I used to want to donate to Mozilla Foundation, but I've long lost any hope that the corporation would spend that money in a way that makes sense to me. The pessimist on me would expect donated money to be spent on more built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. Or maybe a bonus for their executives.
I just want Firefox to be faster. I'm donating to Floorp (a Firefox fork), at least they seem focused on making the browser better.
I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier. It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
Like, in general, I find that any HN thread where most of the comments are just agreeing, one-upping and yes-anding while invoking the same talking points and terminology (CEO ghouls, etc.) is probably a topic we might need to chill out on.
Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs.
Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.
The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.
Yet many over here are getting paid double that.
Salaries are rarely based on value created. They are based on what others pay.
Also a lot of value add comes from corporations which produce things of complexity greater than the sum of their constituent parts.
If you already have a platform in use by the entire world, that matter of scale makes it much easier to find value adds more than a sole proprietor could ever dream of.
It's for these reasons I'm wary of talking about "value add" only being from the developers directly implementing a feature. Without support, IT, security, Product, HR, etc, I could not deliver that value add.
Thousands of software engineers have been laid off in the past few years and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. I expect that there will, at some point, be quite a large number that would entertain a hundred and fifty thousand dollars versus no job.
It can be tricky to narrow down definitions but there are at least a million and probably less than 5 million software developers in the US. The last few years have seen ~100k students graduate with CS degrees each year. Thousands of layoffs over the timespan of years isn't going to impact it all that much. If you played your cards right you could get a $100k+ starting salary at a BigCo (not necessarily a FAANG) 10 years ago, I only expect that to have expanded, and anyone with a handful of years of experience is going to be above that and should consider shopping around for >$150k if they aren't there already.
I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much.
I was offered a job at a big tech but I'd have had to move to the US to their campus because they hate remote work. And they offered only 120k (they probably figured that sounded like a ton of money to a European). But I started looking at the cost of living there and it was insane. I'd have had to share a flat and it would have to be far away, not a few km from the office like I'm used to. No way.
Of course then Trump started happening and I was so glad I didn't move there. I'm kinda LGBTQ too so I'd be royally screwed if I'd been there now
Laura Chambers is just an interim CEO. I am not sure how Mozill Foundation/Corporation is exactly linked in the decision making. But the key people are still Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker who is the Chairwomen of Mozilla Corporation.
If Laura is getting paid lots like Mitchell Baker, it is still an issue. But, wouldn't she be just a scapegoat? I am pretty sure as Chairwomen, Mitchell Baker still has more power than Laura the CEO when it comes to Mozilla Corporation. I have felt this is just to chill the uproar against Mitchell Baker. Now everyone will blame the next CEO. But I wonder how much power she has. I could be wrong of course.
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
By objective measure I’d agree with you but you can’t deny the reality of the job market.
If someone is a truly effective CEO they’d be able to get many, many times more than 2-3x staff engineer salary at pretty much any other company out there.
I think there is a small set of people who would do a good job running Mozilla. Of these people, a very large chunk would do this for $500k annually (this is still enough money for almost anyone to lead a very comfortable life). Being money-driven might make you _worse_ as Mozilla CEO.
I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay because they believe in the mission is a recipe for disaster. Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.
2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
There's people in the FOSS realm running VERY competent operations for simple living wage, or less.
Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade.
Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others.
Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone.
They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.
As opposed to now, where you've got someone who is willing and able to tank the entire project, but it looks good on paper? Is that the kind of person you want to be competing for?
I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.
But they're not. Firefox market share has tumbled and I'm getting more and more captchas because my browser is now so rare it's considered "suspicious". It's not a flaw in the product itself but it does affect its usability. Marketshare of at least 5-10% is crucial to be on the radar of web devs. Especially because the competition besides Safari is basically all one single browser because they share the engine.
Idk I switched to Firefox earlier this year and it's honestly been really painless. Not sure why a CAPTCHA would trigger based on browser ID when those are so easily spoofed. Why would someone be running a bot on a less popular browser? I have not noticed any change.
The one thing I do notice is that on some very poorly built websites there will be a bug and it's because they haven't checked in Firefox or because I am blocking things that are no longer blockable on Chrome, but this is rare.
There’s a difference in arguing that Mozilla should pay market rate for a CEO and arguing that the current CEO is worth market rate. I’m arguing the former, not the latter.
Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.
But if you do need to have a CEO, and offering 2-3X gets you zero qualified applicants...then you are forced into strategies which have undesirable side-effects.
The issue I have is a lot of CEOs appear to be wholly unqualified for their positions and their salaries are completely unjustifiable. So many of them don't even have a glancing understanding of the product or company that they are in charge of. Their primary role is getting a higher stock valuation so the board can be happy.
A good example of this is how many tech CEOs have dumped ungodly amounts of money on "AI" because that's what the market demands. Or how many CEOs hire and fire based on what other companies are doing, not what their company needs.
The fact is, "qualified" is often at odds with "competent". Most of the 30x CEOs are only qualified in chasing stock prices, not competently running a company for the long term.
That’s a problem with your selection process, not the lack of qualified applicants. It’s funny that the qualification that people require often seems to be ‘has done this thing to no great success elsewhere’.
> The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs
I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job.
Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.
Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I'd argue the latter.
Further, CEOs and wannabes have a strong incentive to structure organizations such that they depend ever more on the CEO, justifying massive compensation and of course feeding their egos. But I would argue that beyond a certain size, having to route everything important through one guy is an organizational antipattern. So yes, I'm very willing to argue most CEOs shouldn't exist. Or at least most CEO positions.
> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places.
If the “bad” CEOs don’t take pay cuts or subsequently struggle to find work, then that thinking is obviously not as “incredibly” incorrect as you claim.
Real talk: what are the issues with Mozilla's? I hate plenty of CEOs so I'm familiar but I've never heard... really anything, good or bad, about Mozilla's.
That alone is enough to disqualify all of them. Now look at mobile - the biggest market ever. Firefox does not exist on mobile. That is a reason to remove the leadership and the board with it.
which is quite ironic as Firefox Mobile is better than Chrome as Android Chrome does not implement many features, the most important one being extensions.
So I see the logic, but at the same time, I'm wondering why it's important for Firefox to gain a lot of users on... any platform, really? Like it's broadly good for more people to use Firefox, but also, is that Mozilla's actual mission? Because I would personally say that Mozilla is not out to make "the most popular browser," they're out to make "the best browser." Ideally the best would be the most popular but there's a lot in the way of that that doesn't necessarily mean anything negative about Mozilla or Firefox.
You can have the best browser in the world, and it's not gonna help you if nobody tests for it because its market share is approximately 0%. We're already seeing people getting stuck in endless captchas because they're using a weird browser that behaves differently to 95% of other users, and shitty websites inadvertently relying on bugs in Chromium which results in stuff not working, or running slow as molasses, in FF.
I've been running into both pretty much daily. As a long time Firefox users (since 2.0 almost exclusively), it didn't used to be like that, it's a recent phenomenon.
Much can also be said about them removing features and not implementing things people keep asking for for decades; for example, the vertical tab feature request was there for more then 20 years, I think?
It's not a criticism of developers, they're doing what they can, it's obvious set by managers.
Without market share you are irrelevant to influence web standards. Part of the Firefox mission is to defend a open internet, not to lag behind Google implementing whatever APIs their services need to the detriment of every other player.
Those things go hand in hand though. If they truly were the best people would line up to use it.
I still use it because it's the least bad option. They have a long history of ignoring the community in favour of the mainstream, ironically a user group they have lost a long time ago. So now they're just alienating their remaining supporters in order to cater to users that don't even remember they exist.
Raking in 100s of millions and not improving Firefox is one thing. Another is spending those millions on acquiring companies that produce no revenue, aka setting money on fire.
Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns.
It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.
It's not 100s of millions. The previous CEO made between 2.4 to 7 million (she was really good at giving herself raises) and wasn't there long enough for that to add up to even one hundred million. Still she was very overpaid with the marketshare ever declining and the new one gets even more.
Nobody else got that kind of raise at Mozilla and they probably were much better at their jobs.
> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation.
Yes. This is absolutely true. Most CEO’s are not worth this kind of money. In fact, most CEO’s could disappear overnight and cause zero disruption to the operation of the company.
I think the complexity of the job is _far_ overrated, and the main reason people think they’d suck at it is because they have no/less confidence.
People that become CEO’s are purely better at faking that confidence. If you are lucky, the confidence is built on skill instead of bluster, but they both get paid the same regardless.
CEO should exist, and it's normal that their compensation is the highest of the company.
However it shouldn't be a 268 to 1 ratio with the median worker like the SP500 average. There is no way the CEO is worth that much money to the company.
At a very large company, I think some individual decisions the CEO makes will have much more impact on the company than the work output of 268 employees. I think some CEOs really are probably worth that kind of money. People like Steve Jobs.
However, most ceos aren’t genius superstars. And I don’t think CEO pay really makes sense given supply and demand. I think there’s plenty of people who could do at least as good a job as many CEOs do, and would happily do so for a lot less money.
I suspect a lot of CEO pay is an arse-covering exercise by the board. If the board hires a super expensive CEO, and that person turns out to be terrible, the board can say they did everything they could do to get the best ceo. But if the board hires someone for much less money who turns out to be a turkey, they might be blamed for cheaping out on the ceo - and thus the company’s downfall is their fault.
Is the Mozilla CEO really so amazing at their job that they deserve such insane compensation? I doubt it. I bet there’s dozens of people at Mozilla today who are probably smart enough to do a great job as CEO. They just won’t be considered for the role for stupid reasons.
I disagree (not a CEO). What’s the median worker at a company like Walmart or Amazon paid? To think that a CEO of those couldn’t improve (or degrade) the company’s performance by many thousand times more than a Walmart or Amazon worker seems strange to me. They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.
Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for results. That range of results is very wide for large companies.
A mix of bad CEOs at those companies and good CEOs at Target, Walmart, and Amazon. I don't believe the median worker held any blame at those companies.
From that, I’d conclude that CEO capability and effectiveness really matters and paying up for a good one is worth it.
That is a false binary. It's also plausible that those individuals had as much effect on important outcomes as the guy at the front of a marching band does on the music, with other factors making the difference.
Also possible is that the CEOs grossly overcentralized the companies such that they increased the apparent importance of CEO decisions and then just took some big gambles. Heads they get paid a lot of money; tails their bets pay off and they get hailed as geniuses who get paid even more money.
In theory, every one of the CEO's reports (other than their administrative staff) is capable of stepping into the CEO's job. If they aren't capable (albeit some with coaching and support) that calls into question the company's overall hiring and promotion practices.
In that case, for every CEO there's literally a dozen other people at that company alone who could do their job. Why do we keep repeating that good CEOs are in short supply?
And finally, rich people eventually look for other ways to feel valued. Status is a big one. Having the top job at the company is a big perk in and of itself. If they don't feel privileged to be the CEO, why the hell even take the job?
Everyone's acting like a competent CEO is some kind of rocket scientist unicorn.
In reality they don't do all that much. And most of the decisions are driven by data and advice from Gartner that just recommend the highest bidder, not some magical insights.
After all the CEO works for the board which is made up of shareholder representatives. They have very little industry knowledge and they just want the company to jump on the latest hype and "industry practices". They're usually very risk-averse.
So the CEO is kinda tied by what's happening in the industry anyway. The only CEOs that are capable of breaking that are the ultra confident ones like Jobs or Musk.
How did your CEO become CEO? Mine got there because he was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with the company that ultimately bought out my old CEO.
How does that make them "worth it"?
> but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company
Look, I've interacted with CEOs and frankly the job isn't nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. The most important aspect of the job is socializing, not managing the company like you might assume. It's putting on a good show and making potential clients like you. It's every bit just being a good salesperson.
There's a reason, for example, my CEO currently lives in California even though his company is halfway across the country and has no offices in CA.
Now, that isn't to say the Job of a founder CEO isn't a lot more difficult, it is. However, once a company is established the CEO job is a cakewalk. There's a reason companies like FedEx had a CEO literally in his 80s that gave up the reigns right before he died.
If you have the ability to schmooze, sit through meetings, and read power-points. Congratulations, you have what it takes to be a CEO.
