> I really, really, really dislike the language they have used lately.
That is exactly the problem I have with it - weasel words and euphemisms; FF is scoring an own-goal here and eroding trust.
Why not just tell it like it is. "We need funding and are lining up deals with third parties to display their ads/messaging in the address bar search. We vet these third parties by holding them contractually to these standards [list standards to establish bar required for "trust"]."
It's only my opinion, but spelling it out clearly - the need for funding and how/why "trusted partners" get to display their stuff - would make me far more likely to allow these suggestions. (Oh, and as for "relevance", FF should explain how that's intended to work, ie what data are being used etc.)
Exactly. No excuses - when you use such a language, you do it on purpose - you know you're going to fuck people over, and the language is there to keep them unaware that they're being exploited.
I second your opinion - I'd be willing to entertain, or even support, this way of them making money iff they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why. In details. Talk with me like two adults that respect each other.
Except it's not used correctly here. "A iff B" means "A implies B and B implies A".
"I'd be willing to entertain, or even support, this way of them making money iff they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why" implies both of these:
- "If they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why, I'd be willing to entertain [...]"
- "If I'd be willing to entertain [..] then they will honestly spell what they're doing and why".
The second of which doesn't make sense to me, unless I'm missing something? He should have used "only if" rather than "iff" here.
I believe the bidirectional implication in iff is logical implication, not causal implication. If the GP is willing to entertain ... then you can conclude Mozilla will honestly spell what they're doing. Iff in general use does not introduce a causal relationship, just a bidirectional set of conclusions. In other words, iff sets up necessary and sufficient conditions.
You're right, I guess it depends on what you choose A and B to be. For:
A = OP supports Mozilla making money from address bar ads
B = Mozilla is honest about making money from address bar ads
"B -> A" (OP supports Mozilla if Mozilla acts a certain way) makes sense. "A -> B" sounds confusing in a sentence, but its contrapositive, "!B -> !A", also makes sense.
However, for:
B = Mozilla decides to make money from address bar ads and is honest about reasons
"A -> B" no longer makes sense, since OP can support Mozilla having the address bar ads with an honest justification, but Mozilla can still decide to not have the address bar ads.
(1) IFF is shorthand for "if and only if". Try to read the original sentence, it makes perfect sense and is used correctly.
(2) Logically, iff, equivalence and double implication are themselves equivalent, the expression in question is (necessarily) logically correct even in those forms, though it is irrelevant as of (1) and a confusing way to express the relationship, as the causality clearly flows in one direction.
(3) It was not meant nor interpreted as a bare logical proposition, hence it is improper to blindly apply logical transformations and reinterpret in a different system.
I think the 'if' is the first point you list, and the 'only if' is saying that if Mozilla doesn't spell it out honestly then they'd not be willing to entertain which is a bit strange but logically equivalent to the second point you have.
Implication is not causation. "If I'd be willing to entertain [...] then they will honestly spell what they're doing and why", as if they wouldn't honestly spell it, there's no way I'd be willing to entertain the idea.
I agree with all the other responses here that it is used correctly. First off, they are using it informally, and it's perfectly clear what they are trying to say, so even if it was formally wrong, exercises like these would still be tedious and beside the point.
But even playing the game of treating informal language by the rules of strict logical formalisms, it still makes sense. The two elements implying one another would be (1) trusting mozilla and entertaining this new program, and (2) mozilla communicating clearly about their ads. You trust them if they communicate honestly, and communicating honestly garners trust. Makes sense to me.
the fact that my first instinct was to mock you with "ummm ahhhctuallly" is telling that maybe your comment wasn't really needed.
We understand the intent and thought behind the use of iff in the original comment, regardless of what it may be interpreted to mean outside of a _very informal_ setting.
At first I had an immediate negative reaction to this.
But then I thought, okay, they need money, ads in address bar isn't the worst thing in the world.
But then then I thought: But only if they are clearly disclosed as ads! Instead we seem to have a combination of " traditional suggestions like browsing history and open tabs, as well as new suggestions from our partners" -- are the "paid placements" clearly designated as such? Unclear? Probably not?
In "traditional" media, the first rule of advertisements is that they be clearly identified as advertisements, as content put there by someone paying for it, instead of by editorial judgement. Because how can you trust the editorial judgement of the publisher if you can't tell which is which?
That even Mozilla no longer thinks this is necessary shows how much the culture has changed, where "paid placement" is pretty much assumed everywhere (or if not, you're a naive fool) and nobody trusts anybody.
I would love for them to go NPR style on ads. If you listen to an NPR radio station (at least here in my area), basically anyone can run a radio ad, but it has to be about 10 seconds max and it is delivered by the on-air personality. "Npr would like to thank Bob's Hot Dogs, Bobs hot dogs deliver an excellent dog at an excellent price, find out more at bobdogs.com"
Replace the brand there with yours and that's what you get. No contextual bs, no crazy logos or statements, just a simple word from a sponsor.
Agreed, and I'd even contend that public media dependence on commercial advertisement is a problem. I'd much prefer to see public funding for public media restored.
Maybe Mozilla needs to do a pledge drive, instead. I had used Mozilla products for many years before I even realized they accepted charitable donations.
That’s how traditional media might like to say things. It’s not how things really work. Too late to think of the best newspaper example, but Amazon’s drone coverage on 60 Minutes years ago was a complete charade.
Because they don't want to say: "we want a lot of money to all kinds of projects irrelevant to the browser".
They should focus on their core product and cut everything else away.
Instead they are an organization that tries to save the whole world. It seems like they think the jobs created for themselves by "saving the world" is the core business and Firefox is just a cash-cow for this.
The first of its sins is the tacit agreement that Mozilla is doing this because, as the parent comment says, they "need funding". Mozilla needs funding now like Wikipedia needs funding: they have more of it than they've ever had, but by all appearances, you'd think they're really strapped for cash or something, because their pleas have gotten steadily more intrusive and desperate.
Second is the "focus on their core product" remark. There's so much wrong with this sentence. First, it's the tacit acceptance that Mozilla is and should be a classic Valley tech company—a bit player with a product competing in the market, rather than the way mozilla.org operated in its heyday—you know, when it was actually a force for good and were winning hearts and minds. This is another case where the trend does not support the thesis. Mozilla _has_ steadily gotten more focused on Firefox compared to its historically diverse interests (to the exclusion and chagrin of many of its volunteers and advocates), and by most measures we're worse off for this Corporation-centric mindset. At its height, Mozilla was accomplishing way more, had greater influence than it has today, and did it on a fraction of the budget. Today, Mozilla has half a billion in annual revenue but the Firefox team claims that keeping a menu item around that lets you jump to a site's RSS feed is too much of a maintenance burden.
Where do you think all the money is going? It's not Thunderbird or developer.mozilla.org that are sucking hundreds of millions away. And as bad as Mitchell's leadership has been over the last 5+ years, her new salary in the low single-digit millions has pretty much nothing to do with it. For comparison, Mozilla has something like a 50+ million dollar marketing budget. This is classic cost disease. Ten years ago, it was a common quip that Chrome's effective marketing budget (i.e. in imaginary dollars) was greater than Mozilla's entire annual revenue. Well guess where we are today? A well-funded contender in the browser wars could almost certainly appear tomorrow and grab as much market share in the next 3 to 5 year period as Firefox currently has and do it on total operating costs that measure half of Mozilla's marketing spend (in actual dollars).
So please stop doing this. Every time you feed into this meme that you heard on social media and that sounded good to you because it wrapped things up in a nice, simple narrative, at best it's going to have no effect, and at worst you encourage Mozilla to lean in and do _exactly_ the things that have led to present situation. If you want to provide encouragement, encourage Mozilla to overhaul its entire leadership, to live by the principles they purport to care about (how about starting with removing opaque clicktracking links from emails?), to put a real content blocker in the browser, to stop hawking VPN snake oil, and to open source Pocket like it was promised over 4 years ago. Demand that they make falsifiable claims that can be evaluated for success or failure on well-defined criteria. Campaign for them to either cap the marketing budget to $1 million or actually do something effective with it (like writing a check to Wikimedia and then blogging about how the reason that there are no overlays on Wikipedia this year nagging you for funding this year is because Mozilla decided to foot the bill and so you're welcome—which would be way more effective than _anything_ the marketing department has done to date).
> A well-funded contender in the browser wars could almost certainly appear tomorrow and grab as much market share in the next 3 to 5 year period as Firefox currently has and do it on total operating costs that measure half of Mozilla's marketing spend (in actual dollars).
This is true but it also has nothing to do with anything Mozilla is currently doing. It is actually a business maxim of Jim Barksdale [1] (and others probably) who used to be an executive at Netscape. Barksdale said that you could move into a market with a large concentration of users and steal a percentage of them away by just offering an alternative.
This is worded like a contradiction or a correction, but that is in fact exactly my point. On offer is the implicit suggestion that Mozilla needs half a billion a year to maintain its current position. But Mozilla's numbers are so low and Barksdale's maxim is well-founded enough that you don't have to take a huge leap in logic to see that that argument doesn't hold up. That it would be possible for a nobody to appear and get the same results means that Mozilla's costs aren't justified.
Maintaining a position is not the same as building a position. If Barksdale is right then the existing players in a market need to work to ensure that they can't lose market share from new entrants.
You're not following the implication all the way through.
If a player M controls some "share" in the game and an independent contender C can appear and match M's current share on <1/10 M's current costs, then M's costs to maintain its position relative to all others are not greater than C's costs. If M₀ is M's current offering, then M can carve out part of its budget to fund the entry of their own, controlled Cₘ, independent of M₀, and when Cₘ reaches maturity and matches M's share from M₀ alone, they can let M₀ die—or keep both M₀ and Cₘ around, having advanced their take with greater efficiency than all the costs it would have required to make the same gains with M₀ alone. This assumes that the share from Cₘ comes entirely from those competing with M. This won't be the case; M₀ itself will suffer. But even in the worst case scenario, the share from Cₘ can come entirely from eroding the share of M₀, i.e., a simple transfer. This also won't happen. However, even in the event that it does happen, it's still a net win for M, having used Cₘ to cut their costs by >90% under the regime with M₀.
Edge is already eating Mozilla's lunch on the desktop and Brave is growing.
I think the big thing about VPN is that its value is predicated on others being shit. Stuff like Edge Collections, Brave's privacy respecting Search/News/Talk/Rewards(tips) stack, Vivaldi having built-in RSS and notes, and yes Pocket all provide direct value to the user. A password manager is direct value, as was Send or whatnot.
>like writing a check to Wikimedia and then blogging about how the reason that there are no overlays nagging you for funding this year is because Mozilla decided to foot the bill and so you're welcome—way more effective than _anything_ the marketing department has done to date
I doubt wikimedia would agree to that, since their schtick is that it's user funded and thus a neutral actor
Mozilla probably "needs" money much like the Wikimedia Foundation "needs" money and so desperately begs for donations ("How much is Wikipedia worth to you?"). The WMF spends like 20 % or less on Wikipedia, 80 % is unrelated stuff. Mozilla probably spends a small fraction of its money on Firefox and pisses away most of it as well in e.g. management payouts or random sidequests.
So few realize the importance of this. Some say "well only in Android" or "use nightly". The plan is clearly to incrementally erode freedom to a final state of dysfunction under the guise of gaslit improvements and false switches. They actually argue that removing about:config was for our own good. Printing webpages to PDF is also something we're supposedly better without. But we shouldn't complain, for they've abandoned the crusty old obsolete concept of configurability for brave new ones. Pocket, guerilla advertising, binary over variety, cloudflare, dom.battery.enabled, privacy.resistFingerprinting.alwaysdisabled and an emoji level of privacy. Why design good software when they can design good users? They're not all bad though. At least they saved us all from the terrifying overwhelming burden of RSS, right?
They're attitude is that, yeah, the internet is becoming a roiling cloaca, which is accepted and inevitable, yes? So rather than resist and try to improve it, adapt and contribute to it's descent.
> The plan is clearly to incrementally erode freedom to a final state of dysfunction under the guise of gaslit improvements and false switches.
That's quite the accusation, and completely baseless. about:config was removed from the stable version on android to prevent users breaking their installations. It's interesting you mention privacy.resistFingerprinting, as it alone is the cause of countless bug reports and support tickets from users who don't understand the implications. If you're confident enough to go digging in about:support then you can run beta or install a fork with it enabled. There's no alterior motive.
The base is the removal of about:config. Whatever got written up into the release notes, it was received by many users as stated above.
Also note that an ulterior motive doesn't need to exist for the path towards centralized, user-hostile control to happen. It starts with "the developer knows better what the user wants than the user themselves" sort of attitudes.
Removing a whole toolset of configurability because one tool was causing trivial issues is practical? And you have evidence of jubilant hordes prostrating themselves in gratitude for this benevolence? Where are they? Did they all get disappeared along with this post?
No, they need money to pay for their CEO. She had to fire 250 engineers to pay her salary last year, she might not have another 250 left to fire this year.
It is but it also happens often enough in business that you have to wonder what it is that drives it?
Is it some business school process or management training BS? It usually only happens when "trained" business people get involved that this sort of BS happens.
Except they only need money because they frittered away the massive Google subsidy on pointless projects rather than building up an endowment while sticking to core goals.
… which, in fairness, is itself a species of selling ads! But setting a search engine default is far more benign than what they’re planning here.
I'm no expert, but from what I've heard the reasoning is that ad companies don't like it when you do that and won't want to work with you. They'd rather FF says "we love these guys and they just happen to be handing us bags of money" rather than "look, we dont like this anymore than you do but we need the cash".
Not excusing it, and I could well be wrong (there could also be a way of saying it that satisfies both parties), but thats my understanding of the rationale
If that's the case, this is already grounds for writing Mozilla off. Ad companies are what they are. But if Mozilla was not able to find a partner who's able to tolerate honesty, and decided to compromise instead, what else they're going to compromise on when their new "trusted partners" ask nicely?
This is exactly the point why I left Google Chrome back then and considered FF as a good alternative. I didn't trust Google anymore. But now I face the same problem again, because I don't want these "features and trusted partners". I also don't want to have to justify over and over again why I don't want them. I just want a well-functioning and secure browser that people can trust.
> I just want a well-functioning and secure browser that people can trust.
You can't trust any of them. The real question is, who do you trust more? Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Brave. You can't trust any of them, but you have to pick one.
Mozilla might be the best out of this, but they're also in the weaker position. Ads, whether they respect privacy or not, give off a scummy feel to users. The clean Chrome UI, even if it tracks you in a hundred ways, "looks" more trustworthy to users than a browser riddled with ads.
It's bad enough to have to instruct people how to disable the New Tab ads, now you have to add one more step. At this point it becomes pretty awkward:
"Don't use Chrome browsers, they don't respect your privacy and are bad for the web! Use Firefox instead. Oh but wait you have to disable integrated ads first, just do this and that and this and I swear it's fine!"
Remember Mozilla is ultimately a non profit and must spend a healthy percentage of their income every year. Mozilla is just representing the collective self interest of those it employs. People wanting to keep their cushy job.
The history of Netscape and Mozilla is sufficiently farcical to fuel an entire 6-series comedy franchise. Were it not for the jaw-dropping salaries that the absurd execs draw, I'd laugh.
A quick Google search tells me the rule in the United States IRS is: <<Generally, a private foundation must meet or exceed an annual payout requirement of five percent of the average market value of its net investment assets to avoid paying taxes.>>
Harvard endowment is so huge for two reasons: (1) fundraising, (2) earning more than 5% per year for long, long, long time. But they still must spend 5% per year of their massive endowment.
