Firefox built-in Tracking Protection out of the box works well enough I can imagine a lot of other users feel their needs are met without additional add-ons.
I know I don't have any additional add-ons installed, but I'm already getting nagged so much by websites to "disable your adblocking", with many confused to thinking I have something like uBlock Origin installed and only a few so far realizing it is just Firefox. (Those that do sometimes requesting I reopen the page in Chrome seems to prove the point that Firefox is doing some things right and Chrome not at all.)
The numbers were roughly always in that size. Estimating usages through download-numbers was possible for a longer time now if you knew the number of users.
How much do you trust add-on developers? For the past 5 years I'm only using add-ons during recreational browsing. The market for personal information is just too aggressive to assume you're safe. I imagine this is part of the reason. Another reason could be that "power users" opt out of analytics right away, leading not only to skewed statistics but also awful UI decisions by Firefox, as they have to make their decisions based on the data they collect.
> Another reason could be that "power users" opt out of analytics right away,
Yeah I imagine a good chunk turn off Mozilla telemetry and data collection 'features', meaning the percentage of users using uBlock Origin is likely much higher.
It's quite eye-opening how much lower-end hardware is out there. Too many users to ignore have either 2 cores, or 4GB RAM, or 768px resolution, 32-bit OS, and hardly anyone has a discrete GPU.
Random anecdote: we recently had to launch a fairly large site that targeted 800x600 because that was the resolution of the monitor the old guy who owned the company used and he refused to believe anyone was using anything different. It was really frustrating to work with them, to say the least.
I wish it would be more of this "old guy". A lot of developers have the latest and the greatest machine. That's why the programs are slow for us, mere mortals. It is a pity that x86_64 allows more than 4 GB of RAM. We could have had much better SW.
At least part of those machines could be VMs running in CI/CD.
However, you are right that we shouldn't overestimate the client capabilities in the global scale. There's a huge market in developing countries, where every working computer is taken as a blessing.
"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."[15]
By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."
Could someone clarify whether donations to Mozilla are earmarked for Firefox specifically? Or is it for unrelated initiatives, and Firefox is only funded through Google?
I assume the donation money can't legally reach Mitchell Baker, since it goes through the Mozilla non-profit, but the whole Mozilla Corp vs Mozilla non-profit structure and the handling of funds is still very confusing to me.
I sometimes wonder if there is a market for paid browsers. As in software you pay for. I know it used to be a thing many moons ago, however I think I'd pay $20 or whatever to have a good browser that doesn't have anyone besides it's user base in it's mind.
And it still depends on a browser engine, which development isn't and would not be covered by the $30/mon fee. This fee probably mostly covers the cost of running the browser in the cloud for the customers.
But it is a good point and I guess with enough people using this kind of thing, they could raise the price a bit and use the difference to develop an actual browser engine. Which is a tremendous task so I'm not even sure it would suffice to support every cases of the modern web.
I believe a consultancy model, where many companies fund the development by paying for specific need could work. It seems Igalia works this way and they are involved in the development of most mainstream browser engines. I don't know how that would scale.
I'd eat my shoe if they came out with a one time purchase for anything of the sort. I'd put $20 or $30 to a browser with those guarantees no problem, but they'd likely be subscription model which is why I'm so skeptical of such a thing.
Yeah, you won't convince people to pay based on features. Leveraging Google's loss-leader work on Blink/Chromium and building slick features cheaply on top of that will always be an easy way to undercut any efforts there.
The only way to monetise an audience like FF's is via ethos, and it's questionable whether that's enough. Wikimedia Foundation do this quite successfully, but I believe their revenue is a bit smaller than Firefox's.
The problem may be that the Google deals are too generous, which traps Firefox into an overspend, crippling their ability to build alternative revenue streams that meet the same income level (why cut costs when you have enough income).
Is it possible to maintain a browser of Firefox's scale at a WikiFoundation-level income of ~$120million?