I have seen CEOs that where earning 250k in the EU with thousands of employees. The issue is an entitlement issue, where today's world makes people think that they deserve millions of dollars for leading a company, same issue as developers expectings hundreds of thousands for their work. Its a corruption of the system which is both a effect and a cause of the current death of capitalism in the US.
It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more sense.
Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation.
So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox.
For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox.
There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.
I don't hate Firefox. It is my daily driver. I hate that Firefox went from the dominant browser by market share, to the minor, insignificant player it is today.
I hate that Firefox is so irrelevant that most web devs don't test on it. For many sites that's fine, because web standards are web standards, and Firefox supports them quite well. But whenever I run across a broken site, or even one that mostly works, but gives me papercuts, and then fire up Chrome and see that it works fine there, a little bit of me cries inside.
Mozilla should be focusing a lot more on user acquisition, and on figuring out why so many of their users have left.
That's sort of the point. Firefox is an excellent, even amazing browser. But because of the way Mozilla has handled it, it's become largely an also-ran, and its continued existence seems highly dependent on its primary competitor in the browser space. That's just incompetent given the quality of Firefox.
The hate on Mozilla. This entire thread is people saying that Firefox is great, but Mozilla is shit. Why do you think that hate on Mozilla is the same as hate on Firefox?
The thing is that in 2020 it was too late. Firefox have been lagging behind Chrome for so long, that the headstart they had when Chrome was launched didn't matter.
For example, Chrome had process in tabs when it was released in 2008. Firefox had a ticket in bugzilla open by the community that had been ignored by Mozilla for years, before Chrome was released. Even when it was released, Mozilla's first reaction was "meh, we don't need that".
There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners and having your costs inflate to match these donations, rather than something, anything to help the sustainability of Mozilla.
Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come.
Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation.
I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released.
I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not.
[0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!
I’m more of a full-stack but I develop “Firefox first” on my projects if I can and leave it to my tester to see that it works on Chrome. X-browser issues turn up rarely, I wind up having more trouble with Safari than anything.
I know Mozilla does worse on benchmarks, but I never complain about performance. Recently I tried some sites from one of the spammiest sectors on the web and found I couldn’t move the mouse without my Chrome lighting up like a Christmas tree and navigating me to crap sites, but the Firefox experience was that I had to click on something for all hell break loose.
We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah. It performs great on Chrome and lags pretty bad on the fox. That’s the only bad screen, and we have a lot of screens.
Personally I don’t like it that they have an office in San Francisco. Emotionally I think, “the only thing anybody should be building in San Francisco is a homeless shelter.” Practically though, I think a browser company can’t “think different” if is steeped in the Bay Area culture, not least if they can get in a car and go visit people at Google and Facebook. If they were someplace else they might have a little more empathy for users.
Like you I have found Firefox to work pretty well in real world applications. The one place I found it did fall over was Microsoft Office Online. FF runs like molasses in a large online Excel spreadsheet vs Chrome.
Microsoft is absolutely terrible at Firefox support. I feel like they do it in purpose. In fact when I set my user agent to Edge half the issues in O365 disappear! Suddenly things actually work.
The latest crap is that it now requires me to sign in every single day on Firefox. And often after I sign in it immediately goes to "hang on while we're signing you out". Meanwhile they're pushing edge heavily as a vehicle of copilot promotion. So I'm pretty sure this is just intentional breakage..
This works because you're deliberately targeting a set of features Firefox supports, and the overwhelming majority of the time they're a subset of what Chrome (and increasingly, Safari) support
Read over the various web platform blogs out there, and keep a tally of how many times you'll see "Firefox gains support for XYZ in 139, bringing it to widespread availability. Chrome has supported this since 32 and Safari since version 16"
And many of these are fantastically useful features. Sure, they're not ground breaking building blocks like in the old days when IE didn't even support certain types of box model, but they're echos of the past
Worse than that, where I work I can only install an LTS Firefox so I am stuck with relatively old features, but, hey, I’m in React land using components with some time lag in their development that don’t use these new features. I was kinda shocked to see that mainstream toolkits aren’t using <dialog/> given that it is a huge leap forward for accessibility… screen readers do not see anything they’re not supposed to see, end of story. Trouble is that it does cause trouble for frameworks that depend heavily on portalization.
Just my two pennies. Firefox is the best vendor for adhering to spec. In contrast, Webkit drags its feet while Chromium releases and deprecates experimental API willy nilly.
There has been one debugging niche where I've found Chromium preferable: Chrome sometimes gives better WebRTC signaling error messages than Firefox.
> hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier
I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities.
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”
Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.
Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I realise that HN has different people posting different arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the years.
All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser?
In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.
These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.
The reason Mozilla is criticized on every front is because they've failed on every front. Their market share has cratered, none of their other projects have taken off, they haven't even succeeded at providing plausible cover fire for Google's illegal monopoly.
They're losers, plain and simple, in the unembellished sense that they have lost every battle they've fought; and people don't like losers. I'm sorry if that offends you.
Why don't the rest of us start a browser? Again, has that "Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing" point escaped you? Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor that would lead me to have some empathy for Mozilla, actually; but it would still be empathy for a loser.
>Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing
>Google's illegal monopoly
>Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor
As someone who switched from Firefox to Chrome a while ago, these remarks made me curious enough to research the case.
The judge ruled based on "billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets".
The crime of the century laid bare before our eyes. A search engine company caught red-handed paying companies to set its search engine as the default search engine as everyone everywhere knew and saw for decades. Utterly reprehensible.
Okay. If you think they should be above the law, that's who you are. Those are your values. Thanks for letting us know.
I'm of the humble view that it's at least as important to enforce the law when it comes to the most powerful corporations in the world, as it is to enforce it on the average person.
Sure, the law should be enforced against them. The law's the law. I wasn't trying to imply they should not face the full penalties the law requires, here. Obviously they should. No one is above the law.
The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud or murder rather than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts with technology product providers and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations.
Aren't you implying that actual fraud, as well as things like copyright infringement, would be anything more than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations?
IMO buying defaults isn't as bad as Google's rigging the ad market. At least others have outbid them for search defaults in the past and in other markets.
That one is definitely a lot worse and a danger of a monopoly/extremely powerful market player. I would argue that a monopoly is not inherently "bad"* but has much more ability to do bad things if it chooses to, with not much potential recourse from others.
*Strictly in an ethics and fairness sense. It might (or might not) be worse for consumers. Just worse in a kind of boring rather than nefarious or deeply harmful way.
Not every front, they gave us MDN and Rust, both of which will probably outlive them. KaiOS (the continuation of Firefox OS) is very popular in less developed areas of the world. Not that they managed to make anything off that.
MDN was a consolidation of several vendors’ web documentation efforts (I still remember Opera’s Web Fundamentals course fondly), which they collectively decided to put under Mozilla’s stewardship because surely Mozilla, among all of them, would maintain it neutrally and for the public benefit. It was a good run and Mozilla did do a good job at the maintenance for the last decade, but with their recent monetization efforts around MDN, I’m not hopeful for the future. (This is also why I’m incensed by Google’s web.dev—it’s not just the domain name, it’s that they are reneging on that old agreement.)
Their handling of MDN has been disappointing. Laying off their staff, asking for unpaid contributors, and selling more advertising space was greedy business.
They're currently running a REDIS advertisement that looks like a critical error. The ad is a bright red toast!
_Speaking personally_, MDN is Mozilla's most valuable resource. It is the only resource I want to survive Moz's leadership.
A-Frame is awesome; I use it to share all the photospheres I take with friends and family. I'm not aware of another easy, cross platform way to do that.
I was in grad school when VRML came out, I used it for things like visualizing 3-d slices of 5-d energy surfaces embedded in a 6-d phase space. I almost went to the VR CAVE to try it out but didn't quite, ironically I work in the social sciences cluster now and the former CAVE is our storage area and still has some big projectors on the floor which were expensive once.
A grad student who sat next to me, who I had endless arguments about "Linux vs Windows" told me that VRML was crap and the evidence was that it wasn't adequate to make 3-d games like Quake.
Today I'd compare A-Frame to Entity Component Systems (ECS) like Unity. A-Frame still has an object graph and it still has the awful primitives that VRML had that Horizon Worlds is stuck with, but you can make complex shapes with textures and import real models.
My one trouble with it as a developer is memory management, if you load too much geometry on an MQ3 it "just doesn't work." I got stuck on a project with it, I've got a good idea how to fix it but it was enough of a setback that I've been working on other things sense.
I did learn a lot more about the ECS paradigm this year when I was in a hackathon and joined up with a good Unity programmer and a designer to make a winning game (brought my mad Project|Product Management skills as well as my startup-honed talent of demonstrating broken software on stage and making it look perfect.) Now I play low-budget games and have a pretty clear idea how you'd implement them with an ECS framework so one day I'll put down the controller and make another crack at my VR project.
If you think what I said was a vitriolic personal attack, I have no idea what I could say that you wouldn't construe as one, and honestly, don't care enough about Internet debates to try; best of luck.
Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said:
“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating”
But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data.
Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”
- Advertisers buy user data from Firefox, who can then resell or provide this data to others.
- Others buy that data.
- Big data companies and others aggregate this information.
- Cookie or IP are not necessarily required to identify users; thumbprinting, datetime, and behavioral matching can identify users adequately.
- Advertisers and analytics giants can ingest data that includes PII, if it’s encrypted, and that can be decrypted.
- New methods of tracking have replaced old ones and new methods are even better than old ones.
- This data can be used to group users in many ways, so it can know essentially who you are, when you do things, what you will do, and who you’ll do them with.
- This information is used for targeting ads, but can be used for other purposes.
- Technology to utilize this data has been evolving much more quickly.
- Why just target ads? Why not provide users with a version of reality that optimizes their consumer behavior?
- Why attempt to ensure control through enforcement? Why not control motivation and thought?
- Why have political elections? Why not control decisions?
Firefox isn't supposed to be a business to begin with. Mozilla is a nonprofit organization, isn't it?
If they can't survive off of donations, then they don't deserve to exist. If they want to sell user data or search defaults, Mozilla should fork Firefox.
When Zuck said this, I could feel the smarm, but I respect his honesty, and I know what he's not saying. Mozilla is trying to spit the same game about its Google search default deal, as if that is the same thing. It's not, because when Facebook does it, it's a for-profit corporation selling out its users. When Mozilla does it, it's a nonprofit organization selling out its users to the single largest for-profit web property in the history of the Internet.
Google is a monopolist. They should lose the right to pay off their competition.
> Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet?
So now we're at "Why are you obsessed with this? It happened so long ago."
No one is having a "flamewar". This has long been a discussion that has been appropriate on the site. Now that we've seen the consequences of the decisions it's appropriate to discuss them.
> In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.
Not until those calling it a flame war or something that shouldn't be surfaced admit it was a mistake and that kind of thing shouldn't happen. But I guess it's the kind of thing that people who are partisan/or tribal fanatics think is fine, to poison every open source project with their politics in the name of inclusivity and actually seeking a powerful monoculture.
I want internet to be free and Mozilla Firefox to be for the entire world and not have to fight the US partisan philosophy of the day, which increasingly wants to censor everything or restrict access to the Internet with the typical "feel good" excuses.
The hackers who treat information and people as equal and deserving predate a lot of the fake inclusivity which is all about power dynamics and divisions.
I will keep bringing Brendan Eich and censorship up and I will keep using firefox since it offers more freedom to the user. Both are not mutually exclusive. Mozilla as a company has been quite misguided for a long time.
You imply it’s the hackers or Hacker News that has changed to create a negative atmosphere. From my perspective, however, it’s the direct result of a very long series of hostile-to-hackers decisions made by Mozilla.
My issue is that when you try to have discourse but everyone’s on the same side, it can easily devolve into a circlejerk where everyone is trying to see who can most dramatically burn the strawman. These kinds of feedback loops are just bad—it doesn’t really matter who the target is or how malicious they are—because they cause the participants to drift further and further from the reality of the conflict.
In the best case, if the target really is bad, the participants may just look foolish when they later deploy their anti-strawman ballistic missile against someone who actually has a slightly good pro-target argument they hadn’t thought of. In the worst case, this is how mobs work themselves up to eventually justify violence against a target that’s totally harmless.
One thing’s for sure though, once a circlejerk like this starts, rational thought ends.
