First focusing on AI and now this, already cancelled my donations, do we have a good fork to move to?
It’s hard because Mozilla need money to survive, and the world needs Mozilla, but it’s been hard for them to find a stable source of funding. Mozilla relying on their main competitor (Google) for most of their income is a massive risk. I can understand why they’re trying approaches like this, even if the users don’t like it.
Does anyone here have a suggestion as to a better way for them to increase their income?
I think they should move firefox development back from mozilla corp to mozilla org, so the development process can be funded with donation again.
For example, wikipedia development and operation are funded by donations to wikimedia foundation, there is a commercial corp (wikimedia enterprise) but they’re not in charge of development and operation of wikipedia.
Firefox, on the other hand, is entirely funded by mozilla corp. Any money donated to mozilla foundation is not used to fund firefox development. Instead, firefox development must be funded from search engine deals and ads. Why can’t the community chip in to keep firefox alive?
To my knowledge, the community donations are just laughably too low to fund a development team of hundreds of devs. The Mozilla Corporation is a subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, so transferring money in that way is possible, they just choose to not do it.
Well, and another aspect is that donations can falter. All it needs is one scandal (whether true/deserved or not). You can’t plan with that, and you can’t promise hundreds of devs to pay their livelihood on such a basis. You need other, stable sources of income anyways.
That’s because mozilla foundation never actually taking donation drive seriously.
Let’s consider current situation: currently, mozilla corp allocates significant engineering resource to develop revenue-generating services such as pocket, vpn, and now, AI stuff. What if mozilla never need to try to chase revenue, and instead focus on being an actual foundation, funded by grants and donations? Their expense would be significantly lower.
Let’s say mozilla able to refocus development back to firefox and retain 250 highly paid engineers, with yearly expense for salary, benefits and other overhead at ~$100 million per year. That’s less than 1/4 of search royalties they got from google in 2020. Now put those $300 million extra money into an endowment instead of wasting it on marketing and other revenue-chasing activities, and start to seriously looking into grants and collecting donations like wikimedia foundation, and in a few years mozilla might be able to amass a huge fund to guarantee independent firefox development for years, or even in perpetuity with huge enough endowment.
Why does the firefox browser need a hundred devs?
Browsers are huge these days. Firefox is well over 20 million lines of code.
The Linux kernel is 26 million source lines of code without comments and empty lines
The list of features modern web browsers have is incomprehensibly huge! Not to mention chrome keep proposing new api all the time, then use them on their products like google meets, then blame firefox for not supporting them when firefox users use those products.
Building anti-features is a lot of work!
Wikipedia gets something like $150 million in donations annually. Firefox absolutely could have done similar numbers back when they had a massive userbase, and it would have given the users a feeling of ownership. Instead they decided to be funded almost entirely by the technology monopolist.
I’ll happily donate 5 bucks now and again to Firefox development, but I don’t want my donation to go to a 5-6 million dollar CEO salary.
…and there is no way to do that, currently.
Which is why I’m not donating right now, even as a satisfied user of Firefox for 15+ years.
Become a donation gateway for other opens ourselves projects.
Edit: opensource projects
Tell me about some cool opensource project on my new tab page, optional 1 click donation. Skim a few percent.
This way everyone else will promote firefox.
That’s not something that’d likely scale enough to bring any meaningful sum of money.
Even then it targets a tiny, tiny minority of their even current userbase, let alone if they want to approach more “average” users.
Why wouldn’t it scale?
The percentage of users that donate to open source projects they use is very low, and I’m not sure that’d significantly change just because Mozilla start asking people to do it.
Firstly, that’s not a scaling problem, you’re talking about poor uptake.
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters. That’s why a sophisticated organisation like Mozilla is so well placed to sell the stories behind some of these projects.
Thirdly, the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low. Particularly amongst more technical users.
Fourthly, this plan would actually drive users to Firefox. If Firefox is promoting donations for say, LibreOffice, then they would naturally have an interest in promoting Firefox.
With the advent of enshittification, free-as-in-beer tech is dead. I think people are realising that things need to be paid for. It’s very defeatist to just say “no one contributes to open source”. Why not try to find the format within which people might contribute?