Running a non-profit with only an endowment (no fund-raising) for more than 20 years with is hard to do.
You'd think from the messaging that they don't have nearly the funding today that they had 5 years ago, when in reality their funding has grown by ~50% during that time...
Given the massive salaries and bonuses paid out to upper management[0], I think their problem would be not sounding like that dril tweet about budgeting[1].
After the massive layoffs and cuts to vital web platform projects this move just feels consistent in their move from their old "quirky nerd charity" image to a new, more corporate one. I'm not saying that this is a good thing.
"Firefox barely exists on phones, with a market share of less than half a percent. This is baffling given that mobile Firefox has a rare feature for a mobile browser: it's able to install extensions and so can block ads."
Yes, indeed, FF is pretty great on the phone, it looks like someone fails to advertise it as such. I use it precisely because I can use add blocker. The person with 2.4M compensation should notice that something wrong is going on.
I am afraid that Firefox/Mozilla at some point will become something like Yahoo or Commodore, a name that is being bought and sold by investment founds to extract some income and sell it further...
The problem is that Mozilla's profits are tied less to their market cap than to their ability to raise funding. Historically Google contributed the lion's share because Firefox was useful to mask the increasing market domination of Chrome, which would have caused some upset so shortly after Microsoft got into trouble for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. This role is becoming less relevant with Microsoft reviving its browser efforts and Apple heavily pushing Safari, and of course Opera, Brave and others riding on Chrome's coat tails via Chromium (like MS for that matter).
Ironically Netscape itself became "something like Yahoo or Commodore": AOL bought Netscape (which led to the Mozilla foundation being created), then proceeded to sell discount services under the name "Netscape ISP" and eventually renamed the original Netscape company. As far as I know the original company (now non-operating) eventually ended up being owned by Facebook and the Netscape brand somehow ended up being owned by Yahoo.
Counterpoint, I’d rather NGOs and benevolent societies be attractive for world-class leaders, rather than be the constant underdog. Of course those CEOs have to avoid implementing classic business schemes.
Yes, the kind of leaders that forget the core of what they are doing and that make shady deals and decisions like this. "World-class leaders" are sharks and have no place in a company for common good.
You're equating greed and competence. It's an oddly common mistake.
NGOs and benevolent societies are attractive on the basis of their values.
If monetary compensation were correlatory with quality products, we clearly wouldn't be in this position with Firefox: Mozilla's current leader is clearly world-class by your own definition (where world-class==well remunerated), and is yet demonstrably failing the company on every possible metric.
> FF is scoring an own-goal here and eroding trust
Excactly them trying to find more sources of income is fine by me. The hiding it and the deceptive messaging is awful. "enhance and speed up your searching experience" - I'm sure it will.
Even the opt-in screen is an anti-pattern.
"Allow suggestions" or "customize". No "do not allow suggestions". On the first level.
This is the stuff I want (and in the past expected) Mozilla to fight, not to become.
Because the sad truth is every other company is doing exactly the same. We live in a world where the people who track you most will greet you with "we value your privacy".
Having watched The Boys just an hour ago, I couldn't agree more. So much of that show is made up of language that conceals intent and how it is used to preserve one's public image and save face, and you can immediately tell when someone is actually willing to tell the truth instead of skirt around the actual issues.
The incentives aren't made clear and you're left with the gaps to fill leading up to how decisions like these got made at an executive level. Does Mozilla stand to lose favor with Google or someone else by trying to be more honest about what it's trying to accomplish, or avoid?
Mozilla does stand to lose a lot of favor with its core audience by trying to act corporate now of all times, with Firefox marketshare at an all-time low. And I have to wonder if these kind of statements were universally accepted by the people who are a part of the company, on the foundation or corporate side. Are there any Mozillians that believe that this is not Mozilla as people remember it? Would they be willing to express their thoughts, if so?
I'm not quite sure scripted dialogue in a fictional TV show about murderous superheroes is the correct comparison for Mozilla putting ads in search results...
Well, if Mozilla trusts someone - I feel curious. I would believe they have a chance to be better than others and my trust to them in fact goes from 0% to 25%.
i dunno. In my experience, when someone says "trust me" and simultaneously offers me money to do something that I know is wrong, that's a good time not to trust them.
Speaking for myself, I'm not shocked, nor even surprised, that marketers would like to get into my living-room and my bedroom. If Mozilla wants to facilitate that, then they become my enemy.
Marketers are going to do marketing, just as pigs roll in shit and rabbits breed. I'm not trying to stop the tide; but I'll sandbag my front-door, so the tide doesn't wash into my home. If Mozilla wants to try an end-run around my flood defences, Mozilla can be removed quite easily.
Mozilla execs seem increasingly the same as the execs at IANA. They don't have real customers or shareholders; they are not held to account. It astonishes me how much these greedy oafs get paid. They are removing value, not adding it.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could get some of the products we use from companies that are structured so that they "serve their customers" and nobody else? Customers (i.e. users) would then have a veto on idiotic new "features" and infelicitous marketing partnerships.
If Mozilla had been such an organisation, then perhaps Firefox wouldn't have slid away from the top spot.
Yeah, it really sucks. I've been using Firefox for 15 years or so but this shit is just so discouraging. Can't we have one piece of good software that doesn't try to shove "relevant" "suggestions" from "trusted" "partners" down our throats?
I just want a browser that isn't controlled by the ad mafia.
A browser is expensive. Currently Firefox is funded (though not controlled) by Google's Ad business. I am all for them reducing their reliance on Google's Ad business. In this sense this is a step _towards_ what you want. I really really dislike them double speaking about this though.
Mozilla takes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. For decades it hired its engineers from the single most expensive place on earth to hire an engineer, the Bay Area. It boosted CEO pay into the millions shortly before laying off a big chunk of its engineering team. If they had taken the cash they spent on "diversifying their revenue streams" (i.e. getting distracted by side projects while their moneymaker Firefox got slower and lost all its users) over the last decade and a half and stuck it into a trust, they'd be sitting on a war chest of billions of dollars right now.
I also don't understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.
I'm one of those five, and I'm not switching. Chromium is tainted, Brave is outright corrupt, and IceCat is seriously unpractical (they don't even build Windows binaries, because ideology beats practicality for them).
Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or later, draw a line and find a better way forward (i.e. a new exec team). Either that, or the project will die and hopefully someone else will pick up the baton.
I'm using Firefox myself and have been using it almost exclusively since it was named Firebird back in the day, but I have considered Vivaldi as an alternative at one point.
I like Vivaldi but the issue is that you're still locking yourself into Chromium's Blink rendering engine which just serves to strengthen Google's push to be the de-facto standards enforcer of the web.
Their whole business model is predicated on effectively replacing ad networks with Brave's own system; I don't know about you, but I find that abhorrent from the perspective of site owners. If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.
> I don't know about you, but I find that abhorrent from the perspective of site owners.
No, I find it amazing and I can probably write an essay about it.
The "ad-supported" economy is directly responsible for a lot of content, but the majority of it is not just bad, it is also actually damaging to society. Think of all the sites that "make a living" on clickbait, content farming, fake news, SEO manipulation and outright fraud. Also, think of all the big ad tech companies that have no incentive in ensuring any kind of quality on its users and just focusing on metrics like "engagement".
It is not too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.
"Ad-supported" sites have nothing to gain by working on quality content and can put all their efforts optimizing for controversy, shock value and eyeballs. When everything became "free", we lost our ability to vote with our wallet and lose any power in steering the market to produce the things that we value.
Given that we can not simply ban "free" sites, the next best thing is to find an alternative way to finance content creators, but where the users can have a say in how the resources are allocated. The Brave model does exactly that. Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality. They will have to be able to demonstrate that their work is not just worth of the people's time (for those that want to put up with ads), they will have to produce something of value to us.
> If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.
No, not at all.
There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model. In fact, they can even also base it on BAT and leverage all the work that Brave already did and avoid all the pitfalls that Brave had along the way when they were developing the system. Brave buys the token in the open market, Mozilla could do the same. They could use the same partner exchanges. They could probably even use the same codebase on the client side.
Honestly, if Mozilla did just that on Firefox, I'd switch back to it immediately. Like you, I also wish that Firefox continued to be a strong alternative to keep Google in check. But after the many years of poor management, blatant cash grabs and all the marketing spending that makes them more focused on "looking good" than "doing good", I've given up. I don't want wishy-washy feelings, I want to destroy Surveillance Capitalism.
Mozilla/Firefox are not working on anything to do that. Brave is.
> Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality.
That's a huge jump. Incentives are basically the same, at worst the same as subscription-supported services that are slowly becoming the standard for news websites that still care about their reputation. The Brave system simply moves some of the power from multiple ad networks to a single entity, Brave. No thanks, this is not the open web.
> There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model.
It doesn't matter who runs the network, you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.
I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap, thank you. If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror when Mozilla goes down in flames, so be it.
> news websites that still care about their reputation.
Those with brand recognition and that can charge subscriptions are not the ones in the long tail. The rewards system is supposed to be a way to help those that are in the long tail: Youtubers with a small but engaged community, Open Source software developers that want to work on their own project, kids making Fortnite skins, investigative reporters that want to cover stories that are not getting picked by mainstream media.
- "Well, these people could use Patreon", you can respond.
Yes, some of them could. But Patreon requires people to contribute their own direct money and requires that people to have access to the global financial system. While with Brave anyone, in any corner of the world, can take whatever little amount of money they want and send as a tip.
> this is not the open web.
Do you use an ad-blocker of any kind? Over 40% of internet users do. Do you think they are "against the open web" and "abhorrent"?
Are you against ad-blockers? Are you okay with Google's push to make it difficult to run ad-blockers on Chrome? To me working actively against the interests of the users is the abhorrent thing.
> you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.
HOW??? To a site that is dependent on ads, I'm still failing to see what the brave rewards program does that is different from any other ad-blocker. That revenue opportunity is already sunk, Brave has no fault here.
> I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap.
You started to move the goalposts. You only need to deal with "cryptocurrency bullcrap" if you decide to cash out the tokens you receive. If you just want to take the BAT token to tip for other creators, you don't even need to signup to an exchange and you don't need to give away any personal data. If Brave was able to run its revenue share program by transacting with cash, would you be okay with it?
> If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror (...), so be it.
Honestly, it just seems like you just have a bunch of misconceptions and prejudices you don't want to re-evaluate. If you don't want to use it, fine. What is not fine is to be calling companies and people "outright corrupt" without anything to actually back it up.
For me at least, all the language Brave uses seems to indicate something similar to a pyramid scheme to me. I dunno, something about the whole thing sets me on edge.
Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be.
What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?
The Brave system is pretty simple, though? They sell ad space, people buy ad space. Brave shows you ads and keeps a cut, they give their users a cut. Brave has a tipping service which lets users tip sites they like. End result is advertisers can advertise, and people making content get some of the ad money, the setup's just built to not track people.
The big concern there is that ads that don't track are generally less valuable so even widespread adoption of Brave's system would cause a decrease in ad revenue, same as Apple's recent anti-tracking changes.
It's incredible. I think Brave/BAT is pretty much the only project in the crypto space that has a straightforward answer to "how do you guys plan to make money?" question, yet it is called "outright corrupt" and implied they are stealing from users somehow. I really wonder why there is so much cognitive dissonance.
Just speaking personally, but every time I've ever confronted a Brave dev online it's been among the worst experiences I've ever had. Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture, I get lambasted for sharing it and then they insist that I'm objectively wrong. Browser preference is ultimately subjective, like your choice of editor or operating system: the least you can do is explain your mentality in a way that isn't ostracizing to technical users, otherwise you're no worse than Apple with pocketing your 30% and leaving the users out to dry.
I don't know if your choice of words was intentional, but if I am developer and you come to confront me - I would also be more aggressive in the communication.
> Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture
If you start a conversation with "issues that you have", you are going to have a hard time. Always. Starting with "issues that you have" is bad because (a) it assumes that you know more than the developers who have done the work of designing and addressing the trade-offs of the system and went through the actual work of developing the solution, (b) it assumes that your needs are more important than those of other users who are satisfied with the solution and (c) places the burden of solving your issue onto their shoulders while offering nothing in return.
In other words: no one likes a know-it-all.
If you start the conversation with the intent of understanding why things were done in a certain way and why certain design choices were made, you will be more likely to get in an engaging and productive conversation than just showing up with a laundry list of things that you'd like to see "fixed". By asking why instead of "confronting" design choices, you are more likely even to get them to recognize when a choice is sub-optimal.
I follow a good part of the lead members in Brave on Twitter. I've seen a lot of conversations from them with other people. Most if not all of them are working with false assumptions and don't even bother to question themselves. Those that come right away aggressive against them or assuming malice are indeed met with brashness. It might seem rude, but I would probably do the same after fending off the 100th random person on the internet accusing you of things you haven't done or demanding that you do something about the token price.
Those that come with the intent of understanding and assuming good intentions are way more likely to be treated cordially.
I'm not a Brave dev, I'm not going to steer your ship for you. I'm coming here, outright to tell you that the amount of hand-waving that your dev team does is suspicious at best, and it's starting to become the laughingstock of the browser wars. Brave's rhetoric is remarkably similar to a plethora of other crypto scams taking over, which doesn't make BAT's sketchiness any more palatable. Your issue is deeper than optics, it runs through whatever management thought it would be sane to incorporate an ERC-20 wallet in my goddamn browser. If I have to explain the issue with wanting my programs to do one thing and one thing well, we probably have irreconcilable opinions.
This is not an issue on Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari god forbid. These browsers are the main contenders because they're simple, and just browsers. Trying to build an "everything machine" is what made Internet Explorer such an unbearable slog, which is why all of our modern browsers are defined more by their limitation than their capabilities.
Again though, these are not my problems to fix. Brave has already burned their bridge of trust by involving themselves in crypto (and pocketing a portion for themselves, worse yet), so I have nothing more to do here than kick back and watch your development slowly turn back into a Mozilla-type org again.
I am not involved with Brave so you may stop addressing me as such.
Anyway, you just created a bunch of strawmen and expect others to spend time trying to reasonably argue with you? If this isn't the biggest "QED" to my comment, I don't know what is.
I could point to at least 5 false statements in your 3 paragraphs, but it is clear that you are not interested in having a productive conversation. So, don't be surprised if others just tell you to piss off and be less of an entitled aspie prick.
Chrome-Brave, Chrome-Chromium, Chrome-Vivaldi, Chrome-Edge and other Chrome clones are no go because it entrenches Google monopoly and bad practices. IceCat doesn't exist on Windows.
There is really close to no choice for browser alternatives.
Seamonkey (which I'm using to write this) is one option. Built for all platforms, no Mozilla tracking/ad/pocket-partnership nonsense. Unfortunately the team is small and Gecko has been changing a lot lately.
Long term the gemini protocol and browsers like lagrange might be the only option - its just too hard to build a modern standards supporting web browser these days (even Microsoft has thrown in the towel and adopted Chromium for Edge).
There is so much wishful thinking around this... "me and five other people want to pay, if you just cater to my specific tastes, than the me and these 5 people will happily bankroll your massive engineering effort!"
Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??
A lot of people just think that Mozilla should be a nonprofit and not aim to primarily enrich it's CEO and leadership. This isn't the case at the moment, which is clear if you paid any attention to what they've been doing for the last few years.
