| are a practically impossible customer base to monetize
| wkat4242 wrote:
| IntelliJ and Github beg to differ?
| politelemon wrote:
| > Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla's
| business model.
|
| 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.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| First, all the normal people left. Those leaving now, like me,
| are former Mozilla fans, techies, die hard Firefox users. That
| hate the Mozilla business model.
| hooverd wrote:
| I like Firefox idk
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| I like firefox too, as a browser. I dislike it as a means
| to track me and serve me ads that Mozilla Corporate deems
| 'acceptable'.
|
| Ads make me the product. I do not want to be the product.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I don't understand what these comments are actually criticizing
| in terms of side projects. They got rid of stuff like Rust,
| Firefox OS, Pocket, etc. Mozilla has streamlined to make web
| browsers and web browser accessories. VPN/Relay are both
| profitable projects that inhibit surveillance, so clearly that's
| not the issue. Do you want, not just these projects gone but the
| CEO gone? That happened already too,
| https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-cha...
| graemep wrote:
| It takes time to win back trust.
| zetanor wrote:
| We've been through a decade of the Mozillas blackholing money
| with zero telegraphing of any intent to bring financial
| sustainability to Firefox. The (expensive! ugly?) rebrand did
| not include any meaningful recommitments (which filtered down
| to me, anyway). I've just now clicked around the Foundation's
| website trying to figure out what my prospective donation might
| have gone towards and it's still kept very vague. Am I donating
| to Firefox, to non-software activism, to a podcast? I couldn't
| even find a single mention of Firefox on
| https://www.mozillafoundation.org in a minute of looking.
|
| 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.
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| I'm curious, how capital intensive/wasteful were these
| aimless projects? Compared to their operating expenses? What
| better way could they have spent this money? (Development
| isn't exactly a good answer, if it's not a lot of money, it
| won't exactly buy a lot of R&D and even if it did, R&D
| doesn't necessarily translate to more income).
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Whoops, it happened. An internet argument changed someone's
| mind. :)
|
| 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/#freque
| ntly...
| codethief wrote:
| > If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not
| able to donate to Firefox development at all
|
| 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.
| jm4 wrote:
| I just took a look at that site after reading your comment.
| It almost appears as if Mozilla just isn't interested in
| making a browser anymore.
|
| _" 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.
| nabakin wrote:
| I keep seeing comments on HN that misunderstand what's
| happening with Mozilla and it's kind of frustrating.
|
| 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.
| stefan_ wrote:
| If you had put all the money Mozilla executives have spent on
| buying then winding down bizarre startups, occasionally
| connected to them, in index funds instead, you would probably
| have an actual revenue stream to support Firefox, other than
| what they have now, which is nothing, because like their
| leadership, these purchases never amounted to anything other
| than damaging their brand.
| kbelder wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > They got rid of stuff like Rust
|
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| The interface is fine, they need to make sure they are
| participating in web standards and implementations of those
| in their browser. I would love if they froze development for
| a year and just fixed bugs that have been around for 1+
| years.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| 99% of consumers don't care about web standards, they just
| care that their site works. Nobody is paying for the
| minimum viable browser. It's not going to get anyone up in
| the morning.
|
| 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.
| Permit wrote:
| This thread is a perfect example of why the ad-driven model will
| win every time. Most people don't _actually_ want to pay for
| things (that's just what gets parroted in anti-AdTech posts
| here).
|
| 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.
| rcxdude wrote:
| >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 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.
| aembleton wrote:
| Remove blockingWebRequest from Firefox, much like Chrome has
| done. Then charge $20/year for a version that allows you to use
| it across all of your devices.
|
| I'd definitely pay that as its adding a lot of value.
| grimblee wrote:
| I entirely agree, if there was a browser that let me be a
| costumer instead of a product I would 100% pay and use it
| everywhere.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Kagi.com/orion
| grimblee wrote:
| It's apple only ? Linux pls
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| They're actively working on that! Go kagi! https://web-
| cdn.bsky.app/profile/kagi.com/post/3ljqsgjmkpk2n
| time4tea wrote:
| Tbh firefox is excellent.
|
| Having an PS1/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.
| bradfa wrote:
| I have a Firefox account. I will gladly pay a yearly fee for it!
| It provides significant value to me.
|
| 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!