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters. That’s why a sophisticated organisation like Mozilla is so well placed to sell the stories behind some of these projects.
This is definitely a good point.
the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low.
You’d be surprised. I’ve worked in ad tech. Retargeting ads (where you see ads for items you’ve viewed in the past) and abandoned cart ads (which you see if you add items to your cart but never check out, sometimes with a discount coupon attached) have very good clickthrough rates. Targeting based on customer list performs pretty well too.
In any case, I really doubt they could make even 1% of what they currently make with the Google deal. AFAIK they make around $400 million per year from that deal: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters.
That is a huge assumption to make without data to back that up. Do you have a list of open source projects with high numbers of user donations, with evidence that the numbers are due to marketing? Barring that, I think this is pure speculation.
this is pure speculation.
Of course it is.
That said, do you think it’s unrealistic to suppose that marketing might improve revenue? I do not.
Wasn’t firefox a volunteer open source project at one point?
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Firefox is developed by a for-profit subsidiary.
That company actually abandoned Thunderbird years ago, within the past two years Thunderbird moved to its own (for profit) subsidiary.
No.
It’s hard for them to find a stable source of funding for the massive size of their org, correct.
But how many developers do you need to create a great browser? They don’t need 1100 people, that’s for sure.
1100 people does sound like a lot, but some of those employees are probably working on things other than the browser. I wonder how many people work on Google Chrome in comparison.
I’d assume <100 devs.
MozillaCoin /s
Hey what if instead of free adblock, we charged people for it? Also I’ll use a little bit of the profits to try banning gay marriage.
Nah, I think it’d be called something like… Mozilla Attention Token.
Firefox Monitor and Firefox Relay are good ideas for subscription services that may be useful to users and hopefully get revenue.
When I looked closely at Firefox Relay, the email feature was redundant because I also have a service which does this, and the phone feature isn’t available yet. Looking at Firefox Monitor and the list of companies/brokers it monitors, these appear focused on the US which isn’t where I live.
I hope they can get revenue by promoting these services and making them useful for more people. This would be better than showing ads. I’d pay for a useful service, not to have an-free experience for something which is freely available with ads.
The tech communities are trying their hardest to get people to switch to Firefox. Meanwhile Mozilla is trying its hardest to get people off Firefox with decisions like this.
The purpose of Mozilla is to kill Firefox. That’s what Google is paying for.
Is this because of the new ceo?
This is a weird one. On the one hand, we have Mozilla, the last remaining browser company not sucking at the teat of either Google or Apple and we all expect for Mozilla to somehow generate enough money to pay enough employees to stay competitive on the other hand we have the users who expect them not to do anything to try and leverage their userbase to create financial independence.
The problem with Mozilla remains the same problem that they’ve had for a while. Mozilla doesn’t acknowledge the symbiotic relationship it has with its community and the community always over reacts, which means there’s a chasm where simple things should be easy but they’re not.
Take this for example, Mozilla only had to have a public facing discussion about this and then go and do it anyway.
Sometimes paying lip service works. But since they didn’t, you have people like OP who feel like something nefarious is happening and in the end Firefox users lose out as things like donations being pulled hurt.
Mozilla already shows ads, as do all the other browsers, however unlike the other browsers, you have a fully functioning uBlock that can and will remove anything that the preferences don’t cover.
Mozilla makes hundreds of millions from Google. Every single person could stop donating and they would continue along just fine (Well the CEO might need to take a 10 million yearly pay cut).
What weird is seeing people champion the enshittificstion of FOSS software.
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Eh.
The examples Doctorow user when coining the term were two sided markets, but if you actually read the original article for understanding, rather than to “well actually” on the internet, that the process being described is much more general than that, and is one of products or services becoming worse over time so that whatever value they provided becomes increasingly shifted toward shareholders.
This may seem weird in this case, still, because the only shareholder of Mozilla Corp is the Mozilla Foundation, but the principle still stands.