Little of the money that's going to be raised by this will end up paying for engineers to improve or maintain the Firefox code base and the vast majority of it will end in the pockets of said leadership, and this is kinda displeasing.
Do you have a source showing the vast majority of revenue goes to leadership? In 2018, the CEO’s salary equaled 0.64% of revenue. Before we discuss whether that is right or wrong, we should at least agree on a set of facts.
they generally get more then 400 million yearly revenue, though there was one outlier with over 800 million. this is money they generally don't have to pay taxes on because of their status as a non-profit.
> More than 75% of Mozilla spending is on people-related investments to produce the products and programs that support our mission: keeping the web open, free, and accessible.
this would mean they had around 300 million to spend on these 800 employees, averaging around 375 000 per employee.
Sr. Software Engineers get <$200 000, so IF all of their 800 employees were senior software engineers (extremely unlikely), their salary would be around 160 million, which is slightly more then 50% of what was available. a more realistic calculation would be around 20-30%, because not everyone will be getting SV wages. They've got global presence after all with offices SF, Toronto, Berlin, Beijin etc.
you'd have to verify in which unrelated projects by third parties mozilla invests and generally follow the money to figure out anything more, but that is simply out of scope of a hn comment.
Mozilla Corporation is a for profit subsidiary of the non profit Mozilla Foundation.
A common rule of thumb is employees cost a company 2x salary.
The 2019 combined financial statements show $210 million for program salaries and benefits. Management and general salaries and benefits were $109 million.[1] Program means software development basically.[2]
> this is money they generally don't have to pay taxes on because of their status as a non-profit.
Minor nit here - they don't have to pay taxes because they don't make a profit, not because of their status. If a for-profit corporation doesn't make profit (and few tech companies do), they won't have to pay income taxes either.
$375k per employee for a pure technology company doesn't seem outrageous? That has to include facilities too.
It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries. I really doubt that's going to succeed in a challenging and competitive market like browsers. IMO they'd be better off spending more trying to poach the best brains behind Chrome.
does it? whats the remaining 25% (100 million) for in that case?
> It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries
i do not want them to do that particularly. i just pointed out that not all 800 employees will be getting the $137,000 with a $54,800 bonus wage to point out that i'm being extremely generous in my calculation of how much they're likely paying to actual employees.
there are no conclusive numbers i know of, but if you just look at their open positions portal (https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/) you will surely agree that few of these will be getting that $190k...?
this is quite offtopic but what i find especially disheartening about mozilla is that almost all of its revenue comes from google.
every nation i know of is trying to build up their online/web presence, and yet we have only one mega corporation sponsoring web browsers to a significant degree.
why isn't every nation like the USA, Canada, Australia etc each investing at least 10 million into a fund to build an open source web browser or contribute to one? why is every nation fine with that situation?
I agree. I think they would find use in having a "Firefox Enterprise" that catered to businesses directly - basically a version of Firefox that they will tailor to an organization's crazy security requirements. Basically anywhere I've worked has wanted to lock down internet browsing in some way or other, and they now pay for expensive products to do so externally. I think it would be very appealing to just pay for a product that did so out of the box...
> The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.
In case of Mozilla/Firefox: do this while you still have some reputation left. It's literally the one party on the Internet that would have a chance of pulling it off.
I approve of this traditional usage of the term "literally". It's literally correct, but possibly too late - they've been burning bridges for five years.
There's some remarkable sleight of hand in "for every person working on [it]". That's a lot of people required to build a browser. Are you suggesting each of those 5000 users pays $5 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS, or that you'll need [5000 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS] users?
The latter. The numbers are not precise, it's just to show that you really don't need a lot of paying people and they really don't need to pay a lot each.
(2) is in big part because people who're willing to spend money to get rid of ads are exactly the people advertisers are trying to get to - people with plenty of disposable income.
They've not stopped updating that page; it just takes longer than you would otherwise expect to get final numbers, prepare the reports, run them past auditors, etc. The 2019 statements were published in October of 2020, so I'd expect the 2020 numbers some time this month.
It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.
> It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.
Wow I didn't know that. I always assumed Firefox was developed by a non-profit. So it basically means that Firefox is a commercial product (the purpose of which is to make money). Thanks for that bit of information which was not at all obvious if you don't pay close attention...
It's actually a common arrangement with charities and other non-profits, done that way to make a tax and administration boundary.
The subsidiary is a for-profit, but the profit all goes to the parent non-profit, which is then constrained in how it can use that income.
Think of a little charity shop that sells, say, second hand clothes in order that the profit from sales funds a charitable purpose like fighting cancer. The little shop is likely to be a for-profit company, wholly owned by its parent charity.
Charities have to follow strict rules about how they spend their money, care for their assets, make decisions, report on everything and be audited.
Everything they do is required to be demonstrably for the charity's purposes, which clashes with the on-the-ground flexilibilty required to make business-like decisions for something like a shop. For example when you decide to spruce up the lighting at the front of the shop to attract customers, which only indirectly serves the charity's goals.
That may be a poor example. The point is that the subsidiary business can be run more like a business, being managed, making decisions and spending its income in the freer way a business is allowed to do. The parent charity retains shareholder-like ultimate control, but that is indirect control; the subsidiary has its own directors and executives.
In the case of a shop that means it can spend on things that may attract customers, take gambles that may bring in more profit for the parent charity to use, and make day to day decisions that aren't subject to the same level of reporting, auditing and trustee oversight that the parent charity is. The shop's operating assets are outside the charity, giving it operational flexibility, but when it transfers some portion of assets as profits to the charity, those assets become inside and how they are spent becomes more tightly regulated.
All of the Mozilla Corporation's profits are reinvested in Mozilla, being a nonprofit charity caused tax issues that caused them to spin off the Mozilla Corporation.
I'd love to be able to pay some monthly subscription to support Firefox. But every time this comes up, someone tells me that there's no way to directly support Firefox itself. I wish they'd do something like Wikipedia does, to ask their users to donate or contribute.
Unless I'm mistaken, Wikipedia doesn't ringfence their donations either, so by donating to the Wikimedia foundation [0] you're not just paying for wikipedia either.
While I philosophically agree with you, I can’t help but think:
- Developing Firefox looks way more expensive than running Wikipedia servers.
- It looks like there’s at least 10x less Firefox users than Wikipedia users.
It might still be possible (Firefox users might me more willing to pay and to pay more than Wikipedia users). It still looks really hard.
I wish they didn’t try to match the startup/VC/pivot/diversify frenzy but, in the end, I’m really happy that they exist.
From what I understand doing donations and stipulating that it’s for a specific purpose can hurt a nonprofit more than help, because then vital logistics get underfunded and fuck up the competency of the organization. (Eg. Everyone wants to fund nonprofits cancer research or whatever, but what if they actually desperately need to fund remote work infrastructure because a global pandemic has forced them all to work remotely on short notice?)
Of course if you don’t like what an organization broadly does with the money given to it, don’t give it money. Maybe issue some feedback that you think the organization should do x or y, and the fact it’s doing p and q makes you hesitant to donate.
A browser is not "expensive". A modern marketing tool is expensive.
Take out all the crap, and strip it back to a plain browser. Freeze all new features. The only maintenance that is needed is security patches. That shouldn't need more than a handful of full-time devs. They could be paid using just one exec's salary.
I'll maintain my contribution to Thunderbird; if Mozilla doesn't feel like helping financially with that more-or-less unique product, fair enough. But I'm not OK with having to drill into about:config to disable Firefox Pocket's hijacking of high-profile screen real-estate - why hasn't it gone yet?
Why is a browser expensive? There are many great and big open source projects out there that are maintained and developed mainly by volunteers. Why can't Firefox be like this?
Building a shell around Chromium or Webkit isn't very expensive.
Maintaining an independent, high-quality browser engine so that the design and implementation of the Web isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly is incredibly expensive:
https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent...
(4 years old, but the situation I describe hasn't changed, except that Microsoft has switched to Chromium so Mozilla's engine is more important than ever.)
Feels like a massive missed opportunity - microsoft is the only big player not funded by ads.
Also having their own Engine was cool, i liked it, although it did sometimes have failures. Looks like they got tired if different issues and thew in the towel
They would never overcome the reputation damage from IE. I think they accepted that and switched to Chromium because it just makes maintaining the userbase they do have a lot easier.
The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing.
If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.
--- end quote ---
This is why. It's currently impossible to start a greenfield browser [1]. And even forking an existing engine and trying to keep up is almost impossible [2]
It's very hard for designers and developers to come up with regular updates that stay on the fine line between still useable but somehow worse than the previous version. Firefox has been excelling at this.
Better answer than the just-so ones that you've gotten so far:
It actually used to be that way. For example, it used to be the case that the Firefox product owner was a Googler getting paid by Google to work on Firefox. Lots of other contributors hailed from other companies (or universities), too, whether they were specifically getting paid for it or not; there was a long-tail of completely unpaid contributors. Mozilla wasn't anything like the Bay Area company you see today so much as it was, loosely speaking, a co-op. Mozilla's various formal organizational incarnations were supposed to handle, in order of importance: A. keeping the infrastructure running, and B. paying the salaries of its own contributors to the mozilla.org commons.
Several things changed this:
1. Google, the biggest contributor to the project, pulled their people off Firefox to go build Chrome.
2. Mozilla-the-Corporation, having deceived themselves about the role that the commons-style development played in the project's success, went and Netscaped it.
On the latter point: basically, the Corporation abused its position. They tried (and unfortunately succeeded) at consolidating things under their corporate structure (particularly during the FirefoxOS era after hiring an Adobe exec to be their shepherd through that doomed project—convinced that what Mozilla really needed was good, business-minded leadership). This launched Mozilla on the descent we've seen over the last ten years, and burned all sorts of bridges including goodwill with external contributors and other parts of its base. They hollowed it out, and then had people on payroll to fill in the parts that were getting fucked up. As with the case of Netscape, not all of their hires were good hires.
The perverse thing is, if you know anything about Mozilla's early history, i.e. Firefox pre-history, you'll know that this was already tried once before. What's amazing is that it actually "worked" this time. You'll hear (from people like Mitchell, even) stories about how mozilla.org was an escape pod, and that it had to be rescued from Netscape, because Netscape thought they were the rightful rulers by fiat—this, even after mozilla.org had been set up! Unfortunately, Mozilla-the-Corporation (distinct from mozilla.org) succeeded at taking control where Netscape failed, mostly because everyone involved pretty much let them. A lot of the mechanisms that had been put in _specifically_ to keep Netscape hires in their place were rolled back as part of the post-Firefox-4.0, "we want to move fast and break things, too" era.
Lots of people who at one point once had @mozilla.com email addresses will dispute this, choosing to tell themselves—and others—a different story. And of course they do. It happens for exactly the same reasons that the "are we the baddies?" meme is a thing.
Are you sure you weren't using a VLC clone that added this stuff? Because these things exist (e.g. "VLC plus"). They're basically malware, tricking people into downloading what they think is the genuine article.
I found this thread from 2012 while researching my post. There are in fact not a lot of posts about this topic. Are you sure these entries are sponsored? It doesn't say sponsored in the screenshot.
It's been half a decade since I last used VLC and looked this up, but I'm certain there was a VLC staff member, perhaps a moderator, who explained the presence of these sidebar entries as measures to cover development cost.
There are in fact not a lot of posts about this topic
Well, a couple of minutes on Google. I just looked at all results for "sponsored" on the forum and it is in fact the only thread that uses it in that sense.
I'm still waiting for any concrete evidence, as I am genuinely curious what kind of sponsorships of that kind there are, or were, if any.
They have "Jamendo Selections" nowadays, but that service offers independent music under creative commons licences, you can also right click and remove it.
This list is filled with a LUA script in a VLC dir, and you can override it with a user list. IT's not available through GUI but if it bothers you it's possible to remove it entirely that way.
There is the shinny hardware mafia. It might not be your cup of tea but their source of revenue is clearly on their mostly overpriced hardware.
I remember seeing lots of devs complaining about Safari not implementing the latest new shinny google technology for chrome but looking at some of these features those aren't things I'd have in my browser like PWA. Web developers are totally out of touch if they expect that everybody wants a website to have access to things like USB ports.
Many people would pay for firefox. I don't know if it's enough people to offset what advertisers are willing to pay, nor if adding that would dissuade too many users but it'd be nice to have the option to pay so we can support the development of the browser directly, and avoid adverts.
Donating to the foundation feels a bit like donating to the WWF because I want to help a specific Panda I met at the zoo.
If there were an option to pay 1-2 bucks a month and not have Pocket or anything third party, I'd pay that. I am curious why they seem hesitant to approach this model. It isn't like most of us never purchased Netscape before.
I would rather donate to avoid having random pandas appear at my window and wave manically. But I would much rather not be forced to donate by such unsolicited panda attacks.
It seems it's time to find a Firefox alternative now, privacy-minded and ad-free.
Pity the web is mostly unusable with w3m. Would any HNers recommend DDG's browser as a viable alternative?
Using DDG since years and am happy with it. There was a time where I used !g more often but that isn't the case anymore. And when I still do, I'm typically disappointed.
Many people would pay for firefox so long as it supports their pet features and they all have their own pet features. And it would still be less than they'd get from advertising.
Invariably this is true, but I think had a payment model been adopted when Firefox itself was gaining traction, they wouldn't need to stray from that winning product model - privacy focused, user control, advertisement free, web standard honoring.
As it stands now, they are obviously wanting to monetise their product but for whatever reason don't want to open up to the option of a retail/consumer grade price. Probably it is because they'll make more from feeding ad companies.
I think back when firefox was gaining popularity there wasn't really a public awareness for the need for a privacy focused browser. In other words, even fewer people than right now would've been interested in buying it because they didn't really think they needed it.
Once someone gives away a roughly equivalent good enough product for free charging for a competitor becomes incredibly difficult and that ship sailed when MS bundled IE with windows.
Indeed. They should just state "It's an Ad". I doubt they actually going to try every product that they are advertising, to make wording "suggestion" be even close to the truth.
That said, I don't understand, why would somebody use Firefox instead of Chrome, Edge, or Safari if they ad in-browser ads.
But I'm software engineer, and I didn't know about it. I don't think most (as in 95%+, even in tech) people would know difference to care. My point is visibly – firefox seem to be just as ad-hungry as competition.
They could be better behind the scenes, but customer wouldn't know it.
You know what I miss? Software I can pay for. I'd happily shell out couple of bucks a year for a browser. Or a social network. I'd be more than happy to pay regularly for something that requires regular, constant, maintenance, upkeep, servers, salaries. But no, somehow humanity landed on free+ads. Ugh.
True, and it's already been happening with TVs from what I recall.
You know what I wonder? Where's the hatred threshold for ordinary people? When you see an ad in a middle of something and you're so pissed that you'll go out of your way to specifically avoid the product that's shoved in your throat. I know mine's been reached, but, hey, I'm just an grumpy asshole ;)
Wasn't there some google cookie in firefox that couldn't be deleted at some point, related to safe browsing?
Then when people kept complaining they just hid it from the UI?
I honestly don't know what the situation is now though.
Yes, Google sends a cookie in the responses from its Safe Browsing service. As of Firefox 27 (released in February 2014), Firefox has sandboxed the Google Safe Browsing cookie in a separate cookie jar, isolated from normal web browsing.
Giving Google the power to decide what users are and are not allowed to download is another thing that Mozilla should not be doing.