Doesn’t Wiki Foundation income and expenses go up every year? There was the trending post earlier showing the numbers. I think expenses doubled in the last five years. So can Wiki Foundation likely can’t maintain an expense level of $120M unless they’ve stopped spending more this year.
Edit:
found the link. There’s discussions on HN, reddit, and other sites too.
It's a free product, and a commodity. Development is expensive, especially when the main competitor can make it so by playing Fire And Motion (see Joel's article) and treats their browser as a loss leader for their trillion-dollar business.
Because B2C is a pain, while B2B is easy money. Business 2 Business means you work with professionels, people of your own kind, and with a small number. In B2C you work with huge number of unreliable customers, catering more to their individual whims. And you must invest more money for money transactions, legal procedures, chargebacks and whatever you are selling to those customers. That's just a bigger risk and pain as a company.
Any option whatsoever to donate to Firefox (specifically as a project, not to Mozilla) would at least be a start. I'd happily sign up to a monthly subscription.
Would it bring in equivalent sums to search deals: of course not. But I think it would be at least a not-insignificant addition.
There is a monthly donation option for Mozilla https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ I don't understand why "any option whatoever to donate" must exclude non-Firefox projects. In my opinion that is the start, available right now.
Suppose at some point hypothetically, Moz Foundation donations exceeded Google's payments. Presumably they would reshuffle things in order to fund Firefox's development, too. While Firefox is the most important thing Mozilla does in my eyes, I also like their non-Firefox work, so I'm happy to fund them. If at some point those donations outpaced Google, or the stability of Google's funding comes into question for some reason, then I'd like to show there are other funding models available. So I donate. How they spend the money in the meantime is up to them.
> Presumably they would reshuffle things in order to fund Firefox's development, too.
What makes you presume this?
> If at some point those donations outpaced Google, or the stability of Google's funding comes into question for some reason, then I'd like to show there are other funding models available
The problem with this is timeline. If the donations naturaly outpaced Google's funding that'd be great, but it seems unlikely. On the other hand, if the stability of Google's funding came into question, how long would it take to ramp up alternative income sources? This isn't something that could be done overnight: it needs to be called out and contingencies considered early (now).
> I also like their non-Firefox work
I also like some of their non-Firefox work, but none of it is unique/essential. If Mozilla stopped all their other work tomorrow, and only developed Firefox, there would still be good alternatives out their to their other works (e.g. Lockbox->Bitwarden, MozVPN->Mullvad).
Good alternatives to Firefox are much rarer, and most truly open alternatives are incredibly small niche projects like Dillo or Otter Browser that aren't really very mainstream-usage-ready.
> The problem with this is timeline. If the donations naturaly outpaced Google's funding that'd be great, but it seems unlikely. On the other hand, if the stability of Google's funding came into question, how long would it take to ramp up alternative income sources? This isn't something that could be done overnight: it needs to be called out and contingencies considered early (now).
I don't disagree, but I also don't think this discussion is related to whether or not folks should be donating to Mozilla right now. My giving them a donation doesn't restrict them exploring other funding options, which they do seem to be doing, with Pocket and their VPN services and the like.
> Good alternatives to Firefox are much rarer
Right. So my thinking is: suppose Google funding dries up some day. From there we have two possible universes: Mozilla looks at their incomes and sees 80% of the missing funding is coming from donations. Or they see 10% is coming from donations. In the first case, they could scale down their non-core features and continue Firefox development on that donations revenue. In the second case, they would have to find some alternative income stream, which is difficult and full of uncertainty, or shut down and Firefox dies. Personally I favor the first universe, where Firefox is funded through voluntary donations. So I donate to make the first universe more likely. And there's no downside to me donating now, since it's totally cool with me if they use my money to fund their non-Firefox work in the meantime.
Many people from the community contribute freely to the FF codebase, and the Firefox project also employs paid engineers to work on the codebase. Funding to pay those engineers comes from Google. Donations to Mozilla do not go toward paying those engineers.