Moreover, you sound like a ridiculous pendant, because what’s actually happening here is that Mozilla is turning Firefox into a vehicle for advertising, which means it’s fucking entering a two-sided market… You’re arguing that the sky isn’t blue because it’s night time at fucking sunrise.
Words mean whatever you want them to mean.
Only if you aren’t interested in a conversation where all parties have a clear understanding of what’s being discussed.
Did someone not understand what the original comment’s poster meant with “enshittification”? It’s not like he used a completely unrelated term.
Is mozilla is showing ads, then it is a two-sided marketplace.
That’s not the difference between this and the usual kind of enshittification. The users are one side, the advertisers (and google) are the other. Nothing unusual there. The difference is that this time it’s driven by desperate grasping at straws, rather than barefaced greed.
And you don’t see Mozilla’s reliance on financing from its main competitor as a huge issue?
My post covers all of your points.
Mozilla works out in the open. They can’t always nicely prepare everything before they head into a user dialogue, especially when people even dig up their Bugzilla tickets.
I would much rather have them continue to work in the open. That does much more for my trust in them than a flawless PR story…
I’m not planning to move anywhere tbh.
Mozilla is almost 100% financially dependent on Google right now, if that funding goes away then so will Firefox, the Gecko engine, and likely all the forks. With all the layoffs happening in the industry, we can’t rule out Google shareholders looking elsewhere to cut costs too, such as the massive subsidization of Mozilla. The little we can do is allow Mozilla to find other sources of funding that are optional for users IMO
Yes, stuff like pocket is garbage. But at least Mozilla allow you to turn it off, which is more than can be said for Google: on Android devices manufacturers have to pay a hefty “fee” just to allow users to remove the Google search bar from the launcher. As a user you can get around this by installing a custom launcher, but as a manufacturer, you will not get Google certification: no SafetyNet (Play Integrity DRM, required by Banking apps), no Widevine, and Google will block GMS & their other apps on your product.
Regarding AI, mozilla’s memorycache is completely local (runs on the user’s machine) and does not call out to any servers. The new translation feature is the same. The only exception to this that I’m aware of is the AI helper on MDN, but the target audience of that site is already in a position to determine whether that is a useful feature or not.
I’m not planning to move anywhere tbh.
I do. If they go through with it than they’re not much better than Google.
If they don’t have enough money maybe they could start with cutting the CEO’s pay.
Likening this to the evils of google is such a wildly dishonest take lmao
Why? Do you really think Google started out evil, and not step by step by implementing “improvements” similar to this one?
On the contrary, it’s the only comparison you can make, since they are literally the only options.
already
How considering to show ads and allow to opt out is worse that google? Have you watch Youtube?
I haven’t read through the issue, but so far all of Mozilla’s endeavours into ads have been stellar privacy-wise.
And their CEO stepped back a few weeks ago. It’s well possible that the intermediary/new CEO won’t get as much payment, because losing them to a competitor will not hurt as badly.
this need to start from inside the company, lile the employers timing a walkout of something, other than that everything gonna stay the same
ill be happy to be wrong, but there is no alternative. if we dont support firefox; were all fucked.
Hence why we need a public option.
Pale Moon is the only alternative I can think of, it’s independent of Gecko and FF
Last I heard, which was admittedly a long time ago, Pale Moon was dangerously out of date with respect to security and web standards and not much more than a meme. I feel like I remember a significant change in leadership relatively recently, but has Pale Moon actually become a viable alternative?
Beyond that, WebKit is still a thing. Ladybird is too though it’s still quite a ways from primetime.
That bugzilla page says they targeted version 122 for this change. I have Firefox 122 on my PC and when I look at the about:config page, that setting is still set to False. I think y’all are freaking out about a very small thing.
If you use Firefox, and you check your about:config page and you see true for that setting, then just change it to false and go about your day.
Or are we all just talking philosophically about this?
Sure, you can change literally everything about Firefox if you pay a time cost. The defaults do matter because that’s one more thing to fix when installing it. We could say this about any negative feature.
With Firefox sync you only ever have to do it once.
Firefox is a super easy install for me. Install login and all of my settings auto apply.