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Yeah idk why that they just did not have an structural
| subscription like that or like patreon community etc
|
| without google money,doing this maybe can be make profitable
| freediver wrote:
| Browser is the most intimate piece of software we have on our
| computer. Paying for it (vs someone else paying for your
| browsing) is a no brainer.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://kagi.com/orion
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| One of the core problems of the internet is that the
| "everything-is-free-if-watch-ads-but-you-can-also-easily-block-
| them" paradigm of the last 25 years has created a generation of
| people with an innate entitlement to free services.
|
| 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.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening
| all over the place, there is also a growing market of people
| who are willing to pay for something of high quality that
| won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who
| would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?
|
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The problem is that people like yourself don't even
| register on the radar.
|
| 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.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| I think people like me do register on the radar, see
| platforms like substack, kagi, bandcamp or patreon to
| mention a few. Linux is more popular than ever and keeps
| slowly growing.
|
| 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.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| With ~200M Firefox users and Google paying ~$400M annually, a
| $5/month subscription from just 7% of users would fully replace
| that search deal revenue.
| EasyMark wrote:
| nobody is going to pay $5 a month for firefox. they might pay
| 99 cents a month or $10 a year or something.
| Palomides wrote:
| converting 5% of users to paying is frankly beyond
| plausibility, if they got 0.1% I'd consider that a miracle
| freediver wrote:
| Only if the product sucks. Kagi converts at much higher than
| that. It incentivizes you to create a better product, a
| wonderful positive feedback loop.
| atrettel wrote:
| I pay for Kagi. I generally find it to be adequate at the
| moment --- not wonderful, but better than other options
| available. And unlike other options, Kagi is improving
| slowly over time.
|
| 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...
| jedimastert wrote:
| Completely unrelated but being that typographically close to
| "onion browser" made me confused for a second or two
| jwr wrote:
| Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them
| money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my
| money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because
| I know what is happening to people in Ukraine.
|
| (I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
| EasyMark wrote:
| I tried Orion and it was the crashiest app I used on my macbook
| air. I still love kagi search though
| Pooge wrote:
| A few years ago I wanted to buy some Mozilla merch in order to
| support them. I'm glad they removed it because I would have
| regretted it.
|
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| This is basically an optional way to pay for the features that a
| decent fork like librewolf provides.
|
| 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.
| oliwarner wrote:
| How could anyone consider tossing money at an organisation that
| wastes as much as it does pretending it's a publicly traded
| company?
|
| The executive pay is disgusting and reflects in no way the
| performance of the products. This money should be going into
| engineering and outreach.
| camgunz wrote:
| I'm so exhausted by these threads. Hacker News is, if it's
| anything, a site built by tech entrepreneurs for tech
| entrepreneurs. If you really think you can do better, fork
| Firefox, hire some engineers, and have at it. Brendan Eich did
| exactly that! Go work there! Or skip some steps and look at the
| other browser startups to see if they already had all the ideas
| you do.
|
| 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!
| weare138 wrote:
| We already paid for Firefox through decades of donations in
| addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars MoCo has received
| over the years from Google that was definitely not a bribe in
| exchange for sandbagging Firefox by firing most of the Firefox
| devs. That's what the community got in return for our decades of
| support because again, we've already paid for Firefox.
|
| At this point we should just fork Firefox or focus on IceCat
| instead.
| hoseja wrote:
| More millions for the CEO!
| sotix wrote:
| I already pay for my email and for my search engine. I would
| gladly pay for my browser if it came with an ad-free, privacy
| preserving model. Good software is worth paying for.
| anton-c wrote:
| I feel like we would pay and it would get worse somehow
| artyom wrote:
| > Am I suggesting Mozilla entirely pivot to this business model
| overnight? Of course not. [...] Run an experiment...
|
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Firefox is supposed to be committed to serving the user before
| itself yet I see that as a sham. They put ads on their new tab
| page and phones home when starting and exiting. It's the least
| bad alternative but I'm not stoked about helping Mozilla which I
| feel betrayed by.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > Today, I happily pay for software (including free and open-
| source software!) that puts users first, including Proton,
| Standard Notes, Kagi, and others.
|
| 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.
| sigmonsays wrote:
| can someone explain what is happening to firefox for posts like
| this to exist?
|
| 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?
| braiamp wrote:
| I already posted a hot take [0], but this one is even hotter:
| there's no strategy that Mozilla could have employed to make any
| of their products popular.
|
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549224
| krackers wrote:
| Firefox should have appealed to the developer/hacker
| demographic. Instead they've made every effort to alienate
| those demographics in trying to appeal to the general public.
| They were never going to be able to compete against Google's
| influence, but they could have established a stronghold with
| the power-user communities that would grow slowly over time as
| they converted their friends.
|
| 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.
| alganet wrote:
| This all sounds counter-productive.
|
| Free software of such magnitude could and should live only by
| source code contributions, not money.
| buyucu wrote:
| I would pay for the development of a decent free browser. I'm
| sure a lot of people would.
|
| 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.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The real idea here should be that if Mozilla is accountable to
| its paying users, a bunch of incentives are fixed.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I would be very happy if paying for firefox meant that I knew
| when it would become Servo
| smallerfish wrote:
| Their revenue in 2023 was $653 million. They would need 5.4
| million subscribers willing to pay $10/mo, which is about 4% of
| their total userbase. Clearly that's a steep hill to climb, and
| couldn't be done all at once. The transition would be tricky.