I still use it, but I lost all respect for the management. This level of tone deafness should cause everyone on the board and c suite to personally write an open letter of apology to the users, but instead we got a half-hearted victim-blaming non-apology:
This is really rather telling. Here is how Mozilla articulates what they think users have a problem with:
> We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on.
Mozilla is willfully inept. They think that pre-loading third-party non-free code and ads without my knowledge or consent is not an issue! Moreover, Mozilla thinks that this doesn't conflict with Mozilla's interpretation of what opt-in means and the values it embodies.
Mozilla is looking more and more like controlled opposition. Mozilla undermined their own users' faith in Mozilla's add-on/extension capabilities and act like releasing the source after the fact resolves any issue at all regarding doing this without consulting users or receiving prior affirmative consent.
This comment is getting long enough as it is. I'll just leave this here.
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising!
That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.
> … Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness
It literally was not.
The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale.
Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades.
Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
Using Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully settled on the name Firefox— the days of "Firebird" and the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages like about:mozilla. Firefox is dear to me and it has been for a very long time now.
Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about.
(That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)
I don't really agree. By sitting at the big tech table you give up a lot of ethics.
I think it's similar to NGOs like Greenpeace. I respected them when they were using rubber boats to blockade toxic waste dumping. Now they have a millions earning CEO rubbing shoulders with the pollutors and ostensibly "changing the system from within". Which creates watered down measures and too much dependency on the industry. Just like Reagan's "trickle down" fallacy this doesn't work. Money and power corrupts.
Also yes a lot of us use Firefox but not because we still love it so much. But because it's the least worst option. Kinda the only option if you want to run the real Ublock Origin now.
I think the reason for that is that we are still using the Firefox that was made 5 years ago. Then the whole team that was working on making the browser more modern and speedier was fired (as I understand it anyway).
I love Firefox, and I’m happy that there’s a foundation working on it that magically gets funded, but I see that money going to things I don’t care about far too often to be comfortable with it. It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
I'll bet if Mozilla thought they could get away with canceling Firefox, they would.
It feels like Firefox is treated as lead generation for whatever new boat Mozilla builds to sell Firefox users down the river on next time. It's "finished" in that regard; it is a widget that passes network traffic to Mozilla and third parties, and in exchange, Mozilla gets a pittance from Google. How any of this is supposed to be accepted with a straight face is beyond me.
As someone who spends a lot of time on HN, I fully agree with you. I am beyond bored of seeing the same things just continually reposted and take over some good threads. I actually got to a point where I would not click on comment threads that had anything to do with anything that Elon touches, because it just got ridiculous.
On the flip side though, I know there are a ton of readers who only occasionally Read the interesting story, who are part of today's lucky thousand who haven't heard yet. For that reason, my position has become somewhat moderate in that I think the hyperbolic hate posts are still ridiculous, including some informative and reasonable comments is probably good. To be clear though, The majority of this thread is not that :-D
It's not so black and white. Firefox is my daily driver, this doesn't mean that I can't have concerns about the direction of the Mozilla Foundation or express them online with others who share those concerns.
Or maybe we are genuinely upset that a browser we've supported and watch grow for decades at this point has fallen so low. Market share matters a ton, and Mozilla has been a very poor steward of Firefox's market share.
Maybe stop ascribing incorrect motivations to those of us who are angry but also care very deeply. I'm so tired of others assuming some sort of ill intent or virtue signaling or whatever, and using that as a way to derail a conversation.
I love Firefox and will keep supporting it but I hate the Mozilla that fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, that become all about US woke partisan culture and decided that instead of everyone being equal, they had to discriminate based on their exclusionary ideology "to compensate". In a space that was super hippie and equal and free, they had to make it corporate and fake.
They even went absolutely against the freedom of the Internet with posts claiming for censorship of wrongthink. Which one could easily tie to the Republican vs Democrat bullshit.
Open source, Linux and a free Internet are not about those petty Western centric politics.
I don't care if you don't like it. Many of us have lived it and used Mozilla from 1.x/2.x versions.
He wasn't fired. He stepped down because of the uproar not in Mozilla itself but in the user communities. Because that's what the shareholders care about, disgruntled employees don't affect the share value but a dark shadow over the brand does.
I was personally also happy to see him go. You can't be inclusive when you try to deny people you have nothing to do with their equality.
The sheer volume of sidequest projects they've put resources into that were clearly self-indulgence projects from internal staff, that had no obvious market need or target user-base put me off years ago.
They're kept in existence as a cost of doing business for the likes of Google, purely to ward off browser monopoly claims, and absolutely do not deserve to be taken seriously, or be given private funding.
I feel like these are stuff that the C-suite needs for justifying their pay. If it is "boring browser development", it will show that they are doing nothing, redundant, and cannot have bonuses and salary raise.
Also worth reading: Reinventing Organisations by Laloux.
Incredible book - absolute book of the year for me. They talk about the history of organisations and how organisations can be run differently & better. And they research companies who are trying this stuff out today, and talk about what they do. The modern CEO idea is pretty silly on the face of it. We take the - ideally - smartest person at a company, divorce them from grounded reality, then burden them with all the hardest decisions your company has to face. All while disempowering the people on the ground who do all the actual work. In many ways it’s a pretty stupid way to run a company. There’s plenty of other options.
Just the other week the economist did an interview with the CEO of Supercell, a Nordic video game company. They have the same idea - the ceo in many ways doesn’t run the company, which frees him up to do actually useful work. And it lets the team leads take initiative and lead. Much better model in my opinion.
They're trying to diversify their revenue so it doesn't all come from Google. All these 'self-indulgent projects' are attempts to actually make enough money to compete with a multi-trillion dollar company's resources because they know they can't compete long-term.
The parent is referring to things like Coop (social media), SkyWriter (IDE), Persona, Solo (website builder), “data futures”, Servo [1], “big blue button”, most of them have little to no potential for revenue.
Meanwhile you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing, and it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
[1] including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF, making it more of a vanity project - it’s already thirteen years old at this point
I think that would be believable if a massive portion wasn't spent in venture capitalism based gambling, where they put 90% of their eggs in the AI basket, of which, 70% are small unknown groups, 30% is just hugging face which really doesn't need their money, but at least that was a good bet.
Because they are a non-profit, they have to spend their money every year. That’s why Mozilla is/was over employed and following all these projects that die, because they need these engineers to work on something.
My friend worked at Mozilla 15 years ago, arguably during their golden years and he said it was a joke how much money they wasted because they had to spend it.
That’s not how NFPs work. I’m on the board of a NFP, we absolutely are able to save money year to year. The big difference between us and a regular corp is we don’t have shareholders or paid board members.
Charitably, I'd like to believe that all these side quests were in search of actual, real, substantial, alternative revenue streams, in order to reduce dependency on Google.
The problem, of course, is that all of these side projects just flat out failed. Maybe they were self-indulgence projects or maybe they were pursued in earnest, but either way, they failed.
I maintain Waterfox, so I recognise this isn’t a great look criticising another fork. But there’s a contradiction in abandoning Mozilla over spending and leadership concerns whilst supporting Floorp, which initially used open source extensions to build up their USP, then switched to a non-open licence to prevent others from doing what they had done.
They only reverted after community backlash (or being “inspired” if I recall correctly). You’re comfortable supporting a project that actively betrayed open source principles, whilst writing off Mozilla for issues like executive compensation.
It doesn’t strike me as more morally consistent than supporting the organisation that actually develops the underlying engine?
It's kind of disheartening to see what happened to the Mozilla Foundation. And it makes me kind of afraid of what's going to happen to linux once Linus is out. It seems that a great project requires a great BDFL, otherwise it will be taken over by ghouls.
Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized than Mozilla? We're so so blessed with Linus and everyone is afraid of the moment the project has to stand without him. But I'm confident he's aware and working towards that point in time. I'm not too much into it though, so this is more or less assumptions.
But these are fundamentally different type of projects. Many businesses and products run on top of Linux and/or PostgreSQL. There is a very clear and obvious incentive to contribute, because that will help you run your business better.
With user-oriented software such as a browser, this is a lot less clear-cut. Organisations like Slack, or Etsy, or Dropbox: sure, they've contributed resources to stuff they use like Linux, PosgreSQL, PHP, Python, etc. But what do they get out of contributing to Firefox? Not so obvious.
I think this is one reason (among others) that Open Source has long been the norm in some fields oriented towards servers and programmers, and a lot less so in others.
With PostgreSQL my biggest concern is what happens when we no longer have Tom Lane, Petere, etc. Rather than the project dying I see the opposite happening; it gets feature crept by contributors adding in their own custom behaviour and it becoming too complex.
There's always a large overhead of adding something new and it's always the experienced devs on the project that know where the right balance is.
No project or development style is perfect and they all come with their own set of upsides and downsides. PostgreSQL is no exception. Maybe the PostgreSQL 20 years from now will be a different type of project with different types of trade-offs. That doesn't mean it will be worse. I'm not so worried about this.
Linux is a trademark of Linus. Which is why Linux Foundation which is run by corporates like Microsoft, Google etc is staying aside. After Linus, it would like corporate board memebers changing CEOs at their wish.
The Linux Foundation also runs several other projects, none of which do I see being ran terribly poorly from a corporate meddling point. I can only hope that is a strong signal of things to come.
Did I say anything is run poorly? Or good for that matter? The difference is intent. Run for community and run for corporate are both different. Currenlty Linus is the only thing standing in the way of LF pulling another Rust Foundation. Cos it's run by corporates as well. Time will tell.
Rust foundation has not been very community friendly. That's cos corporates run it. There was a fork of the language called crab or something cos of this at one point. Take Linus out of the scenario, it's the same thing that's probable about Linux Foundation.
I did a quick search. Names were named by him here [1] in 2024 - but not as successors per se. More like candidates for important roles in the future. This [2] interview from 2020 touches the subject as well.
I interpret it in a way that he tries to cultivate an environment where a good leader/successor/main-whatever emerges somewhat naturally.
(Prime example of my personal behavior which I really don't like: Put a half-baked assumption/hearsay on the internet. Get 2 replies. Start actually researching the topic only afterwards.)
There is a sad parallel to Wikimedia Foundation, rooted in the same argument: We don't know the correct price. These entities are effectively monopolies with no competitors, and there is no public negotiation on what the annual budget of these entities should be.
So once they get away with nag screens on the world's biggest billboards, CEO pay is suddenly 'justified'.
But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
> But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
Certainly when it comes to Wikipedia: there is oversight. I know people don't like the fact that Wikipedia spends money on things other than server racks, but spending money on developing the community is a pretty legitimate thing to do! How else can you maintain such an encylopedia? You need to attract knowledgeable people to write and review articles!
I went there to find out how they're tracking upstream releases, because that's my major heartburn about any fork of one of the biggest attack targets on a personal computer. Since 12.0.14 doesn't tell me anything about what version of Firefox it's built against, I guess https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp/blob/v12.0.14/brow... is the best one can do and since it says 128.anything and the current production release is 140.0.4 I got my answer
I wish there were a way to donate to the devs who work on Firefox directly.
Like a pool where we donate and money goes to devs to work on user-centric features (eg: I’d also want to exclude those working on first party spyware and adware).
Agreed. Until I upgraded phones and just couldn't be bothered anymore, I kept around an old build of Firefox from before they messed up extensions. I have to run nightly now to get my extensions and just pause updates at relatively bug-free builds. It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost it. I've even switched to edge canary because it gives me extensions and didn't have a few regressions (that eventually got fixed) that prevented smooth video watching
No, contrary to you and GP, the stable version of Firefox for Android (on the Google Play Store) supports all Firefox extensions, including ad blockers.
There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
> There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
They got rid of extensions in August 2020 and brought them back in December 2023.[1] Fenix has lacked full extension support for more than half of its existence since release, and it has been less than two years since extensions were brought back.
I don't feel that firefox is slow on anything I use it on other than Android. Its reasonably responsive on all the machines I have ever used it with including some pretty old laptops. It seems pretty smooth, its been a while since I used chrome.
It might not be that hard to finance Firefox improvements. We should establish a Firefox improvement group. And then set a plan for bug improvements roadmap. Then publish that roadmap and set up a fund for the programmers.