Guess what Mozilla's response is when Google lists something they shouldn't? "Take it up with Google". And you think Google supports those who they defame better than their usual customers? No. This is not a hypothetical scenario.
Because all the browsers you mention are controlled by megacorps who want to own the web for their own gain. As mismanaged as Mozilla is, they are in it to make the web a decent place for users.
This said, of course, I hate this "feature" and I'll make sure I disable it.
"No new data is collected, stored, or shared to make these new recommendations."
"When contextual suggestions are enabled, Mozilla receives your search queries. When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion."
Doesn't sound like "datamining everything you search for".
> "When contextual suggestions are enabled, Mozilla receives your search queries. (...)"
This, right here. They get those regardless of whether you click on anything. What happens with those queries afterwards?
> "No new data is collected, stored, or shared to make these new recommendations."
If that's true, it would imply search queries were already being sent to Mozilla. I hope it isn't true. I feel incredibly dumb that I never bothered to verify it, that I trusted them. If it turns out the queries were sent, I'll look into filing a GDPR complaint, because I sure as hell didn't give consent for my queries - intended for the search engine of my choice, and which might contain PII - to be processed by Mozilla.
> Mozilla approaches handling this data conservatively. We take care to remove data from our systems as soon as it’s no longer needed. When passing data on to our partners, we are careful to only provide the partner with the minimum information required to serve the feature.
> A specific example of this principle in action is the search’s location. The location of a search is derived from the Firefox client’s IP address. However, the IP address can identify a person far more precisely than is necessary for our purposes. We therefore convert the IP address to a more general location immediately after we receive it, and we remove the IP address from all datasets and reports downstream.
>> When passing data on to our partners, we are careful to only provide the partner with the minimum information required to serve the feature.
That's hogwash without access to details of actual cases. What is the definition of "minimum" for a given partner here?
Reminds me of the UX of Android a couple years ago:
- Android: "I'm a better system than desktops, I offer fine-grained permissions that ensure apps only have access to what they need, nothing more."
- Every single app, upon installation: "I need every single permission enumerable in the current SDK version."
>> A specific example of this principle in action is the search’s location. (...)
Oh, that's nice, I feel a bit more relaxed - this means they can't enable this feature for me at all, because they first have to seek informed consent from me for this kind of processing. They'd better remember to ask.
I think I can confidently assume that despite not providing IP or accurate location data, there are enough features in the data for their partners to fingerprint individuals. Might require a lot more work, but when advertisers go out of their way to identify individuals based on their browser/os/hardware settings, they'll attempt to do it on just about anything they could get their hands on.
I wonder how containers affect this behavior? Since the same history seems to pop up regardless of which container I'm in, I wonder if this effectively makes containers permeable?
That's unsustainable. It's what some projects already try to do with Chromium, and it just doesn't work: every time Google steers a bit more towards evil, the downstream burden increases significantly, and sooner or later the bad patches creep in anyway.
There is an institutional problem at Mozilla, we should focus on fixing that rather than trying to come up with even more complex sticking plasters.
Whats needed is a rebirth, basically the Mozilla team quits, creates a new mozilla inc and leaves the old one behind to go full chrome appocalypso.
Basically what nature does when the elder generation acquires to many parasites and dna damages, spawn a new generation and die, taking most of the parasites with them.
> There is an institutional problem at Mozilla, we should focus on fixing that rather than trying to come up with even more complex sticking plasters.
How do you fix that from the outside if not by forking or at least using a different Browser to make it clear that the current behavior is unacceptable.
Forking is an option only insofar as the forking team is actually capable of leading development. Purely reactive forks, like most of the ones we see in the Chromium world, are not sustainable in the long run. Is there a team, out there, who could fork FF and take it into a new direction? Maybe. But that has happened only once in the history of Mozilla, and it was paid for by Mozilla itself, because it's a huge task.
I had an exchange with Darren Herman at Mozilla about these issues back in 2014 when they had just started the nonsense of calling ads “content discovery”. If memory serves these were for the first time on the new tab page.
It was my position that ads violate the ethos of free software by making the user serve the software. You can debate that, but in any case that was the beginning of this culture at Mozilla to use bs language to placate users.
Okay then maybe browsing history was too specific a term. It might not be in the list of URLs you have visited, but it is in a list of things you have searched. So your search history.
The principal is the same. People don't want their private lives (in part expressed through what they search for) exploited and exposed.
> When contextual suggestions are enabled, Mozilla receives your search queries. When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion.
I wish they'd give the about:config key to disable it as well as UI instructions in posts like this. The former can be set in a preferences file; so easily synchronised between machines and not forgotten when setting up a new one.
Once enabled, Firefox Suggest sends what I type in the address bar to Mozilla. There it gets augmented with my location and makes its way to their "preferred partners", limited, for the moment, to a lovely establishment called "adMarketplace".
You don't see a slightest problem with that, no?
Reading through their "how Mozilla handles data" page [1] reveals absolutely nothing specific. What's collected, what's being passed on, etc. Just a bunch of hand waving and "don't you worry, everything is tip-top".
You are OK that - by default - you type something in the Firefox address bar and some random company you've heard of gets a copy of it? You are A-OK with this?
Because this is on by default in FF93, be it a new install or an upgrade.
For now limited to the US, but it's safe to assume they are just testing waters.
Almost everything I search for goes to Google or some other search company, with a lot more metadata attached to it, so yes, I am OK with that apparently.
The default, in friendly big blue colors, is to "Allow suggestions" with the alternative called "Customize in settings". It is also not clear if disabling "suggestions", switches off all its machinery or merely prevents them from being shown.
As others have said up this thread, the problem is not as much the feature itself, but the fact that Mozilla deemed it perfectly fine to roll out something like this in the first place.
It becomes increasingly obvious that Mozilla no longer understands (or cares!) what it was that made Firefox special, made people stick with it and what the motivation and priorities of these people are.
Brave's take is having the user download a country-specific ad catalog so the browser can make decisions locally. Similar principle to why browsers download full blocklists of malicious sites instead of querying each address separately.
The trick is, you can't, unfortunately. You can have relevant ads that encroach on your privacy, or you can have possibly irrelevant ads that don't. If we are considering all possibilities, they could have precomputed some magic to do it all locally, but I have doubts about that because it seems more difficult to do that than just slap an identifier on your keystrokes and consult their ad-partner API.
Based off TFA, it looks like they don't send any sort of identifier to adMarketplace. By relevant they mean relevant to whatever you typed into the search bar this time, not relevant to your browsing history or things you previously typed into the search bar.
Agreed. I am completely fine with them trying to run their own ads. It's much better than indirectly funding them through Googles Ads. But just be upfront about what you're doing.
This extends to the splash screen as well. No "disable ads" button just "not now" or "settings".
It's a dark pattern I call 'the consent ratchet'. As soon as you ever get irritated enough and misclick that button is gone for ever and good luck disabling the 'feature' (term used lightly) seven layers of menus down, assuming it can be done at all.
I am not sure whether their fall to around a 5% market share in the browser market had anything to do with any of the things in the above article, but to me it feels like the logical next progression at some point is to remove Mozilla from the actual Firefox software.
So my question is this: how long will it be before any fork of Firefox will gain a large following, much like what happened to CentOS/Rocky Linux?
Seems like there are quite a few independent forks, but nothing that i think would be a no-brainer for replacing Firefox as the default browser of any Linux distro or on a Windows desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-bas...
Worst thing is that every single time they do this kind of bullshit, they do it without asking for opt-in and enable it sneakily by default. Absolutely the worst.
Ads would be cheeky, but I would welcome any efforts to get into the search space through search suggestions, akin to what Apple is doing in Safari with Siri Suggested Websites. Whether those are provided by Apple or Google I don't know, but they do open a window for Apple (and Mozilla) to slowly develop search capabilities. I've no idea whether that's either Apple or Mozilla's end game, but it would be a promising development if it were so.
I'm pretty sure that Mozilla isn't getting into the search/ad business. I assume that's what you mean when you say "search capabilities".
While it would be good news if they were, insofar as creating more competition for the incumbents (let's be honest, the incumbent, google), at this point only regulators can do anything about the state of search/ad industry.
If this is actually the case Mozilla is yet again being used as one of Google's pawns.
"See, there are other browsers and search/ad companies flourishing despite our market position!"
They also, on the last update, prompted some color scheme adjustments "for a limited time" - what? That isn't something you tend to see in open source software. I wonder if they think it will increase engagement with the browser?
Gods do I miss the days when I could be a Firefox fanboy. I even miss version 1.5 when the Close Tab button was in the same place for any active tab so you could muscle-memory click it without even looking at the tab bar.
He wrote that he dislikes the language – and so do I.
I feel like this kind of marketing language is only there to obfuscate the real reason why things are done. They want to include ads to help finance Mozilla – the main goal isn't "to enhance and speed up your searching experience". Calling the introduction of ads an enhancement for the user is just dishonest.
It's an unambiguous signal that Mozilla is no longer making software to benefit the user but rather to benefit "trusted partners". That's what's to dislike.
"Relevant" is a code word for "we spy on your every move and also share your personal browsing behaviour with our many external partners to serve you relevant ads".
Meh, the feature is easily deactivable, the settings are clear and extensive. As far as ads go, it's one of the best implementations.
Firefox still has no alternative in the privacy / user-centric space (don't mention Brave, I'm gonna get mad). Mozilla has done a lot for the web, I can give them some slack for exploring different revenue models.
Still, I'm going to keep on eye for this kind of practices in the future. I don't want them to get too comfortable with it.
Each time I install Firefox, I end up wasting a non-trivial amount of time carefully working my way through the settings in order to disable the pile of defaults that are as 'easy' to deactivate as they are infuriating. When updating the browser, some of these changes get rolled back, and some of them become more difficult to adjust, either by being removed from the options menu, or by being obscured in about:config - maybe the name has changed for no reason, or maybe the behaviour now depends on an entirely different configuration value.
A particularly obscene case is the auto-updater, which has gotten so bad that I have literally given up on figuring out how to disable it. (At least on Windows; firefox-esr on debian is, so far, free of this insanity) (Ever noticed how forced automatic updates in software get pushed by security fanaticism, but mostly exist to steal your data and ruin your day while they're at it?)
You, apparently, see an easily-deactivable feature in a clear and extensive settings menu. I see an ever-growing eldritch labyrinth, built solely to prevent me from having a straightforward internet browsing experience, all the while the browser's performance is slowly but surely - and noticeably - worsening in the new versions.
Anyway, screw you, Mozilla. At this point I'm only using firefox because I don't see much of a choice either.
>Ever noticed how forced automatic updates in software get pushed by security fanaticism, but mostly exist to steal your data and ruin your day while they're at it?)
Would you mind expanding on this one so I can better understand what you mean?
I'm guessing the "ruin your day" part is that you have to interrupt your workflow for some minutes? But it's not entirely clear to me how automatic updates "mostly exist to steal your data" -- excepting software which is already stealing your data anyways (so I don't understand how automatic updates factor in). Does manually updating somehow protect your data from being stolen in a way that automatic updates don't? Or you just don't update?
Except they have used the language of "not now" and hidden the link away instead of making it a button with equal prominence to the yes button.
That's not the behaviour of an organisation which thinks its users will be happy with what it's doing, it's the behaviour of an organisation which is trying to trick them.
There's still a Preferences option to opt out of "Play DRM-controlled content", even though I'm sure <5% of people opt out of that. Some options stick around for the sake of principle.
It's disabled by default. Enabling DRM installs a non-free binary from Google, and the user is prompted to install it when a website attempts to play DRM media: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm
Not OP but I've avoided Brave from the beginning because of its reliance on an ad-fueled crypto scam to generate revenue. If you're trying to avoid Mozilla's new ad-based revenue scheme, moving to a browser that is wholly funded by tracking your browsing and showing you ads while pretending to "pay" you with cryptocurrency that they never actually pay out, seems like a step backwards.
I'm not finding the section you linked to very damning at all.
Of the four issues, all were resolved quickly and according to community wishes.
1. Unverified Brave Creators UI - Two days after the complaint, Brave issued an update to "clearly indicate which publishers and creators have not yet joined Brave Rewards so users can better control how they donate and tip.
Tom Scott, the original complainant, tweeted in response: "These are good changes, and they fix the complaints I had!".
2. Affiliate Links to Crypto Exchanges - Two days later, Brave released a new version which they said disabled the auto-completion to partner links, followed by a blog post explaining the issue and apologizing. Def the most scummy of the list IMO.
3. DNS Leaks with built in TOR - An issue was discovered and fixed via their Bug Bounty program, where they have an average 6 days to bounty payout.
4. A company violated their terms of service.
I definitely have my biases, although I don't use Brave daily anymore. But I don't think the controversies section you linked is particularly egregious or indicative of bad faith.
Tracking how? You know how browsers can download malicious software blocklists as one large local list insteas of consulting an online service for every url which would allow the provider to know what you do?
Their ad setup works the same. The browser downloads an entire country-specific catalog in one go, and decides what to show you completely locally. Whether you trust their cryptographic setup that tells them you've seen an ad is another thing entirely and is its own brand of black magic.
But the basic setup is simple. They sell adspace and show you ads from that local catalog. Brave takes a cut, users get a cut. They have a tipping service to compensate creators.
There's definitely parts that might be suspect, like that proof of having seen an ad.
And even if it all works just as intended, there is the concern that ads that don't track are generally less valuable so even widespread adoption of Brave's system would cause a decrease in ad revenue and thus ability to keep sites up and running. We've already seen the fallout of Apple's recent anti-tracking changes, and Brave's system is definitely similar in effect.
Running on chromium is one thing, since I believe having a monopoly on what's essentially the new global operating system would not be healthy.
But Brave have just proven to be an unethical, borderline scammy project. And I'm saying this as someone who owns crypto and can see the value of advertisement in some cases.
Brave is based on Chromium, it lacks some of the privacy centric features that are found in Gecko browsers. 1st party isolation,tracker blocking, containers, anti fingerprinting measures and SNI encryption are some things I can think of right now (maybe chrome as caught up now?)
Plus, Google controls Chromium and Firefox is literally the only alternative now. They push changes that are against or in in ignorance of of web standards because they can. Downstream browsers like brave,edge and opera basically have to accept whatever Google says. This isn't good for the web at all. Frankly there should be an anti-trust suit against Google for this because it is very anti-competitive.
You also have Safari (and GNOME Web on Linux) using the WebKit engine, developed by Apple as an alternative...
But that's not available on Android or Windows (the WebKit port exists there, but no good UI frontend as far I know)... which are the two big platforms. (because Apple doesn't care enough about those I guess?)
GNOME WebKit definitely isn't Safari. A lot of websites that work in Safari were broken in WebKit last time I tried it.
It does replicate a lot of buggy behaviour in Safari so from what I can tell you can be reasonably sure that your website works in Safari if it works in WebKit, but that's the only use I've found for it so far.
As for a good UI on Windows, I think you should be able to compile GNOME's WebKit browser for Windows. It'll look terribly out of place like any GNOME application in a different environment, but I think it should work well enough to use?
Recently I've found the opposite to be true. I've on more than one occassion chased bugs that weren't reproducible on Epiphany and I don't own an Apple device to test Safari. The end up back-burnered because the testing situation is bad.
> A lot of websites that work in Safari were broken in WebKit last time I tried it.
If you used it in the past from the Debian repos, they didn't use to do security or feature update servicing for WebKit in their repositories. That's no longer a thing nowadays.