I think it would be great if individuals who aren't in a position to write code for FF could contribute donations to a fund that pays FF engineers.
The number of people I see without adblockers in the wild is really high. When I ask, most people don't know what I'm talking about or they don't care... that is until I show them if they allow me to.
Most people just want to browse Facebook or their bank and don't have a clue about adblockers, add-ons, etc.
Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection seems to serve my needs out of the box enough that I see a ton of nags to "disable ad tracking" on various websites. Why install a third party add-on when the in box tools are sufficient?
I'm guessing, but I would expect that there's a fair few people using ad blockers that have turned off telemetry, and thus aren't included in the report.
I hate the fact that they collect so much data. It's just the next company saying "nah, we're not evil! Don't worry that the browser we make sends home five hundred columns of data about your box and your usage patterns! We really really do promise not to peel out your identity from the data mud and monetize it! pinky promise! Just like google, we're not evil!!"
To those who claim you can opt-out of the "experience":
You can spend quite some time configuring firefox not to check for updates, get rid of all mentions of mozilla's servers in the config, try to have it not phone home, opt-out of any data sharing .. then you start it, and it does nonetheless: "Hey, update me please!" And what data do they share when checking for updates? Too much - I instructed the software to shut the fuck up and not ask for a fresh version, and surely don't communicate that I'm just using version X on my OS under my IP for fuck's sake! And that's just the obvious part of data that'll have to be transmitted in order for an update check to work! See pinky promise, above.
And then, after an update, if you don't start it with -ProfileManager to force your old profile (under linux), it will start with a fresh profile and ... phone home. With fresh settings. Which, by default, share your data. Oh and you can't control what it does while it sits there in the profile manager window. I presume it phones home. How can we be so blind and think this is a good alternative?
I know for me, it's exhaustion, and the inability to quickly scan the obfuscation mess that mozilla calls firefox's source code. What is it for you?
> You can spend quite some time configuring firefox not to check for update
Yeah I tried doing this once. I searched about:config for any mention of `mozilla.org` and deleted it. It still pinged Mozilla looking for an update.
You're probably wondering why I wanted to disable updates, well I have a few toy browsers I don't want updated because I like the specific version and some addons I have are not compatible with newer Firefox (due to the webextensions overhaul).
My solution was to use an older version of Waterfox (Waterfox Classic) which still supports older addons. I also use Palemoon for oldskool extension support, but don't use it as my main browser for obvious reasons.
I'm aware of this setting, and choosing to disable auto updates where Firefox let's you choose to update can be done in the preferences pane.
What I meant is that if you remove all references to `mozilla.org` you still receive updates as though they hard-coded the Mozilla URL because they really don't want people disabling updates.
Are you not using the Firefox package from your distro's repo? If you were, it doesn't check for updates and I've never in all my years had it load into a new profile after an update. It sounds like you were using the official binary not from your package manager, which in most cases you really shouldn't do that.
Actually just yesterday I was thinking maybe I could get 32bit Firefox to run on Linux instead of 64bit, so that there's a hard-cap to how much memory it uses (per process)... would be a less invasive option than disabling swapping like I'm currently doing.
Most likely ignorance, but also maybe: can't afford or don't want to spend money on new hardware when the old one still works (this is a stretch but possible still), don't see the need for 64-bit, and I'm sure a few other reasons that elude me.
The company I'm currently doing some work for has all the main applications as 32-bit running on 64-bit Windows. I have no idea why, but thankfully Firefox is part of the standard build so at least some of the people here will be showing up on this list involuntarily.
Yeah, I've certainly known people who just kept using the computer until it broke. We're talking 7 year old machines with the last major change being when Windows force updated itself to 10.
It's not a question of Indians vs. not Indians, it's a question a people working with a computer daily vs. people who don't. The latter are present in massive numbers in all countries.
[0] https://www.youtube-dl.org/