I agree with all of that. 👍
I just didn’t see anyone else addressing where the change lives in the browser and how to un-do it if you want to opt out.
This appears to be an experimental initiative within Mozilla right now. It’s not available to the public and may never be if it doesn’t pass muster for them.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-thoughts-on-how-you-shop-online/td-p/43015 https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/the-future-of-shopping/
I remember the last few versions of Netscape Communicator had a “Shop” button.
This was the sign that Netscape had lost the browser war and was giving up.
I remember the Amazon icon on Ubuntu. It is why I initially gave up on Linux after the first install…like WTF I don’t want Amazon in this new to me OS.
It seems highly likely that you have mischaracterized the meaning of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled but it doesn’t matter. The mere existence of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled is damning enough on its own.
Is there a picture of what this actually looks / would look like? Honestly, although it is going down a bad path, it isn’t actually all that surprising. Firefox already has sponsored address bar suggestions by default.
I can live with ads but I’d prefer to pay a few dollars a year instead. I already support Mozilla through relay.
The problem is Mozilla started thinking about itself as a company, with its massive revenue from Google.
It isn’t. Firefox was most alive and most growing when it was still a grassroots initiative to build a better web browser.
When they go back to that - or someone forks and creates a charity with one sole focus (a great browser) I’ll start supporting them. I just don’t think Mozilla needs this size of org to build a better browser and and now they’re trying to do a bunch a crap I’m not interested in to justify their org size. They’ve got it back to front.
And I say this as a lifelong Firefox user.
The Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company founded in 2005 by the Mozilla Foundation. I think part of the problem is more people don’t realize this. It’s the same reason you can’t donate to Firefox development, donations to “Mozilla” go to the Mozilla Foundation, not the company that builds Firefox.
Yes, but the profits of Mozilla Corporation are all owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which has to adhere to all the usual 501.c3 rules about spending (i.e. it must be in furtherance of the stated mission of the org).
The profits are owned by the Corporation, which is why the Corporation does all the crazy spending and paying millions to executives, because as long as there is enough separation what they do internally does not affect the tax situation of the Foundation. After the for-profit pays taxes, the non-profit can get dividends and other payments from them, but it is not just a way to wash away tax from all the money.
The Corporation acts like a company because it is one. This is different than Konqueror, Epiphany, or most of the Firefox forks.
Librewolf on PC.
Mull on Android
librewolf is a fork of firefox, without firefox librewolf also gonna die
and same with Mull.
That’s not how forks work. A fork can exist independently of its upstream.
True, but you really think firefox forks would have the resources to keep up with security updates and such? Mull for one is a fork that only changes the default privacy changes and nothing more
Can but how feasible is that?
By being a fork it wont die, but its true that its just a few folks running builds of mainstream work mozilla is doing
I don’t think this should surprise anyone, given the new CEO they got and the announcement that was made immediately afterwards, followed by the layoffs. Fortunately, there are Firefox forks that we can switch to as a form of protest, provided that the forks keep these changes out of their codebases.
One thing I predict happening is that this move by Mozilla could spur more activities for the Firefox Forks. It would be a good opportunity for the developers of Mull, Librewolf, and Waterfox to think of ways to make their respective browsers stand out or be unique. Maybe we can one day see an Android version of Librewolf or a new web engine get developed in response to all this mess. Just a thought, of course.
New browser engines already exists : servo ( rust), Ladydbird (C++) are actively being developed. Both are still far from being daily driveable, but considering mozilla is apparently shiting the bed it’s better than nothing.
I would not blame this on the new CEO unless there’s some evidence to support it. Wanting to incorporate more ads into the browser is one of the things the previous CEO was known for, and maybe that brilliant idea being met with hostility was one of the things that persuaded her to depart from the role. Whatever this new feature was to be, it most likely had its origins during her tenure.
If you don’t use the “review checker” feature, which I didn’t know existed until now, you will be unaffected by this change.
Pale Moon is the only independent fork that I know of that doesn’t depend on gecko or ff
Is Ublock Origin and Dark reader compatible with pale moon?