You can use both the Technology Preview at https://webkit.org/downloads/ or check if the version is recent on your distribution however.
> Brave is based on Chromium, it lacks some of the privacy centric features that are found in Gecko browsers. 1st party isolation,tracker blocking, containers, anti fingerprinting measures and SNI encryption are some things I can think of right now (maybe chrome as caught up now?)
What? One of the main points of the project is to build a browser with a whole bunch of tinfoil like tracker blocking and anti fingerprinting measures. They wrote their own built-in adblocker with Rust so it won't get fucked by Manifest v3 since it's part of the browser. They're the only Chromium browser that does CNAME uncloaking, something that uBlock Origin can only do on Firefox.
Containers are unique to Firefox, Chromium browsers handle that via separate user profiles.
I use both brave and firefox daily. Nothing against brave, it has privacy protections as you mentioned, but ff also has privacy centric features that are not in brave. I have not made an empirical evaluation to measure which is better. That said there is a ton I normally configure in about:config that I just can't in Chromium. I only use brave because Firefox isn't good at handling memory intensive sites.
That is fair, but your original post basically implied that brave doesn't have a bunch of privacy features it very much has and that go beyond basically every other Chromium fork.
also while we're on the topic of dark patterns, the cards, the sponsored backgrounds and the crypto crap seem to be curiously enough the only settings that don't sync. on every machine you have to turn it all off manually again.
> - Sponsored Backgrounds: just random places of the world like tropical beaches, Buddhist temples or mountains.
No, these are just random backgrounds. At some point I started seeing backgrounds advertising Crocs and stuff like that, at which point I discovered the Sponsored backgrounds option and turned that off, leaving me back with random pics of scenery
I installed Brave 1 year ago and I mostly use the defaults (iOS).
So... I looked up its configuration and looks like Sponsored Backgrounds are activated... But, they don't work at all. I deactivated them in case they suddenly start working.
No? They sell ad space, people buy ad space. Brave shows you ads, gets paid and keeps a cut from that payment, they give their users a cut from that payment.
Brave has a tipping service which lets users tip sites they like. End result is advertisers can advertise, and people making content get some of the ad money, the setup's just built to not track people.
They're very straightforwardly ad salesmen like every other browser out there, they've just tried to build an ad ecosystem that doesn't track users.
Brave's business model is that they bribe you with company scrip ("crypto" "currency") to undergo brainwashing (watch ads), what's not wrong with that?
Just imagine the meltdown if Google or Microsoft built that in. Somehow, Mozilla always get the slack and a couple of months down the road they are the saviour of the privacy world yet again.
Google and Microsoft did built that a long time ago. Google Chrome will happily open a Google Search results page for anything you type into the address bar or pick from the suggestions displayed within. And that Google Search results page is full of "sponsored" content. When it comes to Microsoft, it's just the same thing except they call it Bing.
Google and Microsoft do build that in. Google Chrome's default search engine is Google, so the search suggestions come from Google. I am not sure that Google includes sponsored results in those suggestions, but at the very least they do harvest your data to advertise to you better in the future. Microsoft does the same thing by making Bing their default search engine.
Like with Firefox, you have to change your preferences if you want privacy.
Well, both of them already include something a bit similar.
Search suggestions are displayed and the items are conditioned to your location, cookies... Pages which know how to trick themselves to the top of this suggestions get visitors straight from the user's navbar.
The main difference between Google/Microsoft's approach and Mozilla's is that the pages themselves don't pay to be displayed directly onto your browser's navbar dropdown.
I do agree and do not trust Microsoft one inch. But I've read a lot of "Windows 10 + WSL + VSCode is the ideal dev environment" sentiments on this very site. Along with "Microsoft has changed" vibes.
This just makes me worry a little bit that Firefox will take a similar route to Brave and introduce multiple streams of revenue into the browser, disguised as features that the user would want. E.g. Brave Rewards, Brave VPN, Sponsored Wallpapers.
These just clog up the interface and make it feel sketchy. I just want a normal FOSS browser, but I also understand the whole financing issue.
I’ve used Brave as my daily driver for years, and not once have I ever been even mildly inconvenienced by the optional BAT token feature. If it helps fund the browser, I’m glad- that’s better for me. I understand why people dislike it, but the outrage seems superfluous.
I largely lost my trust in Brave after the absolute shitshow where they were hard-redirecting domains globally that you hand entered through their affiliate link redirects - you'd enter example.com and the browser would be hardcoded to not load example.com
And they do need to do that. Browser makers having alternative revenue streams and reasons outside the browser-as-a-window to exist is necessary. One reason Firefox was losing market share is that it was just a window. Google, Apple, MS all provide a competitively good window but have other footprint on the web and can provide integrated services as a result.
One of the best parts about Brave is that they are trying to build independent revenue streams from things like integrated Jitsi features, an independent search engine and the like. Vivaldi builds in things like mail clients, RSS readers and a rudimentary notetaking tool.
In that vein, Pocket is a really good thing, and also helps combat link rot. The vocal Firefox userbase is moronically hostile to add-on services though, even if they are the ultimate key to Firefox's health.
Vivaldi is not open source so that's an immediate "no" from me. I'm fine with using closed source tools from time to time, but a web browser is just too important and intertwined in my life to trust a closed source offering.
In a perfect world we'd have nothing but fully open source software funded by support contracts and commercial interest in offering superior software, but the world isn't perfect and so we have to compromise sometimes. But the browser is one place I draw the line.
> Of the three layers, only the UI layer is closed-source. This means that roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open-source coming from Chromium, 3% is open-source coming from us and only 5% is our UI closed-source code.
From the article ai understand you must opt in to make this available: These suggestions — which aim to enhance and speed up your searching experience — are only enabled when you provide access to new data types.
People complain when the default is opted-in. Now someone makes something that by default is opted-out and... people still complain.
They ask that when someone uses telemetry, that would be shown upfront. When someone does that, they ask it to be disabled by default. And when we get disabled by default, where do we go? Remove the feature, ofcourse :)
Ads, privacy and telemetry is a hot cake topic on HN.
That button is actually a cheap way to support mozilla, if anyone cares.
Safari’s privacy is a joke considering you can’t install browser extensions like UBlock Origin to thoroughly block trackers and other spyware. Not to mention it’s the most buggy and poorly developed rendering engine, breaking more websites than any other major browser. And it’s not even cross platform. Hardly a competitor as far as I’m concerned.
Safari was the only browser to ship with 3rd party cookies disabled by default. Without Safari there'd be tons of websites that required 3rd party cookies to work. These days there are very few.
3rd party cookies make pervasive tracking much, much easier.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't call a software locked to an ecosystem "user-centric". Firefox on Android is a lifesaver in a sea of opportunistic alternatives
By the love of all thats holy, I still don't understand how the development of an entire operating system can be reasonably coordinated by a (admittably singlularly competent) sole finnish guy in a bathrobe from home, while a comparably simple webbrowser needs a foundation, a company, a ceo, a code of conduct, all those outreach and social-action programmes etc...
Or maybe, is all that cesspool of ineffectiveness and virtue-signaling the product and the webbrowser just the cashcow and the name at this point?
Modern webbrowsers are hugely more complicated to implement than a kernel with no user space and very limited driver support (as Linux was back when it was a single person operation).
In fact modern webbrowsers are bordering on being an operating system in their own right. They're already a virtual machine, with their own run times, plus one of the most complicated document markup standards known to man (and to make matters worse, it's not just as simple as supporting correct standards, they have to support incorrect usages of those standards too because webdevelopers often use deprecated standards, tags or even just use those tags wrongly and people still expect those sites to render).
Lets not forget that JS isn't just a simple interpreter like in the 90s. There's 3D rendering with WebGL, audio rendering with WebMidi, real time communications with WebRTC, location services, WASM, and so on and so forth.
Let's also not forget that HTML, CSS, JS, etc are not the only standards a browser needs to support, there's GIF, JPEG, SVG, video formats and audio formats too. There are network protocols like HTTP, FTP, SSL/TLS. And HTTP is non-trivial these days because there's multiple revisions of it, each different significantly from the previous. There's websockets, binary encodings, MIME types, etc.
And all of that isn't even touching on the UI. Even just supporting a modern multi-platform native desktop UI is more than a single persons job. And that's before any of the complexities mentioned above.
We're not talking about modern Linux though. Modern Linux isn't "coordinated by a (admittably singlularly competent) sole finnish guy in a bathrobe from home,", there's now a team of people involved. Sure there is a hierarchy with someone taking the lead but isn't that true for most operations? Even the Mozilla foundation has a Chair (Mitchell Baker) and Executive Director (Mark Surman).
Linux hasn't been a single person operation since the 90s.
The "guy in a bathrobe" is still the lead and has the final say. Is he compensated anywhere near what Mozilla's CEO is?
In fact is the total comp of all the people significantly involved in Linux kernel development anywhere near the total comp of Mozilla's C-suite? I doubt it.
You're now making a tangential argument about whether people are being paid their worth and frankly that's never been the case.
Most of us developers, devops and sysadmins are paid an obscene wage compared to many critical services like nursing. Is it fair? Probably not. But that doesn't have any baring on the complexity of Linux vs Firefox.
Prices are determined by supply and demand, so there is no merit in claiming a person writing software has an obscene earnings compared to a nurse. Not to mention that you can get into all kinds of nonsense like “the team of software developers made something that saved millions of man hours enabling nurses to help many more patients”. But that is neither here nor there.
However, you can compare the people in the same business, such as those writing software for operating systems and web browsers and compare the cost and productivity in both.
I like the idea of Gemini, but there's so much it's missing. There's no accessibility features, no compression, syntax is even more limiting that Markdown or AsciiDoc, etc.
First, Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. Second, nowadays web browsers are fairly big beasts, perhaps even more than the complex machinery that Linux is. If lines of code are any measure Firefox and Chromium are above it[1][2][3]. Finally, Mozilla isn't making only Firefox.
Linux is a kernel, not an entire operating system. Lots of companies contribute, it has a foundation, and I'm sorry to break it to you but it even has a code of conduct.
What makes you think a web browser is comparatively simple compared to a kernel?
I think the main difference between OS kernel and browser is the former can decide what they need to support, but the latter need to be compatible in order to render existing website. IMO, Building a new browser is more similar to building a Windows-compatible operating system.
What a ridiculously disingenuous comment. You realize there's a whole Linux Foundation, right? And multiple enormous companies and a whole open source community that are the actual developers of the entire operating system?
I stuck with Firefox when Chrome stormed the market with a faster browser. Mozilla has had a highly respected name. I'm not so convinced about that anymore...
For me the core values of the browser are:
- free software, open source, as in freedom
- independent (mozilla is weak here)
- developer friendly, good debugging/dev interface (they are slowly losing here)
- keeping up with web standards, letting me play with proposed changes
- good performance
- not tied to a advertising business model (they are weakening themselves here)
- privacy defaults
These things are very important to me and I'm not alone. The browser is one of my primary tools that I rely on to work as well as the wider open source ecosystem.
I'd be very much willing to pay a subscription fee if I end up being the actual customer, as a web developer and not a target for other Mozilla products that I don't care about and advertisements that distract me and get in my way of working. I'm already distracted enough to begin with as I'm literally working within the web...
I haven't been a fan of many of the news surrounding Mozilla as of late:
- laying off hundreds of workers
- continuing to increase C-level salaries while revenue goes down
- products I mostly don't care about
- dropping support for innovative browser tech like Servo
- now spamming their users with ads...
What do I do?
Recently there was an announcement of the replay browser (replay.io). I played around with it a bit and I'm very tempted at the moment to try it as my primary working browser. They tick some of the boxes above (developer focused browser, subscription fee => I'm the customer). Not sure about it yet.
Edit: to the paragraph above about considering the replay browser, I just checked their privacy policy and it's a big no-no...
Is there any browser with good developer experience that respects my privacy and freedom?
Functionally there are only two browsers, and they are both terrible. As such, it has to be no. The options you have are reskins of those two browsers or browsers that miss big features and are therefore a PITA to use (I'm looking at you, Safari).
It's sad to see Mozilla go down this road, one time after another.
I don't mind it if they need the money (they don't, look into their finances and come tell me with a straight face that this non-profit isn't making the ends meet), it's comparable to default search engine placement and search suggestions, can be turned off etc.
What I have a problem with is the dark-pattern-esque language, like "relevant suggestions" and "trusted partners." I'm used to seeing that kind of messaging from the FAANG boogeymen, not Mozilla who's supposed to be the last fortress of the open internet. After years of conditioning it very strongly implies untrustworthiness to me, makes me immediately suspicious of some nefarious scheme.
I would vote with my feet but there are no options left, any other choice would mean betraying my values even further. I am being held hostage.
It’s sucky and I particularly hate ads percolating to every part if my life, BUT how are they meant to support Firefox and other software without a revenue stream?
Mozilla seems to attract criticism for how they run the whole operation, I can’t tell how correct it is, but even if they run it perfectly they still need revenue.
I used to give money to Mozilla Foundation, I stopped when I realised it actually wasn't going to Firefox development, which is done by Mozilla Corporation. I even reached out to their support, and no, there is no way to support FF but with your eyeballs.
With that feature, that I will of course disable for my personal use, I will not be able to recommend Firefox to other people any more.
Seems to work for Wikipedia (possibly another dysfunctional example). I'd happily pay for Firefox too.
If nothing else, there's not that many rendering engines out there. Chrome, Brave and Edge are all Chromium. Safari is separate I guess, but that's tied to Apple platforms. I really don't want yet another Google monoculture.
maybe go the other direction and try to cut expenses rather than trying to make more money? Firefox gets hundreds of millions from Google alone in royalties, that is not enough to build a web browser?
Firefox has lost almost half of its users since 2010, yet it keeps burning more money every year. Run the company in a lean way, cut the fat, do one thing well. It's like Wikipedia, every year they seemingly find new ingenious ways to burn more cash.
> Firefox gets hundreds of millions from Google alone in royalties, that is not enough to build a web browser?
Empirically, it is not. Even Microsoft gave up that chase. Browsers are staggeringly complex and expensive to build. Which may be an indictment of the Web itself, but in the absence of a simpler alternative (Gemini?), the Web we have is the Web we've got, and browsers have to meet it where it is.
Microsoft gave up developing their own engine, because that aspect doesn't make them money, and their engines were too far behind to bother investing into catching up. They're still making a browser, because it's useful even if it doesn't make them money.
Mozilla's engine is modern and they have a clear revenue stream to subsidize its development with their browser revenue.
But instead the browser revenue goes to dumb shit like mobile OSes (that definitely is too expensive), VPNs, executive bonuses, and basically anything but their browser or engine.
FirefoxOS has been dead for at least seven years. That horse is quite dead.
The VPN product probably pays for itself.
I'm not an insider anymore but aside from FirefoxOS the vast majority of the money has always gone into browser development and I have no reason to believe that has changed.
But the Web we have is not a monolith. If freedom/ethics/privacy/etc. are important to a browser user, they should realize that there's a subset of the Web that they need, and one they can do without. "I need to be able to discover and consume every work in every medium from everyone immediately and have it be secure and efficient" is the unspoken mindset that enables this kind of decay in the browser world. Essential services like banks, government are the one subset that you need but will be extremely hard to change, if even possible. For everything else, people need to realize that there's a Web that doesn't need their browsers to participate in this arms race, and that Web needs support from users and from producers.