I think what you are asking for is better steering of the Mozilla foundation. And maybe better steering for Firefox development. Possibly with less opinions. We might be better off supporting servo devs instead.
I agree with your opinion of that corp which as of today exists solely to employ the highly paid CEO for doing less than nothing. Or something on those lines.
But Firefox (+ forks) is a lost cause. One simple non-statistical reason, I mean it seems so, is that whenever I see that “I donate to Firefox fork” mentioned somewhere, it’s almost always a different fork. So maybe now Firefox will die a 100 deaths.
It is possible to create a new foundation that works on a new browser product based on Gecko indeed. You just can't call it Firefox because of trademark ownership.
It would be interesting to see how it collaborates / competes with the origin project, how fast and how far they diverge etc.
I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.
How are you expecting to run an entity with developers, support, and operations without any leadership?
I don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy, but in my experience that is almost always a disaster.
I'm worked on many larger teams and leadership is independent of compensation.
The fact that "high performance leaders" need to make tens of millions of dollars is one of the greatest lies being told in the modern age.
Right now my chief in the fire company where I volunteer makes the same amount of money I do: $0.00. He is the greatest leader I have ever personally met, and I've been around for a while.
When I was in the Army, my company commander (a Captain) made ~4x what the newest private did. The highest-paid officer makes ~9x.
There are government senior executives and university professors running labs with budgets and teams that make Mozilla look like a lemonade stand for practically nothing.
Mozilla should ask the Linux Foundation what their budget is, what their leadership structure is, and do that.
Mozilla, no matter what they say or think or try, is and will always be a web browser developer. A web browser. Anything else is a side project, a hobby. A distraction. Every single molecule of fuel used by their brains while at work and every single microwatt of power used by their infrastructure should be wholly and aggressively dedicated to building the tools and organization needed to create the best web browser possible.
Bloated payrolls are tolerable if the decisions made are wise, responsibility is taken, and strategies exist and make sense.
Three examples off the top of my head — PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, and Debian — are doing just fine without someone "taking responsibility" (when have Mozilla's CEO ever done that?).
Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.
There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.
I think all of these projects have contributors who are getting paid at other companies for the work, notably Linux. Not quite so for Firefox. I mean, tell me where does Linus get his income? You think that can be fully replicated for Firefox?
I’m fine with twice the amount of a developer. Taking into account responsibility, public involvement and special clothing. Travel costs and so on are separate. The developers are doing the hard work.
There is not “team” if a MBA or lawyer gets 38 times the wage of an actual person doing the work.
Worth thinking of it also "the other way". As long as some people (developers) accept an MBA above them getting 38x, without adding much value, this will happen.
I don't personally like it (so generally did not allow to happen to me), but if some people feel "safer" getting lower pay (less chance of getting fired, easier to get re-hired as there are more low paid positions than high paid positions), the natural result is that it will happen.
My experience is that both high and low paid positions are not as "safe" as people think they are (seen multiple changing in various organizations types), so people should care more about finding a reasonable organization.
> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.
If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.
> If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable
That's a big if. AFAIK most open source project developers don't get remotely enough donations to support them working on it full-time. The ones that do are the exception, not the norm.
I think you need a CEO, you just don't need a CEO that is paid $7m/year. That's ludicrous. What amazing decisions have they been making that were worth that amount? Have they really contributed more than a team of 70 developers could?
There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.
It doesn't even have to be that. Take that and bump it 5 times like a million dollars. Throw in more cash if they can increase Firefox's market share. Have clauses to penalize anything about opt-out telemetry or anti-privacy features. I'm happy to add more carrots as well as more sticks.
All said and done, that will still be way more reasonable than that ludicrous salary.
If the CEO changes his salary to 200k then fine I have no problem with that. CEOs are overpaid relative to skill and that does not sit well with my sense of generosity.
If dev work is paid for by the community, the CEO payments can increase since the budget of Mozilla will stay the same but now have less cost to carry elsewhere?
CEO is typically needed for-profit purposes on a scale. Donating for devs to build browser without that purpose does not need CEO. Just a lead engineer and accountants.
It's bizarre. In Japan, the custom is to revere your elders, in the US its apparently whoever is titled "leader". All of HN shivers in exaltation at the mention of the word.
The reality is that Firefox would have done much better had Mozilla fired their CEO 15 years ago and never hired another one. All of them executed significantly worse than mere government bonds did.
> don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy
I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.
I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.
Either software developers have to figure out how to out compete the CEO ghouls (without becoming CEO ghouls themselves), or we just have to accept that the CEO ghouls will take their cut. There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.
I think that's because those everything else are products with an opaque structure, and Mozilla, and for example Wikipedia, are more transparent. Really highlights why some people don't open up, either themselves, their source code, or their organizational structure: it's just inviting endless criticism.
Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.
There's an irony that in providing people the option of not paying, you are also inviting them to find flaws in your organization to avoid paying. We are all aware that Microsoft sucks, yet there's never any doubt that you'll have to pay for a 365 subscription if you're a serious business. At the same time we'll also gladly accept that small companies don't donate to the Linux foundation, because they have to pay their bills.
By using the control we advocate for (forking projects, reducing funding, etc) we only harm the projects that afford us that control. Not paying Mozilla does nothing to reduce the control of Google over chrome. It only hurts the one browser that gives you the choice.
I think you are being too pessimistic. Maybe it is difficult for this to happen for Firefox due to its system already subverted. However, it is not true of OSS in general. Folks already directly donate to creators/maintainers with no executive in between.
That's true, although I will point out that we've long had a funding crisis in OSS. Tons of very valuable, very necessary OSS work is being done for no or little pay.
Add to that the value capture that happens outside of that exchange. We may say that valkey is well enough funded to continue development, but that doesn't account for the immense value that is being captured by the big cloud providers charging a premium for hosting it. Azure, AWS and GCP are only as valuable as they are because there's some software you can run on them. The cheaper that software, the more they get to charge.
This is sort of a general problem with the American system of "philanthropy". We can say that the Linux Foundation is developing the Linux kernel independently for free, and that various other companies then donate, but that ignores the fact that the Linux kernel has been tremendously valuable for those same companies. In a more real way, they are paying for the development of the kernel, but they are not paying anything even close the value they are deriving from it. Value is in that way being extracted from the Linux kernel outside of the Linux Foundation, and that looks a lot like "an executive in between".
Isn't this the idea of charity though? To give without expecting something in return? I think open source software had a tremendous positive impact even if some companies also made profit out of it. How would it have been otherwise? Only walled gardens with no possibility of doing anything (like forking) and probably a miserable developer experience.
You give the examples of Azure, AWS and GCP - do they really have that much secret sauce? My impression is that AWS is mostly giving a new name to open source stuff. If all would decide tomorrow to double their prices competitors will appear immediately. And my guess is that their profit is due to forgotten or over-provisioned resources of other organizations anyhow.
I think we should focus on the benefits for society of open source, not on reducing the profit that some will make from it here and there.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before
I'll need to think about this more but one difference that comes to mind after giving it some thought is that donations are a choice. Buying food is not really optional. I'm not going to the store and giving them 50€ because I hope they continue to operate, I give them the money as an equal exchange
There is a group of people who would choose to shop more frequently at a certain place, or tip more, if their favorite place is having trouble, but as far as I know this is only a small effect and market forces decide for 95% whether a place can continue to pay its bills. With open source software development like at Mozilla, barring other income sources, they rely on those 5%. The donators don't need to accept that their money is spent on drugs and mansions¹, the way that they do when buying groceries and the big boss might indeed use the profits in that way
¹ I have no clue what else you would do with the 7M USD a year that someone else quoted. Even at a 50% tax rate (idk what the tax rate is for someone who operates a non-profit in the USA), an average person could literally retire after six months of telling others what to do at this "non profit"
I can't get around doing it for good products that are better than their competition. Firefox isnt that. I'd pay if it meant supporting enthusiastic engineers that try to make the best browser and strive to compete with Goliath. I'm not going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a product that is worse than the competition.
Or in slightly less fatalistic words: In any entity with more than 1-2 employees you need someone to make decisions and be accountable for them. The normal solution is to have a director/CEO for this. You may be able to get away with paying them slightly less than market rates if they are doing it for a good cause, but if you want someone competent you will need to pay them a relatively high salary to compete with other employers.
Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.
Firefox's entire appeal is that it is not like every other corporate entity. Its legitimacy hinges on how far it can separate itself from intrusive corporate interests.
If Mozilla goes the same way, Firefox loses all goodwill it gathered over the years and stops being an option against Chrome et al.
Yes exactly! Except for developers who I don't like and except for the development of features I don't like and except for certain functions within the code which I don't fancy, and also they have to use tabs instead of spaces if they want my hard earned money! Also which text editor is each developer using?
We need more paid stuff. Making everything advertising funded has given advertisers too much power over society. We don't see real human opinion anymore, we see advertising friendly opinions.
Google is also getting pretty aggressive about blocking people with ad blockers from YouTube. I think it is great. I ad-block everywhere, but if people don’t want me around for that reason, that’s their right. If I wanted to watch short videos, I’d actually have to become a paying customer somewhere!
Ads have many more perverse effects than wasting your time or being ugly, and you can't fix all of those with an ad blocker. They're a constant pressure to make everything retain your attention for the longest time possible, or to editorialize out content that would detract from clicking them.
You also end up paying for all this advertising indirectly, in the price of everything you buy. So you might think you get free content, but you're really not. And let's not even mention the insanity of constantly pushing everyone to consume more trash in a world that really doesn't need it.
Hard agree. I pay for monthly hosting like FreshRSS, Wallabag, etc and support the devs who make those projects. Privacy and developer support. And it's not that much.
Definitely interested in making Firefox, Thunderbird, etc sustainable too.
It's not easy when the purchasing power of the working class has been falling steadily for the last 45 years. We have now blown past Gilded Age-levels of economic inequality and there's no signs of stopping.
This is a very, very Western-centered take. It's been growing in most other areas of the world, although from a much lower starting point. I'd say it's been "reverting to the mean".
Even if you had managed to come up with a point by selectively quoting the post, that would still be bad. The good-faith way to engage with somebody’s post is to reply to the meaning of the overall post. It might be necessary to cut some parts out for logical flow, but that shouldn’t change the meaning of what you are replying to.
Signal personal should continue being free. Signal needs to develop a business line for enabling authenticated, private communications to individuals on Signal.
There's at the very least an entire area of secure healthcare messaging which is full of terrible bespoke systems, or just goes over SMS, which would more effectively and with better user experience go over signal (i.e. the ability to send longer messages, encrypted attachments etc.)
Welcome to the world of MacOS X, where there is a very healthy ecosystem of pay-once apps made by everything from giant corporations, to boutique software shops to individual developers.
I have found that whatever software I need or want, I can always find the best-in-class option to buy for a very reasonable price.
The best part: If you experience a bug or a problem, it's usually fixed within a few days at most after you report it.
I don't understand what these comments are actually criticizing in terms of side projects. They got rid of stuff like Rust, Firefox OS, Pocket, etc. Mozilla has streamlined to make web browsers and web browser accessories. VPN/Relay are both profitable projects that inhibit surveillance, so clearly that's not the issue. Do you want, not just these projects gone but the CEO gone? That happened already too, https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-cha...
We've been through a decade of the Mozillas blackholing money with zero telegraphing of any intent to bring financial sustainability to Firefox. The (expensive! ugly?) rebrand did not include any meaningful recommitments (which filtered down to me, anyway). I've just now clicked around the Foundation's website trying to figure out what my prospective donation might have gone towards and it's still kept very vague. Am I donating to Firefox, to non-software activism, to a podcast? I couldn't even find a single mention of Firefox on https://www.mozillafoundation.org in a minute of looking.
I don't mind side-projects, I mind that Mozilla looks completely directionless from the outside. It might even look like a Google-funded adult daycare. I can't trust that.
I just took a look at that site after reading your comment. It almost appears as if Mozilla just isn't interested in making a browser anymore.
"In the early 2000s, the Mozilla community built Firefox. We toppled the browser monopoly, gave users choice and control online, and helped create a healthier internet.
Twenty years later, Mozilla continues to fight for a healthy internet — one where Big Tech is held accountable and individual users have real agency online."