| ojosilva wrote:
| Very tricky. First, it needs management change willing to go
| Jerry McGuire on the c-suite and Foundation, plus deal with all
| internal culture debt and oxidized dynamics.
|
| 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.
| caboteria wrote:
| I use Firefox but donate to Ladybird and Servo. Mozilla Corp is
| too far gone but hopefully the next generation of browsers will
| have less corporate baggage.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Running on donations is not a viable strategy for any long-term
| goal.
|
| 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.
| RataNova wrote:
| People want to support software that respects them
| greatgib wrote:
| Some people say that the hate for Mozilla Corp is not deserved.
| But the thing to understand is that ten of thousands of people
| have rooted for Firefox. Even if not contributing to the code or
| money, supported it, pushed for it, like telling everyone to use
| it, ensuring that what they do works well with Firefox despite
| corporate interest regarding the market share and all. Lots of
| people have proudly distributed Firefox/Mozilla marketing stuff
| to help with that. People have accepted what was forced to be
| done to accept the money from Google to support the project.
|
| 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...
| duxup wrote:
| I too would be happy to pay for Firefox in a way that the
| majority of the payment went into Firefox development.
| eviks wrote:
| > If Mozilla doesn't do it, I fear someone else will.
|
| What stopped someone else from doing that in all those years?
| vrighter wrote:
| no. It is very clear that they will either spend it on bullshit,
| or pay it out to the ceo or something. And then selling out
| because "they're broke"
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| I already pay mozilla for relay. Let me pay for firefox so
| someone can make the case that suits should care about it
| m-schuetz wrote:
| Mozilla dropped the ball and their financing structure killed my
| goodwill. I'd actually pay for a completely trackingless and
| privacy-focused Chrome since it's a better product, but I'm not
| going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a worse
| product.
| akifq wrote:
| The tricky part is psychological: once you charge, you implicitly
| promise consumer-grade polish. If the address-bar jitters after
| an update, people will cancel faster than they would stop
| donating.
| newsre4der wrote:
| I still like Firefox however I think it has lost already. It was
| Mozilla's management failure. Chromium past it years ago and I
| don't think it can be changed.
| kelnos wrote:
| I agree in the abstract: I'd rather pay for a product that I
| need, use, and love, than _be_ the product, and have it supported
| through ads or unfortunate deals like Mozilla has with Google
| (default search engine).
|
| 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.
| butz wrote:
| How about crowdfunding campaigns for specific browser features?
| Some users require compatibility, others - performance, some
| might pay for offline translation tools improvements, and, of
| course, GenAI stuff should get its own separate tier, if anyone
| is interested.
| int0x29 wrote:
| I've grown very tired of all the whining about the Mozilla
| Corporation. The browser, MDN, and certificate trust auditing
| work need more money than the foundation is getting. Making the
| browser paid for would kill it. This means that they need to find
| another way to pay the bills.
|
| 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.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > The browser, MDN, and certificate trust auditing work need
| more money than the foundation is getting.
|
| 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.
| jwr wrote:
| > I've grown very tired of all the whining about the Mozilla
| Corporation.
|
| 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.
| wormius wrote:
| I think this is the only way to properly handle the current
| situation, but I don't think market forces will be enough to do
| so without them still needing to rely on some external sources. I
| think the most I'd want to pay for a browser is 50 bucks. The odd
| thing is the web is basically the OS for 99% of what most people
| do. So in that sense it's WAY worth it.
|
| 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.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Publish a version of Firefox with no sponsored content, no
| telemetry, no Google (by default), and ad-blocking built in. I
| wouldn't hesitate to pay.
|
| 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
| mattsimpson wrote:
| I would definitely pay for Firefox. Like the author, I
| voluntarily pay for lots of good open source software. Happy to
| pay Mozilla for Firefox.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| You can pay for Firefox, just donate. This post is ridiculous.
| What purpose does gatekeeping Firefox behind a paywall serve?
| People will just use forks for free, as the author himself says.
| Weird.
| aorth wrote:
| I've been paying for Relay for years. I use it all the time. It's
| great!
|
| 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.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I've never heard of this conference, but is it possible that
| the Thunderbird team considers $4,000 for a booth there to be a
| positive ROI for recruitment and/or general outreach?
| 6510 wrote:
| They should do earmarked donations where the money is entirely
| spend on developers working on a specific product and/or paid to
| previous unpaid contributors.
| erentz wrote:
| I don't understand how Mozilla hasn't built up a sufficient
| endowment at this stage to just continue indefinitely paying good
| developers to build the best open browser they can. Its mission
| should be pretty straightforward and boring.
| Donald419 wrote:
| How much are you paying for the equipment
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-13 23:01 UTC)