EDIT: I guess I forgot shopping in essential services, which is another huge source of fuel in the arms race.
Today that means it should actively subvert the business interests of the web. Advertisers want to show ads? Block them and make no exceptions. Surveillance capitalists want data? Give them fake data or no data at all whenever possible. Sites start detecting Firefox? Start pretending to be Chrome.
It doesn't matter what these companies want or need. Firefox needs to take the user's side every single time. This arms race is absolutely necessary. Firefox needs to be a true user agent. If it ever stops being one, it's over for Mozilla.
We agree in that we wish Firefox prioritized each user's privacy and agency more. But what I'm saying is that users' demand for ubiquitous and frictionless media consumption is something that will always be abused, and to try to satisfy that need and also not become corrupt or destroyed by your competitors seems pretty impossible at the moment. I want there to be a space for a browser that doesn't need millions or billions to maintain.
Gemini throws out way way too much. Inline links and image support for one. It feels like someone wants to have everything exactly as it was in the 80s.
They claim to stop feature creep by not including any kind of optional data support like headers and the spec team will reject any feature additions.
While I would be happy to have HTML/CSS exactly as it is and replace JS with a minimal WASM implementation that lets the website bring whatever tools it wants rather than relying on 1 billion JS apis.
The culture. A portion of Gemini users use it as a way to escape from the complexity of the modern web, including some small "browser" writers who want to target a small and easy to understand spec for their efforts.
There's always Palemoon [0] (for anyone who likes the classic firefox interface). I've been using it for years (and have donated), plus I like the fact it can be installed just by unpacking a tarball/zip file (as well as the more usual methods).
Thanks, I didn't know that was an even older version version of the same claim. I imagine that's one of the reasons for the developers being tired of the same (incorrect in their view) claims.
The only remaining issue with Palemoon for me is webrtc (which is selectively disabled). For those that value stability (especially on Windows) that's no bad thing (personally, I'm not a fan of being forced to use a specific browser to access some sites). It's like the IE6 days.
I expect if Mozilla made opt-out a paid feature, then all that would happen is that Firefox would be forked without ads, and the general public use Chrome or Edge anyway.
Nobody asked for or wants that. Just let people donate directly to Firefox development, instead of towards a bloated foundation funding millions in exec salaries and project nobody wants.
1 user at $4.16 per month is not going to help, support and develop a competitive browser or search engine.
1mn users paying $4/m is going to be just over $40mn per year. There's no way any company can compete with MS or Google on that revenue stream. Get investors and they will enforce whatever it takes to build revenue = ads.
Get your facts right, FF has 870 million YAUs. You're off by several orders of magnitude.
This whole argument that only ads can save FF is weak and unfounded.
Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this.
And I most certainly don't want FF to spend money/time on "search engine" features. Let the search engines companies do that.
Wait a minute. Are you saying that FF users are all going to pay? How many free Versus paid users are on Youtube Premium? There are billions of Youtube users I would imagine, certain they are not paying.
>> Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this.
Get your wallet out, hire some developers, build it, share it. You want a lot and make demands but I don't see how what you said is economically viable.
> You want a lot and make demands but I don't see how what you said is economically viable.
FF _is_ already what I "demand" they just need to stop copying every UX feature of chromium under the ilusion that it will make them "competitive" with Chrome. And they need to stop spending money on all these side projects and focus on the core products FF and TB.
These corporate people need to step aside and stop chasing an impossible goal of FF market share growth. They can never compete with behemoths like Google or Microsoft or Apple. The funding disparity and they way the competition setup mottes and baileys is just not realistic.
Google paying Mozilla for default search engine privilege is just a way for google to go CYA, in case they get into anti-trust litigation ("we even fund the small players"). The moment FF actually make a dent in market share is the moment that Google closes the tap on funding.
The main software design problem Mozilla is facing is their urge to add user hostile anti-feutures. MS and especially Google are way better at those, so why compete on that? It is a losing game ...
This was my first thought, then I remembered Google gives Mozilla hundreds of millions every year, Mitchell Baker is paid 3 millions/year (after 250 people were laid off) when Firefox is basically dying.
There should be a paid ad free membership for anyone who doesn’t like ads. Even if not many people take them up on this offer, it would be more fair since there would be a choice.
This! How hard can it be to put a FF subscription payment somewhere inside the browser or on their website?
Of course people can always fork it and remove it blabla. But we're talking about people who otherwise would donate and just want to do it more directly (as opposed to the whole Mozilla foundation)
Those people should form a DAO, pool their funds in a governable smart contract for disbursing them, and reach out to people thru hn search who have their own forks of FF now and who make comments cough like me cough on hn about it over the years every time FF adds some more garbage in their browser.
;)
At this point, threads like this help me add to my list of what garbage i need to compile out every year or so when i feel like syncing up hahaha.
They could start by slashing the out-of-control executive salaries maybe?
Ahaha, who am I kidding, capitalism be capitalism...
Edit: before you knee-jerk downvote, please read up on the evolution of exec compensation at Mozilla. It's pretty eye-opening, and really exemplifies what's going wrong with the project.
Exec salaries at Mozilla are a real problem. The search-engine deals bring a lot of money, which would be more than enough to run an engineering-focused group that develops a browser and associated technologies. However, it's not enough to run yet another megacorp-style organization with overinflated management compensation, which is what it has slowly turned into.
I have very few requirements for personal browser I absolutely insist on. Some of the most important ones are that it must be possible to configure it so it:
> 1) Never-ever in any circumstances sends anything I type into URL bar outside my PC until I press Enter.
All suggestions must come from my local bookmarks and visited sites history, and there must be "old-school" dedicated Search bar (or explicit keyword searches) triggering remote lookup for fuzzy suggestions and stuff like that.
> 2) After I press the Enter, it loads precisely what I've typed. No implicit searches, no www+.., ..+.com|org|net guesswork, nothing.
If I type invalid address, I want to see error message saying that the browser does not understand my intention. The only exceptions are adding default protocol (if what I've typed is not keyword command), and doing URI encoding stuff if necessary. Nothing more. And "keyword searches" done from URL bar must display resulting address.
Thankfully, Firefox is still capable of being configured this way, except that "display Keyword remote URL result verbatim"), but it is increasingly more and more difficult to keep it this way. It makes me sad, and confused, because I see these requirements as a clear manifestation of philosophy Firefox is (used to be) built on.
Now I better understand why they butchered the address bar the way they did.
Instead of treating it like simple form element their change served one point and one point only, draw attention to it and make it more prominent. And the reason for it was just to serve their ads on a bigger and more intrusive canvas and not UX related.
Well, no, the address bar is one of Firefox’s best UX features. Thank god it’s not just a simple form element, it’s much more useful now. Before it was something like the Windows run dialog text box but now it’s more similar to my zsh prompt with aliases for searching and fuzzy history recall etc.
I see the benefits for these features, but do not see why the bar had to become that obtrusive in appearance and behavior for them.
But for me these features are useless at best and a distraction in practice, I don't want suggestions from my browser, at all, I want to think for my self.
I use the url bar simply for entering addresses, or for copying and editing them. I completely disabled my history and what I want to remember I keep as bookmarks. When I want so search something I use the search box.
If Wikimedia were managing Firefox you would see the "donation" button in the toolbar that can't be really disabled during the fundrasing season; you can press a small x button, but it will come back as soon as you think it is truly gone. You are severely understating Wikimedia's aggressive campaigns.
I donated once thinking it would make the banner go away. Not only was I wrong, but it seemed more persistent. Maybe I just noticed their money gathering efforts more after that, but it felt like it only got louder as if it gained power.
Not disagreeing, but how/what could Mozilla spend money on instead?
Is there a backlog (I know there's always a backlog) of WORTHWHILE features/services they could be working on if more money was reallocated to engineering?
Seems like a lot of their more recent services are probably breaking even or maybe even costing them. And I doubt they're really affecting market share or reputation in a meaningful way.
Meanwhile Firefox seems either at parity or ahead of Chrome/Safari/etc, depending on who you ask. (Ahead if you ask me, except on power consumption).
Perhaps Mozilla would have been able to continue Servo, but that's about the only example I can think of. The Rust language and ecosystem doesn't seem to need Mozilla at this point in time. https://killedbymozilla.com/
Maybe lack of a vision has a lot to do with the state of Mozilla and/or Firefox. Then again, it would depend on the vision. After all, Mozilla/Firefox's competition have deep pockets to keep up with any technological advantage that comes their way that doesn't negatively affect/impact their lucrative business interests (advertising, services, etc).
Considering that contract was originally negotiated when exec salaries were much lower... likely yes, s/he would do a better job. It's very plain that Baker and her friends have lost the ideological hunger and now are just in it for the money they can make before it all goes bust.
What are you talking about? The contract is constantly renegotiated, and the only recent one that Baker was in charge for saw the same terms after the previous contract dropped over a hundred million dollars a year.
The point is that the whole system was thought out and initiated before exec salaries spiralled. There is no visible correlation between exec compensation and this type of negotiation.
The amount the execs negotiated is reflected in their salary, the last year we have the CEO salary was shortly after they negotiated a new deal with Yahoo worth over a hundred million dollars more per year seeing them get a raise. I doubt that Baker is getting anything near Beard's salary given she negotiated it right before the layoffs.
> The amount the execs negotiated is reflected in their salary
No it isn't - salary is salary, and these deals existed when the Mozilla CEO was not paid as much. By her own admission, at one point Baker just went "fuck it, other CEOs get paid multiples, why not me?", so now she brings home $3m per year, with the whole exec structure likely benefiting in similar fashion (because why only the CEO?). See: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html but it's on wikipedia too.
That's $3m that could pay for a dozen engineers at Bay-Area salaries, or 30-60 in cheaper locations - maybe enough to match (or surpass) Google's continuous push for new specifications that forces everyone else to play catch-up all the time, as well as stacking the standard committees where Mozilla is systematically overpowered.
> I doubt that Baker is getting anything near Beard's salary
You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary. Even with 7 years of inflation, that's a lot more.
Mitchell Baker has given a lot to Mozilla, but she's now very clearly decided it's her time to cash in.
See how the last year on that graph is 2018? Baker became interim CEO when Chris Beard stepped down in December 2019, officially hired around April of 2020. It also never reaches $3m.
Additionally, look at the ~2015-2018 revenue. That is when Mozilla was with Yahoo and making ~$500 million a year as opposes to the ~$300 million now. That is when the CEO pay spiked, I doubt it's stayed that high and they arguably deserved that pay for earning enough extra money to prevent needing these ads for an additional five years.
>You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary.
Just to drill this home, Baker's CEO salary is not currently public.
Somebody didn't read the actual text. "Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, [...]" He goes on to mention how he scavenged the figures from reports. Wikipedia links an article that states she was paid over $3m in 2019. And before then, she's been on the various boards since forever, so she approved the salary rises for her, Beard, and friends.
So let's drill this home: Baker or Beard, the whole Foundation board is complicit in enabling skyrocketing compensation rates for executives, whose only merit seems to be that they can maintain long-running commercial agreements more or less intact - while dropping the ball everywhere else.
I've read the texts, and further I've actually read the Mozilla financial reports. Yes, Baker had a high salary in 2017/2018 after the Yahoo deal where they improved revenue by over a hundred million dollars a year, though she wasn't "Mozilla's top executive." Her 2019 salary is not public yet, just a sum total paid to "management and administration."
They had an extremely competent CEO who was more than happy to work for a price below market rates, but he was a conservative, so they sacked him. Now Mozilla has what it deserves.
It wasn't "because he was a conservative". It was because he was funding a campaign to limit peoples rights and and everyone / every website was running a campaign to tell users to get off Firefox if they want to stop funding this. It would have destroyed Mozilla if they did nothing.
No it wouldn't have. The outraged were a minority and have a short attention span. I'm sure Firefox would be doing better today with him at the helm. But we'll never know.
Many people misunderstand the meaning of the word "conservative", which is proof of how much the overton window has moved. If you want to progress on social issues, you are not a conservative, but a progressive. Those two things are completely incompatible. If you support gay marriage, you cannot be a conservative. You want to "progress" on social issues, which makes you a progressive. He did not support gay marriage, which makes him a conservative and nothing else.
There also is a big difference between not wanting gays to marry and being homophobic. I don't want people to be able to marry tables, and that does not make me a tablephobic. I'm not disgusted or afraid of tables, but I don't think they should be able to be part of the sacrament of marriage.
>he hasn't publicly gone back on his stance AFAIK
If, as a tech worker, you told me to publicly declarate my stance on a political issue, I would rightly tell you to sod off.
>If you want to progress on social issues, you are not a conservative.
What a ridiculous statement. What point of history are you wishing to conserve? Do black people have rights? Do women have rights? Is public education OK? By your logic, the following argument is valid: “I don’t think blacks nor tables should the right to vote. Including the table proves it’s not a race issue for me. There’s a big difference between not wanting blacks to vote and being racist.”
Judging by your past comments, it looks as if politics are an emotional topic with you. It’s best to up/down-vote and move on than clutter the boards with this dribble.
Inflexible people are less likely to compromise. The article and thread is all about how Firefox continues to be compromised.
One day people might start to see being inflexible and principled and not giving in might be a better characteristic than being easily compromised and selling out at every turn. Even when some principles are problematic. It's a cost benefit analysis ultimately and there are objectivly bad principles would could make this swing the other way of course.
I'm thinking of RMS as the model for this mainly too. Many here said he should go, but the FSF actually got the most members when they did, because some saw RMSs inflexibility as a strength.
Wikimedia doesn't have a CEO, but the executive director is paid $387,770, the CFO is paid $289,356, and there are nine other people paid over $150,000:
Many don't donate to either Mozilla or Wikimedia for the same reason.
Both companies are known for their big products, Firefox and Wikipedia, and both suffer from a chronic insistence on funding projects their userbases don't support.
Is it time to fork Firefox under a browser-focused organisation? I wish I could donate directly towards the development of Firefox to avoid this kind of deterioration, without funding Mozilla at all.
LibreWolf is also available as an AppImage. After reading this news today, I downloaded that AppImage, started it up and closed it down (just to create a profile folder), and replaced the default contents of the new LibreWolf profile folder with a copy of the contents of my existing Firefox profile folder. I then started LibreWolf up and went into Edit-->Settings and inspected all of those (they didn't carry over for some reason so I had to check and edit them manually). Other than that, it's working fine so far: my old tabs / extensions / passwords are all here, and I'm writing this comment from LibreWolf! (I've kept my Firefox profile folder for now just to be safe, but have otherwise uninstalled Firefox.)
>Thunderbird is the leading open source cross-platform email and calendaring client, free for business and personal use. Your gift will help ensure it stays that way, and will support future development.
That doesn't sound specific enough to inspire confidence. Is there perhaps another passage that you can share which is more declarative and direct that the funds are only going to Thunderbird development? I like TB but every time I fire it up I'm getting this ticking-clock feeling
Very discouraging. Few people seem to realise the importance of the direction of browser development, setting standards of the web etc. The situation is very bad.
Am I the only one who increasingly wishes that Firefox could be detached from Mozilla? I donate to Mozilla because I care about Firefox, but all the other crap they waste time and money on is not only useless, it is of negative value to me. And then they start pulling shit like this. Why? Just make Firefox, many people will give you money for this, and stop pissing about.
On an economical perspective, i wish we had more choice than between Google, Mozilla and Brave, all of which have shown to be corrupt and care little about users. I'm sure a popular browser could receive tons of donations if it was based on such model and stopped remunerating execs/managers (or did away with those vampires entirely).