They list a bunch of projects on the site that are kind of all over the place. It's almost as if they don't know yet what they want to do. Mozilla is synonymous with Firefox and the Mozilla browser before that, but it is clear from the site that browsers do not fit in with their future. I'm not even sure they know what their future is. They look like a research organization that's dong research for the purpose of finding something to do? They are also accepting applications for funding.
The only purpose Firefox has in this organization is to fund exploratory research via the Google search deal. There is no plan. These people don't deserve our money and are not responsible enough to be custodians of a project as important as an independent browser.
A new organization should fork Firefox, rebrand it, contribute real resources and monetize it enough to keep it healthy. I'm not talking about junk like Zen or Floorp where they just put a skin on Firefox and have no real development resources to speak of. Someone should do to Mozilla what Mozilla did to Netscape.
Personally, I think that's a more worthwhile approach than what Ladybird is doing, although I'm rooting for them to succeed.
Whoops, it happened. An internet argument changed someone's mind. :)
According to their latest financial transparency report[1], software development as a line item is about 60% of their expenses. However, your question wasn't about where revenue has gone, it was about where new donations would go. That lead me to the donation FAQ which reads:
> At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. The Mozilla Foundation programs are supported by grassroots donations and grants. Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all. This explains the lack of Firefox on their website. Any mention of it as a product of the foundation would be misleading about where the donations go. From the point of view of the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is just another revenue stream for outreach efforts.
This really bums me out, because I'm a huge fan of Firefox. It's my go to browser on my computer and my phone. I advocate for it as much as possible. I've donated before, but I've likely never actually financially supported development of Firefox. I support the EFF, so it's possible I could have donated to this foundation on its own merits. But I didn't.
> If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all
Yes, this is what so many people here on HN have complained about for years :) and is also being raised by the OP:
> To be clear, I very much support the Foundation, and it does amazing work, but I want to know this money in particular would directly support Firefox development.
I'm curious, how capital intensive/wasteful were these aimless projects? Compared to their operating expenses? What better way could they have spent this money? (Development isn't exactly a good answer, if it's not a lot of money, it won't exactly buy a lot of R&D and even if it did, R&D doesn't necessarily translate to more income).
I keep seeing comments on HN that misunderstand what's happening with Mozilla and it's kind of frustrating.
Right now, if you were to take away Google's money, Firefox would not be able to compete with Chromium and Safari. It would die.
All these side-projects are attempts to find a source of revenue aside from Google and are necessary to Firefox's survival. So saying they should stop doing them, completely misses the point.
Unless we want Firefox to die, we should understand Mozilla's situation and encourage this exploratory process, not hate on it.
If you had put all the money Mozilla executives have spent on buying then winding down bizarre startups, occasionally connected to them, in index funds instead, you would probably have an actual revenue stream to support Firefox, other than what they have now, which is nothing, because like their leadership, these purchases never amounted to anything other than damaging their brand.
I've grown very tired of all the whining about the Mozilla Corporation. The browser, MDN, and certificate trust auditing work need more money than the foundation is getting. Making the browser paid for would kill it. This means that they need to find another way to pay the bills.
People whined about search licensing and it now seems there is a court order imminently about to kill those deals. That leaves either running other services or putting ads in the browser both of which attracted much complaining.
And no, forking is not the answer. Mozilla does the lion's share of security work and maintenance. If the mother ship dies the forks will slowly wither and die as they don't have the funding to replace Mozilla. If Mozilla can't make the numbers work a fragmented mess of forks will not do better. A few of these forks have made the problem worse for themselves by insisting on bringing back and maintaining the exploit ridden mess that was XUL based add ons.
I think it’s fascinating how languages shape our society. In this case, the ambiguity between free as in “at no cost” and free as in “freedom” is probably hurting the FOSS landscape. In French, there are two very distinct terms for this: “gratuit” vs “libre”. And it doesn’t sound as an oxymoron to pay for a “logiciel libre”.
I think people on tech forums overestimate the significance of this in today’s world.
Back in the early days of FOSS, when almost everyone who used software was also a programmer, it made a difference.
Today, nearly all people who would care about libre software licenses, are aware of their existence. The vast majority of computer users today are just attempting to do some other task and do not give a shit about the device or the legal consequences of using it, even if you warn them. They simply don’t care about software.
Isn't English actually the only language where "free" can also mean "at no cost"?
German is the same as French in this regard, we have
"kostenlos" (literally cost-less)
"gratis" (the same)
and "umsonst" (which interestingly can also mean "in vain").
(Native German speaker here), it's a very rare use of the word "free" and usually only used in fixed terms like "Freibier", it wouldn't even work for other drinks, e.g., you can't say "Freisaft" or "freier Saft" for free juice, it has to be kostenlos there.
The other Wiktionary example of "freie Krankenversorgung" sounds wrong to be, but it seems to be used rarely in some more formal or legal contexts, no one would say it like this in a casual conversation. Google results also show a 4x difference between frei and kostenlos here in favor of kostenlos. But both are low since "Krankenversorgung" is already a very unusual word. I suspect many of those uses might be bad translations from English.
“Frei” can have the meaning of “kostenlos” (https://www.dwds.de/wb/frei#d-1-1-7), but these are limited circumstances that are usually perceived as metaphorical idioms. “Freie Software” has no direct connotation of being “free as in beer” (unlike “Freeware”).
I think in some way it has become that, but I assume the roots are different. People might have said "Freier Eintritt" before it became associated with money. One might be able to see this in "Portofrei" which does not mean "free as in beer" but no postage required - for my feeling it doesn't feel like "Freier Eintritt" yet, it does not have as much money connotations (though when it wanders to the front like in "freiporto" it feels more to be about money).
I do think there is a spectrum. Funny things like "Freifahrt" or even "Freifahrtschein", or "Freikarte", or "Freiexemplar", "Freiparken", "Freiminuten" or "Freivolumen" (people might use "Inklusivvolumen") - so I'd argue when used as part to form a new word it is a synonym for "kostenfrei" (not yet in "Freiwild" which changed a lot).
On the other hand, how come that the desired connotation is not the immediately prevailing one in the land of the free which is not the land of no cost.
Well, the prompts used in testing ( https://github.com/t3dotgg/SnitchBench/tree/main/prompts) are pretty serious and basically about covering up public health disasters with lobbyists, so I'm not sure this is the kind of freedom you might want.
Still, the contacted_media field in the JSON is pretty funny, since I assume it's misfiring at a rate of several thousand of time daily. I can only imagine being on the receiving end of that at propublica and wapo. That bitch Katie was eyeballing Susie again at recess and she hates her so much? Straight to investigations@nytimes
That doesn’t excuse or justify it. And the reason the world is headed that way is in large part because of the US doing it. Clearly it was a mistake to trust one country to do the right thing. When they proclaimed themselves “leaders of the free world”, the rest of the free world should’ve raised an objection. Worse still, the US is so high on their own supply they believe they’re the best at everything, despite ample evidence to the contrary, which breeds stupidity and arrogance in a vicious cycle. And like every other junk produced in the US, they’re exporting that attitude too.
Arguably it’s really only an English word once it deviates from the original spelling and meaning. Like how the original British English “Aluminum” is now the American English word for the metal represented by the newer British English “Aluminium”, all of which borrowed from, but didn’t outright steal, the Latin roots.
English has not been in its final form forever, therefore there was a language or languages that preceded it. English words derive from one of these previous languages. Since a word from another language cannot be an English word, English does in fact not have any English words except ones that sprang arbitrarily out of nowhere.
I have seen OS projects use the word "libre" in English before to distinguish between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" uses of the word. But I can't remember which projects I've seen using that.
Sure sure, and Omelette, but once the word hits everyday usage it starts to feel different. There is a awkwardness hump to get through - and libre has a large one. So I feel it'll never catch on unfortunately
It already caught on once. It's already in the dictionary (though OED suggests it is obsolete). Though English was probably much closer to the Norman/French influence then. It may be the Tudor influence on unifying England under a common language was what killed the historic use of libre.
Browser is the most intimate piece of software we have on our computer. Paying for it (vs someone else paying for your browsing) is a no brainer.
From day one Orion browser [1] has been designed with this business model in mind.
Napkin math also shows that if only 5% Firefox users decided to pay for it, Mozilla would not only replace Google search deal revenue but also align incentives with its users, leading to a better product down the road.
With ~200M Firefox users and Google paying ~$400M annually, a $5/month subscription from just 7% of users would fully replace that search deal revenue.
One of the core problems of the internet is that the "everything-is-free-if-watch-ads-but-you-can-also-easily-block-them" paradigm of the last 25 years has created a generation of people with an innate entitlement to free services.
Asking these people to directly cover the cost of the services they use incurs a level of incredulity and anger on par with charging to breath.
Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening all over the place, there is also a growing market of people who are willing to pay for something of high quality that won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?
Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.
The problem is that people like yourself don't even register on the radar.
Nebula for example is the choice answer to the enshitification of YouTube. Lots of the top creators push it to billions of viewers. Pretty much everyone who does the YouTube rounds knows about it.
Yet they only have ~750,000 subscriptions.
That is an awful conversion rate, and why these creators will be stuck making ad supported yt content for the foreseeable future. People overwhelming do not want to pay directly.
I paid for Mozillla Pocket Premium and they canceled their product within a few months, did not properly open-source the server, did not export my "permanent library" and refunded 6$.
As the websites in the "permanent library" are partially offline, that data is now lost.
No thanks, not buying again.
I suspect that they don't actually maintain the permanent library, but rather a formatted view of the content that used to be there. Some of the sites I have the URL saved have transitioned to paywall and/or merged, goes offline or disappeared for some reason, so I can't actually read many of the links I exported from it. Though for the one that actually catches interest, I'll look for it in archiving service, but it's a tiresome work to search for it one by one.
I still don't get over the fact Mozilla bought it and shattered it less than a decade later. Perhaps it doesn't make enough "impact" to justify their time and resources, and if this behavior subsists, I would be more discouraged to give them money ever again.
The permanent library was strange. Not very transparent what happened there. I am still shocked they did not invest in the original idea (tag and archive web page), but instead tried to build another content stream with recommended articles and such.
I agree in the abstract: I'd rather pay for a product that I need, use, and love, than be the product, and have it supported through ads or unfortunate deals like Mozilla has with Google (default search engine).
But I also need to believe that the money I'm paying is being spent wisely. Given how poorly Mozilla has been managed over the past decade or so, I wouldn't care to give them any of my money. I've watched Firefox go from nothing to the dominant browser and now back to a tiny minor player that gets dropped off site compatibility lists. It makes me incredibly sad that this is the state of affairs, but... there it is.
Mozilla needs to be spending a ton more money on user acquisition in order to become relevant again. I would be happy to support that, but I have no faith that's where my money would go, or that they'd spend it to that end effectively.
Security is my top priority (even above privacy) when it comes to internet browsers. My impression has always been that browser technology is a very hard subject and incredibly difficult to do right. This approach is the main reason I keep a distance from any software that is not widely adopted. Even if it's innovative and novel. This being said: If I switch to ladybird today, am I a beta tester or is this a project I can count on?
Ladybird is advancing rapidly but I personally wouldn't use it as a daily driver yet. It's quite a small project in comparison to the giants like Chromium and Safari, but despite their talents and the from-the-ground-up approach free from legacy crap, it lacks a lot of functionality and performance enhancements for it to be a daily driver at the moment.
Give it another year or two and things may change, but if you daily drive it now you'll be either a beta tester or a volunteer part of the Q&A team.
Out of all the new and upcoming browser engines, I think the usability ranking is Flow, then Ladybird, then Servo, with none of them being a great daily driver yet.
No I didn't miss it but it made me hate it so much I wouldn't even try it. And I wouldn't have used it even if I liked it, in order to disincentivise this behavior.
I’m used to this behavior in Microsoft Land. OneNote was pretty good but I’m sure they killed it by putting three icons for it on the taskbar and making the ‘print’ dialog print everything to OneNote if you didn’t quadruple-check what you were printing to. I liked the local XML files cause I could write scripts that extracted stuff from them. Then they killed it for me by making it cloud only. Then they just killed it.
OneDrive was dead to me in the first week because (a) it was the default save location for Office and (b) if it was broken I could not save at all. That’s how to be sure somebody never uses a product ever again! It’s shocking to see how vertical integration can so utterly fail —- DropBox can make a product that doesn’t fail catastrophically on a large number of platforms, kernel integration and all dooms Microsoft’s product on their core platform.