On a technical perspective, i'd like a modern document browser, not a webapp engine. I can appreciate a cross-platform app runtime (WASI project sounds good), but running random code from every website i visit has only downsides for me. I feel like the useful aspects of the web are declarative (HTML/CSS) that the browser is free to ignore/override to provide better UX, and i'm sad innovation in declarative web seems to have entirely stopped after HTML5 shipped <audio> and <video> (and a few others).
Why can't login/logout, drag & drop, background polling for dynamic content updates, and content "tabs" in page (not based on :checked hack) be part of the HTML spec?
^ my browser would let me opt-in/opt-out of background updates and/or change the frequency... which i can't control with crappy JS applets that just make tons of background activity and break in the most unhelpful ways when wifi/VPN/tor looses connectivity
All in all, declarative formats empower users, whereas imperative formats (ECMAScript) empower content producers and advertisers. I wish we had a sort of web users union doing R&D on such topics and employing people to work on user-respecting tech.
I've lost hope for Firefox when the browser started opening spyware-infused ("tag manager") sites describing how Mozilla takes privacy seriously, immediately after browser's installation and before the user has any chance to add uBlock Origin or other Firefox add-on that limits spyware/malware execution on their device.
On first run it will open 2 pages on the Mozilla website, all of which embed Google Analytics and/or Tag Manager.
Mozilla claims they have some special agreement that supposedly prevents Google from using this data for advertising purposes but if you actually believe it then I may have a bridge to sell you.
> Firefox Suggest is a new feature that serves as a trustworthy guide to the better web, surfacing relevant information and sites to help you accomplish your goals.
yeah but I actually miss bonzibuddy. I can't rage-shake firefox and get a reaction out of it. At least in that regard bonzibuddy understood the nature of our engagement as a give and take arrangement.
This is what happens when an organisation deviates from its original policy and starts diverting money into social justice or causes which have no bearing on a browser.
Along with the layoffs and now this unscrupulous decision to bring in revenue to offset the haemorrhage.
It's a common wish here at HN that one would like to donate directly to Firefox development. Is there a legal reason that Mozilla can't do this considering their setup having the Mozilla Corporation run Firefox development? What else could their reasons be for at least not experimenting with the option?
I would donate to Mozilla if >50% went to FF development. Considering that I haven't seen prompts to donate in Firefox(for that last years at least), in the release notes, etc. It seems like a missed opportunity, both for FF development and for other Mozilla projects.
Darn. I really enjoy Firefox. I left Ubuntu over their Amazon integration.
First comes ads, then the seductive siren call of selling user data to advertising partners, then the irresistible funding for selling that user data in a more packaged format. We've seen this story play out. The only thing that keeps/kept you above the others has been your drive to be user focused, and I hate that you feel your niche can't be performant without adopting a third party advertising model.
Au revoir, Mozilla. May you find sense and abandon this model.
> We are rolling out a new type of even smarter suggestions. You might notice a message inviting you to enable these new suggestions the next time you install or update Firefox.
Off by default? Fine by me.
OTOH, if Firefox developers provided e.g. a Patreon link, and could wean themselves off the "default search engine" and "suggestions" revenue, how many people would it take to keep it running in the direction actual users want? Could it score, e.g. a million of $5 monthly pledges worldwide?
Firefox marketshare has gone down from approx 16% in 2015 to about 6% in 2021. All the while the strategy to monetize and generate revenue streams while maintaining trust has been a challenge. Nothing they have been doing in the recent past has got me to go back to Firefox.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not too against this. I do not mind DDG showing me lawn mowers when I search for "lawn mowers", and if this is similar but in Firefox, that's OK.
The fact is, Firefox needs funding and this seems to be the way of doing it. Brave does something similar too.
I hope the ads are purely contextual and do not track me, and I would appreciate a way for people to opt out.
No thank you. I really like Firefox but maybe it would be time to move on to Brave. It’s a shame because I want to support an alternative rendering engine besides Chrome so Google doesn’t control the whole Internet.
Do they need me to pay? I would 100% pay a reasonable annual subscription for a browser that works for me and not advertisers. Maybe $30 per year?
Brave literally has built-in ads, except now you're supporting the Chromium engine dependency. What do you think you're improving on by switching to Brave?
Option 1: FOSS community will actively participate in developing one big web-browser project to free the web from malicious corporate practices and guarantee respect of users freedom.
Option 2: A corporation will create commercial web-browser with fixed price or SaaS model without "partnerships" and data-hoarding business model.
Option 3: There will be only one way to browse the internet: The Google's way.
Option 4: Users will learn to use "text-browsers" with hardened security and move to "standard" web-browser UX only if necessary.
Option 5: P2P local networks will provide a "cached" versions of scraped websites for safety and free access.
Option 6: The Internet will be used only in embedded IOT systems, apps from closed app stores, government approved experiences with mandatory ID verification.
And of course they allow you to turn it off, but it's on by default. Notice how they don't really tell you whether it's on by default, they tell you that another feature was on by default and this new feature is getting wrapped up into that.
No discussion on how much money they're making from this.
So absolutely sleazy. Whoever wrote this has read too much marketing bullshit from other tech companies and wants to emulate their intros. The weasel wording in this is just sad and pathetic coming from Mozilla. I expect this from a company like Facebook, but if Mozilla is going to introduce something like this they should at least have the decency to talk to their users like competent human beings and not complacent idiots. It's insulting.
I would certainty pay for a decent browser that doesn't sell out my information to advertisers - just like I do for the email service and the office suite and other pieces of software. I would ditch firefox over this if I hadn't done this already a while ago.
…In which Mozilla buys into the two-sided market craze and starts exploiting its users for ad money.
And here I was hoping that the industry would start recognizing the poison of this business model, exemplified by FB. Instead, we see it spread. (And, notably, in case of Firefox is no overwhelming network effect or potential for user lock-in, unlike with Facebook et al.; so this seems obviously, possibly intentionally short-sighted.)
Meanwhile, Firefox could have been such an opportunity to deliver the first actually paid product in the market, and to use direct revenue to make it superior and keep aligned with paying customers’ interests. Such a waste of reputation, which would’ve made this so much easier to pull off.
A lot of dark patterns are opt-in or "We're trying out something new, it's just a test" to start with. Until they're silently upgraded to opt-out a year or two down the line. Then the opt-out gets moved to the ass-end of a legacy settings menu under a generic name under the pretext of UI renewal. Then a couple more years later the "It's been like that for years, what's the issue?" line can be used to shut down anyone who still cares. It's best to nip this kind of thing in the bud.
That seems like pure naivete. Two can play that game.
A little over a year or so ago I downloaded Firefox. It kept bugging me for updates. But I didn't want these pestering updates. Erstwhile, I could just disable updating with a single unchecking of a box. But they changed it to make it almost impossible to disable updates. I never put enough effort into figuring it out.
Firefox is getting just like Microsoft, Apple, FaceBook, GNOME, etc. "We set the policy, it's our software, you're just the user."
I switched to Debian, which managed to sort all this nonsense out, thankfully.
So just disable it. I'm sick and tired of people smearing Firefox because they're trying to make a living. It's still the best open source browser out there, it's still free, as in freedom and as in beer.
Any fork of Firefox is mainly a change in default settings or branding. None of them would exist without the huge contributions Mozilla Foundation receive. People who criticize Firefox and then use one of its many forks, I'd like to tell them to just stop whining and appreciate what they have.
They're choosing a very unethical, and (given their own ads) hypocritical funding model. The corporate speak euphemisms for this model signal the further underlying rot.
To me your position reads analogous to "Im sick of people smearing organic produce corp for trying to make a living selling agent orange. If you dont like it dont buy it!"
You're overreacting, it's not agent orange. It's a setting you can disable. It's also an open source browser with forks that disable the setting for you.
But this is exactly why I feel Mozilla and Firefox deserve more respect. If we're free to fork their code, then any such decision from their part to keep their funding should be met with respect from the user base.
Good question, I actually went through their budget report a few days ago. I'm not from the states but they seem to be spending over 300 million dollars a year on developer salaries alone. And considering they're HQ'd in Silicon Valley I guess that's not so strange.
The bulk of their income is from Google donating 450 million USD every year just to remain the default search choice. That shouldn't reflect poorly on Mozilla, it should make you question how Google can just throw 450 million dollars on remaining the default search choice in a browser with 1% market share.
It should make you question the massive monopoly that is Google, not Mozilla who are struggling to make open source software for people.
For those that are saying things like "Google/Microsoft etc. are worse" and other such pseudo-justifications: You are missing the point!
Mozilla is now in exactly the same camp as Microsoft, Google and all the other spyware companies. There is no "worse" any more! Their rhetoric uses the same language and tactics as the others therefore they are the same now. Their plan is to monetize your web views, just like Google. This change is absolutely not for your benefit. Not even a little bit!
They have crossed a line. A massive line imo!
Firefox held the torch for companies in the "internet space" (couldn't think of a better term) on how to do things without bending your users over and telling them it's for their own good. But no more.
This is the end for Mozilla for a group of people that absolutely care about privacy and (total speculation incoming!) the beginning of the end for Mozilla in general. For a number of years, their userbase clearly was more interested in privacy over speed and features but if the playing field is now levelled (in terms of lack of privacy!), then the obvious choice is no longer FF these days as Chrome and Edge are faster.
I've watched them over the years become worse, bit by dark-patterned bit. This is a huge leap into a steaming pile of privacy shit though and a clear sign they are circling the drain.
Still, I have no idea what to do! Hopefully there sill be a way to turn it off but they've laid their cards on the table now...
Good thing I stopped updating Firefox a long time ago. "But, but, security!" I hear you scream inside. Well, JS disabled by default pretty much covers it. "But, but, security!" I hear you whisper to your fingers, ready to take down my HN comment. Well, I'd rather live "dangerously" than be a MozillaCorp hostage. If security is the only reason to update, no wonder bugs, security updates, and alarmist propaganda are pushed to users in full force.
_What the hell are you doing Mozilla._ In an age of massive distrust for companies, you are (were?) one of the few companies that had both age and some trust. So many other companies promise privacy but are extremely young. There are so many other directions you could go! Why would you chip away at the value of your greatest asset!?
I continue to use Firefox because I want to avoid a chromium monopoly. Yet I don't see any plan by Mozilla to avoid being reliant on their direct competitor.
> from our trusted partners based on what you’re searching for
Wut?? You must be referring to the partners that you have, that I trust. But I don't know who your partners are, and I have no reason to trust them.
And how is it that you are privy to what I'm searching for? Is DDG among your partners? I know you're in bed with Goo, but I am migrating away from Google Search, partly because I know you are infected with Google Search addiction.
I’m not crazy about this development but if they were going to add any kind of advertising this is just about the least intrusive way to do it. And, importantly, it’s only based on the search terms, not anything about you personally, so it doesn’t seem like it would feed into the surveillance capital machine. I don’t like it, but if it keeps FF viable I’ll roll with it. I just hope it’s the ONLY thing they do and not the start of a slippery slope down
For all I care there already are ads in the form of pinned websites (Amazon, et cetera, about which I dislike Mozilla assuming I want them on my new tab page) when you set up a new profile and must remove one at a time clicking the tiny burger menu icon that's hidden unless you hover on the icon, and appear in the URL bar when opened. This is just another little addition to the already present task of disabling unwanted annoyances on installs without policies groups setup, so it doesn't bother me too much at this point. I doubt this will help improve the browser at all, let's see if the servo developers and the security team gets hired again from the little income this produces rather than some other significant expenses that have been widely documented in this thread already. Is it really so difficult for a browser to focus on its development and its features alone to gain or recover lost market share? Word of mouth and installations to others' PCs by IT people or privacy aware people really are so worthless now?
I must be the only one who finds Chromium a less invasive experience than Firefox.
People harp on about how we must all switch to Firefox, but in the years I have been using Chromium I’ve not once had any marketing BS popups, nags, or issues like this.
And no, Chrome is not the new IE, it’s open source and there’s various different builds available and ways that is is distributed.
> When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion.
Please, Firefox; just give me a way to pay you $10/month. Call it "Firefox Pro" and you get some new color themes or whatever, I don't care. I'm standing outside your window in the rain, waving cash at you, and you're still selling your body on the street-corner for quarters.
I've observed windowserver on macOS constantly eat 30+% of my CPU whenever Firefox is running for a few versions now, and more and more web apps effectively require Chrome nowadays. Plus now this sort of change coming up ... maybe it's a good time to try out something new. Brave perhaps?
If you're looking for a privacy friendly fork of Chromium, the only option that's worth considering is Ungoogled Chromium on Desktop and Bromite on Android.
Brave has crypto ads and a lot of other unnecessary stuff built in. They've also made questionable decisions in the past, like inserting referral codes in links. If anything, Brave is a worse choice than Firefox in terms of privacy even after enabling this new ad suggestions feature.
Unnecessary like a native adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3, tracker blocking, anti-fingerprinting tech and defaulting to privacy friendly search engines?
> native adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3
neither is uBO on Firefox and uBO is more effective than anything else out there including Brave's adblocking
I'd also be interested to know exactly how Brave intends to bypass Manifest v3 since it's a change in Chromium itself which is what Brave is based on.
> tracker blocking
also built in to Firefox, gets even better with uBO
> anti-fingerprinting tech
Any article or blog post to show how effective it is? Most anti-fingerprinting tech ends up making a browser even more fingerprint-able. The only browser that successfully achieves anti-fingerprinting is Tor Browser and it relies on a lot of people using an exactly same config of Tor Browser
> defaulting to privacy friendly search engines?
Changing search engines is trivially easy in Firefox.
It's a shame Mozilla is doing this. It's not the first insult to users/developers Mozilla has made, though they're still the less worst in the major browser developers.
I'm relatively okay with non-targeted advertising (in fact i'm strongly against it, but i respect their perspective). Just replace your Google partnership for default search engine with something else if it suits you.
But why on earth would my browser transmit all of my keystrokes in the URL bar to a third party?! That's an unexpected and very frightening development. That means a single centralized entity gets notice of all the websites i browse and queries i search for. All in all, this change means Firefox would no longer be better than Google from a privacy perspective.
The one asset they have or at least had was being the privacy sensitive good guys! Why not build on that?
Building yet another browser just for privacy might not have been the right move (firefox klar on android), but at least the right direction and a good experiment.
I'll never enable or click on any of these ads but I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription _that goes only to the Firefox budget and not Mozilla_.
I don't think I'm alone here - it would be a non-negligible revenue stream.
I honestly do not understand why people hate this idea.
Mozilla have found perfect place to put ads, they do not cover screen space, are not annoying or always visible. Not that different from Google paid search results, honestly even better.
YouTube has 1,500,000,000 monthly users and 50,000,000 YouTube Premium subscribers.
1,500,000,000 users
50,000,000 subscribers
That is how much people want to pay for what they use vs. ready to watch unskippable ads.
How many of 200 million Firefox users who do not like ads are ready to pay as little as $1 per month? I am pretty sure even 10%, i.e. $20M/month will help Mozilla a lot. But people love free things and whine.
> YouTube has 1,500,000,000 monthly users and 50,000,000 YouTube Premium subscribers.
That is actually about 3.3% which is much higher than ad-click conversion raters (0.77% for display ads). So a premium model is a superior way to monetize long term from a standpoint of what users prefer.
Technologies such as browsers are very important, yet it is very hard to come up with a business model for funding their development in a way that does not compromise the users trust or lead to unhealthy monopolies. I think browsers should be viewed as a public service good and be funded (at least in part) by government subsidies to avoid reliance and corruption by the toxic ad-tech industry. I mean, everybody relies on browsers, they have become the de facto app deployment platform, and funding the development of the major 3-4 browsers would not even make a tiny dent in the budgets of the US or EU.
Yes, since it was named Phoenix. Id pay $50 every five years or so for a new version. But for that five years they only introduce bugfixes and introduce zero UI changes.
On a tangentially related point, as much as I love Firefox, their current implementation of search suggestions is a mess when using the search bar. Even if I try to deactivate the "provide search suggestions" option in the "Search" settings, it always keeps the a child-option active (i.e. "Show search suggestions ahead of browsing history in address bar results").
Another nit-pick, when I type "github", the first result shown is "github.blog" which forces me to type "github.com". I assume it uses my bookmarks for this completely irrelevant suggestion.
The feature is clearly designed to push their Trusted Partners into the faces of their ideological opponents. Wikipedia is non-scary entry point. Expect SPLC or some fact-checkers next. The low revenue un-targeted advertising feature can easily be jettisoned to placate people while the real payload is deployed.
I don't think cynicism is warranted on that. It's probably just normal advertising. Still don't like the way they talk about it, but I think the ad feature is separate from their wokeness efforts. They just want non-Google money.
I’d love to be able to stick to Safari. It’s an awesome browser, except that not having any form of multi-profile support makes it impossible for me to use. It’s really its only showstopper for me.
I think the problem people have is not the company that pays the revenue but the industry. If it's going to be ad revenue it doesn't matter much whether it comes from Google or somewhere else. The main problem is that advertising is ultimately at odds with their objective of protecting users' privacy.
It says that when this is enabled, "Mozilla receives your search queries".
This is a real shame as I was hoping it would be more privacy focused. Maybe it could just download a list of advertisers locally and then locally compare the search text to the ads but instead everything typed in to the address bar will get sent to someone else's servers. I might have had it on if it was all done locally (but I guess there is too many flaws in doing it locally for Mozilla).
Still very sad they are doing this, but at least it seems an easy opt-out/not opt-in.
No problem for me. I'll just slam whichever domain they use to provide the ads in my PiHole configuration, and I'll use the SurfingKeys (JS-customizable) search bar to get results.
I already give monthly contributions to the Mozilla Foundation. Do they need more money? Fine, I can increase my donation. But the whole point of donating money is to avoid ads harassment. If I don't have that right anymore, then I'll either stop donating to Mozilla, or use all my power user skills to ensure that not a single ad shows in my search bar.
The single largest benefits of Firefox to me is that it's privacy friendly and open source. If the first thing you have to do when installing this "privacy friendly" software is to disable a bunch of privacy invading features, what's the reason to not just use a fork instead? And if you're going to use a fork, why not just use open-source Chromium instead? What arguments are left to the benefit of Firefox, fighting web standard hegemony by picking one privacy-hostile option over the other?
Looks like Mitchell Baker is just trying to suck as much money out of Firefox as she can before retiring. Hard to see another way this strategy of lighting the company’s reputation on fire to earn a few extra bucks makes sense.
Bizarre and scummy beyond belief. They claim to be all about privacy to sell their VPN service. And then they also start selling what you type into the address bar to some creepy adtech company, so they can show us ads.
Such shame there’s no one to hold Mozilla management to account for this kind of malfeasance.
Mozilla has been a shambling corpse for awhile, and theyre dragging whats left of firefox with them. Their only goal is to line administrators pockets as much as possible before the end. To that end theyll use up whatever good will and trust they have left.
Personally Ive been done with them since that incident a fee years ago where they were silently pushing out some adware extension for some movie. That followed by their explanation and non-apology told me they were already dead.
Google pays Firefox $450 million dollars a year. Why do they need to keep adding ads and tracking features?
Yes, they want to diversify in case that valve gets shut off but they should be 'set for life'. They have been making hundreds of millions a year on average for over a decade. Why does it take that much to make a web browser and how much of that money goes to Firefox?
We need an ad-free open-source alternative that is focused on speed and encourages an extensive plugin ecosystem.
The donation goes to Mozilla Foundation, not to its subsidiary Mozilla Corp, which actually develops Firefox. You're basically donating to activist blogging, not browser development.
Regardless of how I personally will use Firefox and adjust its settings, this change makes me less likely to suggest it as a browser to friends and relatives.
It still has enough large advantages that I will continue to use it (especially on mobile, with extensions), but I'm just one person. Those less knowledgeable about computers in my friends and family make up a lot more potential Firefox users, and they are the ones at risk with this kind of change.
I can't help but think that this constant conflict of interest seemingly inherent in browsers has technological causes. If Web were simpler, its design better, there would be more implementations and they would be cheaper. Even though it upsets me that the Firefox we knew is doing itself in, Web becoming more dystopian is the most likely catalyst to a better alternative appearing. Darkest before the dawn type of scenario.
With the erosion of the W3C as a standard body, ongoing IP lawsuits and closed source/specs, some day the browser lockin may become real and slowly manifest all around us.
Compare that scenario to the nowaday advertising popup and thank <pasta> that the market hasn't been taken over and the numb masses haven't adopted it yet.
It feels weird to write this, but somehow i am glad.
We (users of the free web) desperately need to prevent complete takeover by Google's Chrome ecosystem. But when I see Mozilla wasting valuable resources on integrating advertising...
Mozilla, set up a 'Firefox supporters' program. I will gladly chuck you $10 a month to ensure Firefox remains viable. I'm sure I'm not alone!
We couldn't care less about Mozilla's "partners". We certainly don't want their "suggestions". So many people were switching to Firefox due to Chrome's crippled extensions. How is it possible to be this out of touch?
How hard is it to charge money for the browser? Literally make it a paid app and I'll buy it.
I agree that this erodes some trust and I can understand and agree with people that are upset about this change. They did inform us though, even though the language used could use less marketing speech, instead of trying to fly it in under the radar and at least it seems to be possible to disable the "feature".
It's good because this puts an end to the farce that Mozilla cares for it's users privacy and that we should use Firefox even though it's lagging behind Chromium.
I do not trust Google but I don't trust Mozilla either. I just hope they don't kill MDN. We can't trust big corps be it for profit or non-profit.
Can someone please just offer an open source browser that I can pay towards somehow?
IMO adtech is the root of all that’s wrong with the modern internet. It gives companies 2 masters: advertisers and users. Guess who’s prioritized when there’s a conflict between the needs of the two? Whoever’s paying the bills, of course.
Fun fact, I've been asked by a VPN company if I'd ship their (somewhat proprietary) VPN stuff with qutebrowser.
The guy who contacted me didn't understand "if you won't offer a SOCKS or HTTP proxy, even if I wanted to, it's not possible".
Naturally I would be anything but comfortable with such a "partnership" (the only thing I'm exploring is getting money from search engines for qutebrowser users' searches).
Nevermind that it'd also be a bad idea from a monitary perspective, given that I'd probably lose more in donations that I'd gain from such a thing.
Oh I like this. It's subtle in a way that flies under the radar but still blesses someone's little heart effectively.
On a side note: I love qutebrowser, even as someone who doesn't prefer Vim or Vim keybindings in things. I like it because it is slim up top, and does what you tell it to and not a stitch more. If it got paywalled tomorrow, but everything else remained the same and open, I could see paying 10 bucks a month for it.
FWIW you can donate (via my GitHub Sponsors profile), I'd rather not force people to pay for it, though ;)
One thing I would perhaps consider is having more "proper" releases for macOS and Windows (with things like code signing, automatic updates, etc. - perhaps even via the Windows and macOS stores) for a small one-time fee. But that's mainly because supporting those platforms properly costs me additional money (and additional time).
No thanks. I’ve used Firefox since their beginning and never took to Chrome. Use Brave on iOS and guess will start seeing how that and other alternatives are on Mac. I’d rather pay a few bucks a month then have the area of the browser that should be signal littered with noise.
The sheer difference in placement and style between the "now now" button and the "allow suggestions" button is all one need to know to be certain it's a bad idea to allow that.
You don't need dark patterns to opt in your users to something good for them.
Stupid question, but with FF being open source, would it be possible to provide alternative builds without much of the recent bullshit? It seems the browser gets more and more useless or user-hostile "features" with every new version.
On a tangent, I noticed when opening a new private window they are now pushing the VPN service. This may have been implemented in a previous update. This seems to disable it... for now:
I've disabled suggestion on Brave for awhile, it's a PITA if you start from fresh so you have to work on bookmarking a lot. But now this, I don't regret to have no suggestion in address bar at all.
I've been looking for an alternative recently anyways. Haven't quite found the right catch yet. Sad to surrender to Chromium after all these years, but Firefox seems to get worse and worse.
I've used Dillo. It's amazing how snappy a browser can be. Alas, it's an impractical browser to use, as most sites require JavaScript.
The real problem is websites, ever-increasing the capabilities of browsers. If that went away then the whole problem of choosing a browser would be solved.
All browsers are capable of rendering vanilla HTML, and even graphics, so there's usually very little need for JavaScript. There's always the option of processing dynamic content on the backend.
I heard that Google Maps originally spat out pages that were in the region of a few 10's of kb. Imagine that!
We live in curious times. Engineers used to design for simplicity, now we seem to just sling more mud onto the pile. It's also curious that environmentalism is such a hot-button topic these days, yet manufacturers are pushing out stuff that makes it harder to repair.
I've been using Vivaldi lately, and very happy with it.
I really missed the old days of Opera, which for a long time was superior to Firefox and Chrome in so many ways. Up until they changed the web, and Opera dom/rendering engine couldn't keep up.
Vivaldi and Brave are the best picks, IMO. Both default to a lot of privacy-friendly settings, try not to track you, and run their own sync stack that's end to end encrypted by default.
Currently sticking to 90 because of Mozilla's disregard for their users. I do not have any hope for Mozilla turning themselves around - a replacement can't come soon enough.
Hmm. I wonder how much revenue is Mozilla expecting from this deal? How much would a crowdfunding effort need to raise, month to month, to buy out 100% of the ad space?
I recently switched to LibreWolf, a privacy focused fork of Firefox and it works really well. It tracks upstream closely and has reasonable defaults for power users.
Can they just have me pay them $10 a month so we don’t have to deal with this kind of shit? I pay that for my IDE, and the browser is arguably more important.
Subscriptions. If you're going to keep people permanently on staff, a steady revenue stream is required. Either the users will provide that (aligning the incentives of the company with the users, since financial performance directly correlates to customer satisfaction), or other companies will, in the form of ad spend, corporate partnerships, cross-promotion, whatever.
Possibly the more sustainable model overall is for software to become a gig job, where engineers get paid for the features they deliver and there's only a skeleton crew of maintainers keeping the project on track (to keep the ongoing costs minimal).
To offset the cost to users even further, you could potentially apply for government grants, at least in Europe. Or corporate sponsorships in some places, in the vein of the Django Software Foundation.
Firefox and Signal are both reliant on market share to stay relevant, and I would say they cannot afford losing users to a subscription model.
It could work if the base product was free and some addon could be purchased as a subscription, but that is also pretty much happening already with Mozilla VPN.
It is all over the comments here: People want to donate. They want to donate to specific products they like though, and not to the organization in general. Donations need to have a specific goal, like for example further development of Firefox and keeping it clean of stuff people do not want. When donations are not specific enough, like it seems to be the case with Mozilla, they run risk of being misused. Then the actual thing people want to support are not actually supported by their donation.
Signal is run by a known angry dictator. The same goes for Mozilla. These companies don't mean well for users, they mean well for themselves. The rest is the narrative sauce that they abuse to insert themselves into a specific niche.
Ultimately this model proves untenable in almost every space where folks try for the freemium model. It is especially apparent in cable and online streaming, where you have no ads to start with but as people grow to like they service ads are added for additional revenue. Eventually, the user pays for ads in addition to the service or product.
How are they planning on enabling this by default for European users like me, without first getting express, informed consent? Did they found a GDPR workaround?
> Firefox has always provided address bar suggestions, such as websites from your browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs (on by default), as well as suggestions from your default search engine. Beginning in Firefox version 92, you will also receive new, relevant suggestions from our trusted partners based on what you’re searching for. No new data is collected, stored, or shared to make these new recommendations.
Given that these recommendation require PII processing (e.g. IP, location) by Mozilla, and "no new data is collected, stored (...)", how does that work? I don't recall ever giving consent to Mozilla to process my data.
(Yes, I'm pissed. They just admitted to going to bed with advertisers, and didn't even bother to give us a honest explanation. You can bet I'm looking if they can be slapped with GDPR.)
EDIT: missed this on first reading. I blame banner blindness.
> Note: Firefox Suggest is currently available for a limited number of users in the U.S. only.
They do that because they need money. Why can't they just ask for money? Can't we just have a healthier business model: you want a good product that cost money to develop, just pay for it?
It could be a freemium model: users paying for premium features (Sync, VPN, ...) support the company, for example.
They don't need money, they have an almost unthinkable amount of capital. If they'd kill all their stupid side stuff and fire that weird shark at the top they could develop this browser for a long time. In fact, instead of firing the servo team that is what they should have done instead of this alienating and frankly extremely problematic policy shift.
Mozilla FYI, the people here represent only a minor portion of 6% of the whole web browser user base, just ignore them and leave some subtle ways for them to disable whatever they hate, and everything will be fine. People here aren't living in the same world where your usual users live.
And yet, they are probably responsible for 50% of users. My parents, my sister and some of my friends are using Firefox not because they did research but because I recommended/installed it and told them that if they use something else, they are on their own in case of any problems.
To label a thread with 671+ comments a dupe and kill and abandon it for one with 81 comments is dubious. It should be the reverse. Not accusing, but this almost appears protectionism against scrutiny of Mozilla. Regardless, it's odd.
Mozilla wants funding? Here's an idea. Track down the corporations using Firefox and convert them to paying customers. I'll start with the two I know off the top of my head:
I don't see this happening unless they have a very specific reason to use Firefox. If only support contracts were a thing for browsers, a la Red Hat/RHEL.
This doesn't change my opinion of them in any way. Although I think ads are cancer, I think it's much worse for Firefox to stay dependent on Google for their entire revenue. I want them to experiment with finding ways to make money off their browser. I want them to keep existing long-term and that's only possible if you have money.
Would I like Firefox to have no ads at all? Yes. But I believe it's better for Firefox to have ads than to be dependent on Google's money.
People still use Firefox ? I'm little surprised.
Librewolf, yes I can understand, but Firefox ?
Unfortunately, the day Mozilla die, Librewolf will follow (and Google will cry).
Before HN flips its shit and threatens to move to a browser that is either owned by an ad company, or use a browser that replaces all ads with its own ads, you are asked whether you want to enable it or not on the first launch. As much as it sucks, having more sources of income rather than just relying on Google is a net positive.
Firefox should split from mozilla and have its own foundation.
I dont feel like donating to mozilla under the current bean counter CEO.
If its an individual organization doing just firefox, i would 100% buy/subscribe to a paid version of the open source browser, which is not shilling my data for ads. I cant believe i am the only one who wants this.
Your donations go to Mozilla Foundation anyway. The Foundation doesn't develop Firefox, their subsidiary Mozilla Corp does. You can't donate to Mozilla Corp.