I have a Firefox account. I will gladly pay a yearly fee for it! It provides significant value to me.
For example I pay Bitwarden $10/year for both myself and my wife. We will be moving to a Bitwarden family plan soon as our kids are getting old enough to have online accounts. Similar pricing structures for Firefox accounts would be totally reasonable!
Clearly some people would prefer a free way to use Firefox and that’s ok, too. In the same vein Bitwarden have a free plan. This kind of pricing structure already works in the market. Please copy it.
Mozilla, please stop screwing up and just make a great Firefox!
This is basically an optional way to pay for the features that a decent fork like librewolf provides.
This is really just a long way to donate really in some sense directly to firefox somehow just because everybody feels like mozilla takes the donated money and tries on some "zanky" product
See The Ville_Lindholm comment really, those were my first thoughts too but I wouldn't really donate to mozilla like ever.
Ladybird's cool though. Maybe donating to them makes more sense but I understand they are not mature but that's exactly the point, they need way more funding (IMO) to get to a genuinely stable browser and need all the help that they can get as compared to the past.
Sure, we all like to stick the big firefox guy to beat the monopoly of google, but firefox/mozilla survives on a single deal by google, and if google ever stops the deal of paying for search engine, it can really shut down mozilla or maybe hinder it extremely.
I do hope that ladybird grows in a way where I can use it in compared to firefox in like hopefully 5 years since browsers are a mess.
It's become a meme, but consider WinRAR. Odds are, it's installed on your machine and you haven't paid for it. It just works. It brings up a polite nag box but it doesn't sell your data. It doesn't invade your privacy. It just works and makes enough money to keep getting updated.
It sounds hokey but, perhaps, Firefox should be trialware. Don't cut off the people who can't pay. Make a browser that just works and see how many people will pay for it even if they can use it without paying.
What is the size of the team that makes WinRAR or SublimeText? How frequently are these programs updated? I suspect web standards change more frequently than compression algorithms.
WinRAR is such a simple app compared to a browser. It probably only needs two or three full time developers to stay updated.
I was going to say "a better example is Reaper, a full-fledged DAW that has a similar business model..." then I realized even Reaper is probably a small piece of software when you consider what behemoth a modern browser is.
I'd wonder if there's enough willing to pay within individual consumers or professionals that would support a browser development team, and my impression is that file compression and browsers are pretty much a software commodity where they can be easily swapped with other options. I doubt there would be a lot of uptake on licensing within companies, and any bundling a licensed copy with an OEM build PC would probably involve mozilla paying them instead of the other way around.
It seems like the browser only exists with a very important secondary motivation, for microsoft and IE it was tying the web and windows together with activex, and for chrome it was to give their ads/services a good presentation. The other alternative I wonder about is the Document Foundation with LibreOffice, where their offering is distinct from MS Office, and there's still space for other players to exist healthily.
The WinRAR model is actually a brilliant (and weirdly wholesome) example. It trusts users to do the right thing, doesn't punish them for not paying, and somehow it still survives
The "paid Firefox" the author wants already exists, as LibreWolf ships almost the exact same code minus the telemetry, ads, and Google defaults for free. If people wanted that, they'd already be using it. The real problem isn't the business model, it's Mozilla's leadership, which has been compromised to hell and back at this point. No pricing experiment like this will fix the exodus.
Aren't they just piggybacking on Mozilla's work though? The point is to make the work that Mozilla is doing sustainable, not to pay someone else to ship a slightly modified version of it.
Yes, forks do indeed piggyback off of their code; that's the point of free and open source software anyway. And Mozilla, in its current state and current leadership, is not sustainable and still won't be with people paying for Firefox. Its marketshare is dwindling, and people are moving to forks such as Zen or to other browsers like Vivaldi. Adding a paid version will just make that trend go faster. And you don't even need to make a fork, because user.js tweaks such as Arkenfox or Betterfox exist anyway.
Mozilla has already millions of dollars than can be put into Firefox's development instead of the business they're getting into. It doesn't need even more money, it just needs to put part of it into engineers who would make Firefox what we need.
How about crowdfunding campaigns for specific browser features? Some users require compatibility, others - performance, some might pay for offline translation tools improvements, and, of course, GenAI stuff should get its own separate tier, if anyone is interested.
A few years ago I wanted to buy some Mozilla merch in order to support them. I'm glad they removed it because I would have regretted it.
Forget about Mozilla, donate to Ladybird—or another open-source non-browser project you like. If a competitor eats away the remaining market share of Mozilla's only "working" product, maybe they'll wake up.
Some people say that the hate for Mozilla Corp is not deserved. But the thing to understand is that ten of thousands of people have rooted for Firefox. Even if not contributing to the code or money, supported it, pushed for it, like telling everyone to use it, ensuring that what they do works well with Firefox despite corporate interest regarding the market share and all. Lots of people have proudly distributed Firefox/Mozilla marketing stuff to help with that. People have accepted what was forced to be done to accept the money from Google to support the project.
And there, in parallel, there are greedy executive in Mozilla that took a big cut of the money, and wasted shitload of it in stupid and useless things that went to trash In the end, achieving really little.
Yes firefox is a little bit better than in the past, but like just a single digit percent better compared to what it should have been if the money wasted was really used to develop the project. Interesting other projects that could have changed the world were underfunded, like thunderbird (that never thrived as much as now since the Corp is not charge anymore) and market shares are still as low as ever...
> Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model.
This is not true for the vast majority of people leaving. It might be true in the hyper focused tech bubbles that we frequent, though they certainly don't represent the vast majority of users.
First, all the normal people left. Those leaving now, like me, are former Mozilla fans, techies, die hard Firefox users. That hate the Mozilla business model.
There should be a donation box solely for Firefox. If that exists, that is no different than paying for Firefox. We will see how many people would actually "pay" for Firefox.
The risk with paid Forefox will be privacy loss, because the app will need to verify somehow the paid status. So there will be some unique, personal licence on the device and Mozilla can identify users using payment info.
The licence will be likely checked via remote API on app start.
Anyway the boat has sailed here as every browser connects to dozens of places automatically and if you go to any bigger site you are basically cyber attacked so advertising companies can fingerprint and track you.
Not trying to single you out here, I want to argue against how standard it has become to require a license server. A license server puts an expiry date on the software at an unknown point in the future. At some point the binary you downloaded after you paid for the software will stop working because the server got turned off, changed API, your internet connection is down, your local CA store got corrupted or any other kind of problem in the huge list of dependencies that goes into making a secure API call over the internet. Sure, you can put in safeguards against all kinds of issues, but that also comes at a development cost and you can never reach a point where the software will just continue to work, no matter what.
Even if you, as the company selling the software, can accept all of the above, a license server still is a liability. You sold someone a product and now you need to keep a public API running "forever" (as defined in your legalese). If something goes wrong on your end you are now denying the product you already sold to your customers who already paid for it. I know this is in the end all mitigated by some legalese, which is a whole different can of worms. You also need to make sure your license API is secure and can not leak user data or be twisted into exploiting your software during license checking. There is an ongoing cost to keep the infrastructure running.
As a sibling comment pointed out you can use local only license management like license keys or just nothing like WinRAR or FUTO Keyboard[1]. Yes, you will get users not paying for your software, there will be keygens out there. But even if you use a remote license check, there will be cracks on day 1, if your software is popular enough. I know this is an old and flawed argument, but if someone is willing to navigate a website full of malware infested, blinking ads to avoid paying for your software, they probably would not pay for it anyway.
As an example of what the end stage of hooking up every software to a remote API looks like, Stop Killing Games [2] has done a great job of highlighting just how bad it has gotten in the gaming market. I know there have been some heated discussions around the movement, but the core idea of being able to keep using the software you paid for, is something I absolutely support.
I realize it's far from a perfect solution to finance the creators of the only browser I consider usable today - but I subscribed to Mozilla's VPN service some two years ago, even though I virtually never use it, and mostly to help them make a bit of a buck through me. (And still, it is nice to have the option of geoblocking circumvention at the ready, although I'd wish for them to just support "ordinary" wireguard/wq-quick as a client option).
I could be wrong, but Firefox VPN is a relabeled Mullvard VPN, which probably has enough engineers to keep things going well. Plus, it's a VPN service, I imagine a small number of developers is all it takes to keep it up to date.
I still like Firefox however I think it has lost already. It was Mozilla's management failure. Chromium past it years ago and I don't think it can be changed.
They're not a real corporation in the "making profit by shipping widgets" sense. They've been funded by a huge annual grant from Google. So none of the management understands in their bones how money is made or how money is necessary for a company to survive. They have never built a successful, profitable product.
Instead of play-acting as a corporation, they might have decided to become a non-profit software foundation, which would have been a very honourable thing to do. But they have not, for example, built up a huge war-chest in case the Google spigot ever stops. Instead senior management has frittered the money away on their own salaries and absurd money-losing projects and acquisitions.
If you want to help fund Firefox, you can for now just pay for a product https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ and not use it (if you live in a country Mozilla accepts money from). Be vocal about it that you do this to support Firefox (e.g. reply in the discourse thread). I personally recommend leveraging MDN for this as it's right now the closest to Firefox, as in it's part of the Firefox organization within Mozilla. I would hope down the road we could just directly for Firefox, but we need to put money where our mouth is.
I was going to respond with my usual point that money paid to the Mozilla Foundation cannot legally be used to support Firefox, but it turns out you're right: MDN and several other products are actually part of the Mozilla Corporation. The exception seems to be Thunderbird, which is MZLA Technologies Corporation.
The VPN product is very good, it's basically a thin wrapper around Mullvad, arguably the best VPN on the planet right now. At least from a privacy standpoint.
Just let me donate directly to firefox. It's seriously about time this happened. Split off from all the Mozilla bs, it has its own independent management, and runs on donations, same as Thunderbird.
I even theorise they could cut the Google funding. There are so many people who would donate to firefox, but don't, because 1) they dont need the money, and 2) the money wouldn't go to firefox anyway. I even remember talking to a long time Mozilla employee at fosdem, and him telling me donating was pointless for those reasons.
They're not a good steward of this project and imo they should let it fly free. The problem is Mozilla would die without it because nobody cares about anything else they do, so their donations would plummet.
Firefox is supposed to be committed to serving the user before itself yet I see that as a sham. They put ads on their new tab page and phones home when starting and exiting. It’s the least bad alternative but I’m not stoked about helping Mozilla which I feel betrayed by.
Opera, up until 2000, was trialware that nagged users to pay. At that time, they were one of the first browsers to support tabs. In 2000 they put ads for non-paying users, and from 2005 they removed ads and survived entirely on Google money. Then in 2013 they became yet another Chrome-based browser.
Obviously, that was quite some time ago at this point. Perhaps paid web browsers' time has come again?
Opera corporation had most of income from embedded devices. Presto engine (and something they had before) could run on low end CPU without MMU and floating point math, with a few megabytes of memory! Browser wss just a side gig for them.
> First of all, your donations to Mozilla don't go to funding the browser.
This is exactly my point. They should establish direct Firefox donations. I agree that it won't change anything overnight, but they need to start somewhere.
Running on donations is not a viable strategy for any long-term goal.
Mozilla needs to learn how to do the very hard thing and passively invest these donations. This is a viable long-term strategy. FF would have extra monetary momentum or inertia, and donation stall-out, however and whenever it occurs, would not be game-over for Mozilla.
Let us donate directly to Firefox development. That is the solution. You don't have to look anywhere else. Thunderbird is a good example of what can be done when the donations reach the project. I just hope they don't screw it up as well. I have zero belief in Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla leadership. And every decision they did to screw MDN and Rust among other things puts their competition in a better position.
Unfortunately, I am done pretending otherwise. I haven't seen anything that is indicative of otherwise. Especially after acquiring a behavioural ads company. I will believe when they make decisions that aligns with it. Not with marketing materials saying otherwise or cos of whatever Firefox fans are left is saying. I stuck through the Firefox abandoned phase until Quantum release even for work. It's not cool that Mozilla is doing this.
I already pay for my email and for my search engine. I would gladly pay for my browser if it came with an ad-free, privacy preserving model. Good software is worth paying for.
The tricky part is psychological: once you charge, you implicitly promise consumer-grade polish. If the address-bar jitters after an update, people will cancel faster than they would stop donating.
Since 85% of Mozilla's current revenue comes from Google paying to have their search engine set as the default on Mozilla, and given that this is at risk due to last year's antitrust ruling against Google, they will need to diversify regardless.
Mozilla dropped the ball and their financing structure killed my goodwill. I'd actually pay for a completely trackingless and privacy-focused Chrome since it's a better product, but I'm not going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a worse product.
> Am I suggesting Mozilla entirely pivot to this business model overnight? Of course not. [...] Run an experiment...
But Google can see it happening and pull support overnight.
Mozilla cornered itself into this situation, any official effort to make Firefox "more independent" has to happen really fast if they don't want to get almost entirely de-funded instantly.
Their revenue in 2023 was $653 million. They would need 5.4 million subscribers willing to pay $10/mo, which is about 4% of their total userbase. Clearly that's a steep hill to climb, and couldn't be done all at once. The transition would be tricky.
Very tricky. First, it needs management change willing to go Jerry McGuire on the c-suite and Foundation, plus deal with all internal culture debt and oxidized dynamics.
Secondly, Mozilla would have to deal with Google - could be done, Google pays so a major browser exists, paid subscribers may help recover lost browser share for FF... And, that Google deal may be going away soon anyway. Probably negotiable.
Third, the free-tier and paid tiers need to be set in a way that everyone (OSS advocates included) are happy and there's tangent value for people on the fence for a paid subscription. Having people just pay because they want to pay for their browser is not a business plan, and Mozilla needs a real business plan moving forward.
I’m going to bump this figure once again here: Mozilla has made $37.5M from investment income in 2023. [1] That might not be enough to sustain browser development alone, but it is surely a lot of money and charging for Firefox would likely be a drop in the bucket (considering many people would just stop using it instead).
Cut the bullshit initiatives, fire the C-suite and put that money to work.
The CEO is accountable to the board of directors and the board of directors is accountable to shareholders. As a nonprofit perhaps Mozilla's board is accountable to nobody - not sure.
After 30 years of Firefox, because of their wasting money and not improving Firefox, switched to Zen, very happy Zen user - hope they will switch to Ladybird engine if that ever becomes a thing.
I already posted a hot take [0], but this one is even hotter: there's no strategy that Mozilla could have employed to make any of their products popular.
I will substantiate that assertion with a simple argument in the form of a question: what were the most popular internet browsers in each period of history, for each platform, and why?
IE was popular because it came with Windows. Safari is popular because it is both Mac and iOS default browser. Chrome became popular because Google convinced you that IE was slow because it was IE, not because your PC was slow already.
Perhaps we should stop calling open-source software "free" due to the stigma that comes with it. It's no longer a selling point, nor should it have been.
There are about 5.5 billion people on the internet. Firefox's "small" market share of ~5% is still about 250 million users.
I'm reasonably sure that a small fraction of those 250 million people are even aware of the concept of "Free Software" or "Open Source", or how it relates to Firefox.
Open does not imply any freedoms. A software source could be openly put in the public but without license, hence you would not be free to use it nor to learn from it.
You might want to be more specific on the definition of "not sold your soul" when praising a messaging app that holds the encryption keys of their homemade encryption scheme on their closed-source servers.
I'm going with a hot take: these kinds of products should be supported by tax dollars, not with individual donators/payers. The market doesn't solve the problem of public goods, it just makes it worse.
This is not "hot" take, this is correct take in itself. The problem is the execution: how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency? How do you ensure that the funds are not stolen? How do you make sure that the product is actually used and you don't fund a thing that no one uses? And so on.
Those are the problems that every govt funded project faces, but they are particularly tough in software. We have many examples where it went very wrong so not many governments acting in good faith are eager to step into it. And you can't allow the government to intervene in development or management here, because this how you'll end up with government-mandated preinstalled browser on smart phones or with added backdoors.
One solution could be participatory budgeting where the end users will directly decide where to invest part of their govt-collected taxes. E.g., on your declaration you'd have a field where you'd like to invest X% of your paid taxes into project Y. This comes with its own set of challenges and admin overhead, but I don't see any other good solution for cases like this, because they are impossible to run under direct government control.
> how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency?
You don't. The state doesn't know what a project needs at a given time, and will try to apply cookie cutter solutions when they don't need it. What you actually do is two parts:
- Give a budget for each institution to spend on open source projects (defined by some industry criteria, or something)
- Force institutions to consider open source projects for free (as in no cost) digital goods, and a report as to why open source solutions when paying for a digital good or service. The later should be evaluated by a central organization that promotes the rational use of digital products, like the U.S. Digital Service, EU Digital Services Directorate, Digital Transformation Agency, European Data Innovation Board, Secretaria de Governo Digital, etc.
These two policies in conjunction would supply projects with the cash needed and foment projects to do useful things.
FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices.
Paid software ensures quality assurance.
I believe counter-examples exist for both models. Many FOSS projects have avoided becoming tools for user exploitation, while numerous paid software products have deteriorated due to corporate greed.
The poster worked at Mozilla Corporation, so I think they’re saying that unless you pay for Firefox, it’s getting funded in other ways that aren’t in its users’ best interest, like MoCo selling user data, which they’ve admitted to.
But, when MoCo sold out its users, they lost the ability to ask me to pay, because what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
I’ll gladly donate and have donated to an organizations whose products I use where those organizations would rather fail and be dismantled than sell their users’ data. I’ll even pay companies that don’t lie about it. But, Mozilla said they’d never sell out, and then they did.
> what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
nothing.
It's why i think browser (and other platform software, such as OS, or telephony/mobile platforms) should be FOSS funded by taxes, and "regulated" so that its always open access etc.
Relying on donation (ala, altruism of individuals) do not work at scale.
I don't think 'FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices' is implied by the article. What the article implies IMHO is that relying too much on ads leads to enshittification and bad practices.
The problem is that a lot of the most influential FOSS only exists because of VC capital (or other dysfunctional markets), either because they sponsor projects directly, or they pay the salaries of the people who happen to do it themselves. FOSS has become a form of economic dumping that could be causing more harm than good. If Google couldn’t “dump” Chrome for free, or Facebook couldn’t “dump” React for free, maybe browsers or front-end frameworks would be regular, functional, competitive markets. Making it “FOSS” is just an inoculation against what would otherwise be considered an anti-competitive practice.
I use Firefox but donate to Ladybird and Servo. Mozilla Corp is too far gone but hopefully the next generation of browsers will have less corporate baggage.
I'm so exhausted by these threads. Hacker News is, if it's anything, a site built by tech entrepreneurs for tech entrepreneurs. If you really think you can do better, fork Firefox, hire some engineers, and have at it. Brendan Eich did exactly that! Go work there! Or skip some steps and look at the other browser startups to see if they already had all the ideas you do.
Do you have every right to whinge here, roughly ever few months? Absolutely! Do I have a right to call you a bunch of wingers? Also absolutely!
There are so many privacy improving Firefox forks out there. These people should unite and start a non profit to handle further development that's in line with the least common denominators of what they all try to achieve and abandon Mozilla for good. Giving more money to this compromised entity won't help anyone. Mozilla should just die.
I, too, have been saying this on occasion. In my observation, Mozilla has been in an increasingly suboptimal position with Firefox, for a while now, as Google and Microsoft have largely settled on splitting the market in between themselves where the core of Chrome is developed by the former and Microsoft spends their effort on what they are [better] at -- integration with Windows in the form of UX-level features and whatever else that they do with it to build Edge. Firefox is increasingly seen as a "fair" nuisance that is slower, and by comparison can afford less effort development-wise. Look at some of the practically critical issues in their Bugzilla database -- there are features there that have been waiting almost a decade for implementation, and the discussions point to a combination of code complexity that requires acute insight into the browser that is your typical bell curve distributed over developers familiar with it -- the number of developers who are able to actually deliver on those features, can probably be counted on two hands. And that is in part because most of these people are getting paid to do other things. In the very least Mozilla directs their effort in a manner that speaks for itself -- why are some of these features, like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360870 that would be considered critical in today's Web development environment, not implemented after nearly a decade? -- If Mozilla _is_ paying the developers?
This is why I too think we ought to migrate to Patreon-like direct sponsoring of individual (or vetted group) effort to generate some development steam for Firefox. It might make Mozilla deny these developers write-access to Firefox repositories for all I know, but a fork cannot be prevented.
I've been using Firefox since its "Phoenix" days (good memories!), but it's lagging behind the competition more and more, and while I'd be first to admit we don't need half the features Google is busy putting into Chrome which then "magically" appear in Edge (what a devious alliance, that), some of them are sound design but are absent in Firefox, to the detriment of developers. In short: Firefox is losing more ground faster than ever before, at some point the boundary conditions will cause it to no longer be a viable alternative for the average user, I am afraid. Which will cause a "cascading failure" where no developer will test for it, and you know what happens then (because we've been there before).
I would rather pay for Kagi/Orion if they ever went cross platform. I like the idea of paying for my search and browser package with LLMs bundled in. I don't want to get locked into the Apple ecosystem even more than I am so I going to need Linux/Android support at least in Beta
Remove blockingWebRequest from Firefox, much like Chrome has done. Then charge $20/year for a version that allows you to use it across all of your devices.
I'd definitely pay that as its adding a lot of value.
This thread is a perfect example of why the ad-driven model will win every time. Most people don’t actually want to pay for things (that’s just what gets parroted in anti-AdTech posts here).
It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).
I don’t feel optimistic for the future of Firefox given it seems they’re likely to lose their primary source of funding in the coming months.
What alternatives are there? The temporary benevolence of a mega-Corp with a vested interest in online advertising? Crypto mining in the browser? Replacing affiliate links?
I haven’t seen a solution that seems practical here but it seems clear to me that if privacy-motivated, anti-BigTech HN commenters won’t pay for it, no one will.
>It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).
I think this is in larger part because people don't like the decisions they have been making. I think an executive team that had stayed focused on firefox or successfully brought in revenue to support it would have much less backlash on this point. People boycott other companies for similar reasons.
I have no intention to pay just for Firefox, the browser. A browser is not that special anymore and there are plenty of alternatives.
However, I do want to pay for additional features and services, like a solid ad-blocker, integrated VPN-networking, privacy features like email relays or anti-fingerprinting, a safe and reliable cryptocurrency wallet, a smart cross-platform password manager, a privacy focused gmail alternative, integrated detection of fake reviews, bot messages and sloppy AI content, AI summaries, …
Add value to Firefox, in a coherent, meaningful and effective way to make using the internet secure, enjoyable and interesting again. Do that and take my money.
Nothing, just like nobody stops people from releasing modified builds now in fact people do (waterfox, ...). Trademark law provides a moat, as do fees to get into proprietary app stores.
Nothing, but it doesn’t work for closed source software either.
Pirating a FOSS app would probably have less of a psychological barrier, but I think it would be more frowned upon instead. (I won’t judge you if you pirate Photoshop, but pirating Inkscape? Shame on you!) We’ll have to see how it plays out though.
> Today, I happily pay for software (including free and open-source software!) that puts users first, including Proton, Standard Notes, Kagi, and others.
Uhh two of those are primarily services with dedicated clients not just software.
I totally agree with the article otherwise. I don't want to donate to the foundation to support Firefox. They'll just use it for side projects and it does nothing to reduce their dependency on Google. Just let me pay for a version of firefox that has a nice contributor badge, and doesn't have Google as a search engine installed. It doesn't have to be something that's worth the money.
Also they could make the sync service paid. And reduce the free version. I'd gladly pay for it. They've said they'll never make us pay for it but I don't understand why not. It's a service that costs money on an ongoing basis.
IMO they should also go back to a more community driven approach. Not treat themselves as a mega corp with an overpaid CEO. But more like a startup. Because really, size-wise they're only startup sized. The only reason they pretend to be a big tech is because they have so much Google money to throw strong. A project like KDE (Which I sponsor monthly) provides a lot more software without all this overhead, and works much better along with the community. This is how I would love to see Mozilla.
Obligatory: Thunderbird improved its situation, including financially, and code quality, after Mozilla discarded it. Perhaps Mozilla is just bad, and we need a new foundation.
And then they promised to be the browser which would "protect your privacy"! Then they went on to do opt-out telemetry and claim ownership of user data so that was all a joke as well. The org deserves so much worse than it's grappling with.
Lobbying the government to restrict his employees’ freedom to marry who they want was indeed a political “ideal”, but its actual content is of course important to the context.
You make it sound more noble than him trying to make his personal “ick” into binding law.
Who's going to tell him about Mozilla's situation?
> Charging for open-source software may sound hypocritical, but even the Free Software Foundation believes software fees and software freedom are completely compatible.
Paid support always has been allowed in free software. The issue here is two-fold:
1. When most people hear 'free software' they immediately think it is 'free' as in gratis (for nothing) and expect free support.
2. Especially for funding browsers it has always been an issue around who is going to pay for the long-term support without ads, tracking or VCs.
I would pay for the development of a decent free browser. I'm sure a lot of people would.
The problem is that Mozilla is so badly mismanaged that we don't feel paying for the current state of Mozilla. Mitchell Baker's tenure as CEO was disasterous, and the new CEO Laura Chambers had a bad start.
We already paid for Firefox through decades of donations in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars MoCo has received over the years from Google that was definitely not a bribe in exchange for sandbagging Firefox by firing most of the Firefox devs. That's what the community got in return for our decades of support because again, we've already paid for Firefox.
At this point we should just fork Firefox or focus on IceCat instead.
>"Some might worry that people would flock to alternatives if Firefox became a user-funded product. I disagree. In fact, I think the exact opposite is true. Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model"
Sorry but that's just... delusional. Yes the moment Firefox would charge money and become a paid product 90% of people would switch over to Brave et al. The average internet user or even Firefox user does not now what Mozilla's business model even is because they're not terminally online.
A browser like Firefox if it wants to compete with Chrome and wants to have an impact on the internet needs to be free because the average internet user is willing to spend exactly zero dollars on software. If anyone could make more money charging for their software than not they'd already be doing it, unless you think they hate money.
Same goes for all the tirades about Mozilla's management. Again the average person has no clue about it, they don't read news about software company management. Firefox has been losing ground because Google owns half of all major sites on the internet and Android and ships as a default on tons of devices, it's that simple.
you can pay for services they've tacked on the browser, just like you can with Firefox if you want to, but neither of them are, as the author demands, going to charge for the browser because they know perfectly well they might as well burn the office down
Someone should fork Firefox, strip all copyrighted stuff, and severe all ties to Mozilla. Worked great for Rust, Servo, Thunderbird and several other projects dumped by Mozilla.
But honestly Firefox has way too much technical debt. Starting new browser (Ladybird, webkit) seems like much better way to go! There are several independent browsers!
Thunderbird is de jure still a Mozilla project (through a subsidiary, MZLA).
And no, severing all ties wouldn’t work – not unless you find a viable financial model. Selling access for builds (Ardour-style) might work, but I’m not too sure.
My understanding is Thunderbird is self funded from donations.
> not unless you find a viable financial model
First reduce expenses by several magnitudes. There is no reason browser should need more than a github project, build QA servers, and 10 paid core developers. But you would need much better codebase for that!!!
As for income, donations come to mind. You can still sell default search, just not to google.
20 years ago browser companies had income from selling their rendering engine for embedded use. They also did consulting...
I used to want to donate to Mozilla Foundation, but I've long lost any hope that the corporation would spend that money in a way that makes sense to me. The pessimist on me would expect donated money to be spent on more built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. Or maybe a bonus for their executives.
I just want Firefox to be faster. I'm donating to Floorp (a Firefox fork), at least they seem focused on making the browser better.
I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier. It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
Like, in general, I find that any HN thread where most of the comments are just agreeing, one-upping and yes-anding while invoking the same talking points and terminology (CEO ghouls, etc.) is probably a topic we might need to chill out on.
Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs.
Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.
Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still).
The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.
The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.
Yet many over here are getting paid double that.
Salaries are rarely based on value created. They are based on what others pay.
If salaries were based on value added, a lot of software dev salaries would be orders of magnitude higher.
Hmm if this is true why is it so rare that software devs quit their jobs and make more money freelancing or starting their own companies?
We all cannot afford job instability, with mortgages to pay.
Also a lot of value add comes from corporations which produce things of complexity greater than the sum of their constituent parts.
If you already have a platform in use by the entire world, that matter of scale makes it much easier to find value adds more than a sole proprietor could ever dream of.
It's for these reasons I'm wary of talking about "value add" only being from the developers directly implementing a feature. Without support, IT, security, Product, HR, etc, I could not deliver that value add.
I 100% agree! It's almost like income stability is valuable!
Maybe 5% of them?
Easily I'd say close to half would make quite a bit lower than 300K.
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.
I, and many good or great SWE's, wouldn't even begin to entertain such a low offer. Your numbers are a little off.
All engineers in Europe (except maybe Switzerland) would kill for 150k a year. ESPECIALLY remote.
[delayed]
Thousands of software engineers have been laid off in the past few years and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. I expect that there will, at some point, be quite a large number that would entertain a hundred and fifty thousand dollars versus no job.
It can be tricky to narrow down definitions but there are at least a million and probably less than 5 million software developers in the US. The last few years have seen ~100k students graduate with CS degrees each year. Thousands of layoffs over the timespan of years isn't going to impact it all that much. If you played your cards right you could get a $100k+ starting salary at a BigCo (not necessarily a FAANG) 10 years ago, I only expect that to have expanded, and anyone with a handful of years of experience is going to be above that and should consider shopping around for >$150k if they aren't there already.
I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much.
I was offered a job at a big tech but I'd have had to move to the US to their campus because they hate remote work. And they offered only 120k (they probably figured that sounded like a ton of money to a European). But I started looking at the cost of living there and it was insane. I'd have had to share a flat and it would have to be far away, not a few km from the office like I'm used to. No way.
Of course then Trump started happening and I was so glad I didn't move there. I'm kinda LGBTQ too so I'd be royally screwed if I'd been there now
That's the other way around - life in SV is expensive because of all those high salary workers.
It doesn't matter what the cost of living is in SV. Their employee in a low cost if living area is as productive.
> I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much.
Depends on the specific job, company (big tech vs not), and city. Seattle, NYC and a handful of others may pay on par with bay area.
For a senior at random faang or equivalent, that might mean $300k-$500k / yr. More for some NYC positions in the finance industry.
> Mozilla CEO
Laura Chambers is just an interim CEO. I am not sure how Mozill Foundation/Corporation is exactly linked in the decision making. But the key people are still Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker who is the Chairwomen of Mozilla Corporation.
If Laura is getting paid lots like Mitchell Baker, it is still an issue. But, wouldn't she be just a scapegoat? I am pretty sure as Chairwomen, Mitchell Baker still has more power than Laura the CEO when it comes to Mozilla Corporation. I have felt this is just to chill the uproar against Mitchell Baker. Now everyone will blame the next CEO. But I wonder how much power she has. I could be wrong of course.
Baker left the board in early 2025 https://www.theverge.com/business/615977/m
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
By objective measure I’d agree with you but you can’t deny the reality of the job market.
If someone is a truly effective CEO they’d be able to get many, many times more than 2-3x staff engineer salary at pretty much any other company out there.
I think there is a small set of people who would do a good job running Mozilla. Of these people, a very large chunk would do this for $500k annually (this is still enough money for almost anyone to lead a very comfortable life). Being money-driven might make you _worse_ as Mozilla CEO.
Great point. A company that needs to be steered by morality needs leadership that is willing to take the helm because their values align.
If they're in it for the money, instead of the mission, then I say good riddance. That's how we get where we are now.
2-3x staff engineer pay is a LOT of money. More than enough.
I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay because they believe in the mission is a recipe for disaster. Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.
2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
There's people in the FOSS realm running VERY competent operations for simple living wage, or less.
Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade.
Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others.
Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone.
They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.
As opposed to now, where you've got someone who is willing and able to tank the entire project, but it looks good on paper? Is that the kind of person you want to be competing for?
I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.
> Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.
There's no reason to believe that. But it's still better than someone whose heart isn't in the right place and can't execute.
It's not clear CEO pay is driven my market forces at all. Pay seems almost completely divorced from competency.
But they're not. Firefox market share has tumbled and I'm getting more and more captchas because my browser is now so rare it's considered "suspicious". It's not a flaw in the product itself but it does affect its usability. Marketshare of at least 5-10% is crucial to be on the radar of web devs. Especially because the competition besides Safari is basically all one single browser because they share the engine.
Idk I switched to Firefox earlier this year and it's honestly been really painless. Not sure why a CAPTCHA would trigger based on browser ID when those are so easily spoofed. Why would someone be running a bot on a less popular browser? I have not noticed any change.
The one thing I do notice is that on some very poorly built websites there will be a bug and it's because they haven't checked in Firefox or because I am blocking things that are no longer blockable on Chrome, but this is rare.
There’s a difference in arguing that Mozilla should pay market rate for a CEO and arguing that the current CEO is worth market rate. I’m arguing the former, not the latter.
This.
Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.
I think if you are paying 30x engineer salary you are always going to find CEO’s that optimize for money.
Pretty much.
But if you do need to have a CEO, and offering 2-3X gets you zero qualified applicants...then you are forced into strategies which have undesirable side-effects.
What does it mean to be qualified?
The issue I have is a lot of CEOs appear to be wholly unqualified for their positions and their salaries are completely unjustifiable. So many of them don't even have a glancing understanding of the product or company that they are in charge of. Their primary role is getting a higher stock valuation so the board can be happy.
A good example of this is how many tech CEOs have dumped ungodly amounts of money on "AI" because that's what the market demands. Or how many CEOs hire and fire based on what other companies are doing, not what their company needs.
The fact is, "qualified" is often at odds with "competent". Most of the 30x CEOs are only qualified in chasing stock prices, not competently running a company for the long term.
That’s a problem with your selection process, not the lack of qualified applicants. It’s funny that the qualification that people require often seems to be ‘has done this thing to no great success elsewhere’.
This should be the top comment.
So like every other piece of software!
> The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs
I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job.
Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.
CEO pay has grown wildly in recent decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_the_...
Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I'd argue the latter.
Further, CEOs and wannabes have a strong incentive to structure organizations such that they depend ever more on the CEO, justifying massive compensation and of course feeding their egos. But I would argue that beyond a certain size, having to route everything important through one guy is an organizational antipattern. So yes, I'm very willing to argue most CEOs shouldn't exist. Or at least most CEO positions.
> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places.
If the “bad” CEOs don’t take pay cuts or subsequently struggle to find work, then that thinking is obviously not as “incredibly” incorrect as you claim.
Real talk: what are the issues with Mozilla's? I hate plenty of CEOs so I'm familiar but I've never heard... really anything, good or bad, about Mozilla's.
This is desktop market share, their "stronghold":
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1j07hrt/heres_how_...
That alone is enough to disqualify all of them. Now look at mobile - the biggest market ever. Firefox does not exist on mobile. That is a reason to remove the leadership and the board with it.
which is quite ironic as Firefox Mobile is better than Chrome as Android Chrome does not implement many features, the most important one being extensions.
So I see the logic, but at the same time, I'm wondering why it's important for Firefox to gain a lot of users on... any platform, really? Like it's broadly good for more people to use Firefox, but also, is that Mozilla's actual mission? Because I would personally say that Mozilla is not out to make "the most popular browser," they're out to make "the best browser." Ideally the best would be the most popular but there's a lot in the way of that that doesn't necessarily mean anything negative about Mozilla or Firefox.
You can have the best browser in the world, and it's not gonna help you if nobody tests for it because its market share is approximately 0%. We're already seeing people getting stuck in endless captchas because they're using a weird browser that behaves differently to 95% of other users, and shitty websites inadvertently relying on bugs in Chromium which results in stuff not working, or running slow as molasses, in FF.
I've been running into both pretty much daily. As a long time Firefox users (since 2.0 almost exclusively), it didn't used to be like that, it's a recent phenomenon.
Much can also be said about them removing features and not implementing things people keep asking for for decades; for example, the vertical tab feature request was there for more then 20 years, I think?
It's not a criticism of developers, they're doing what they can, it's obvious set by managers.
Without market share you are irrelevant to influence web standards. Part of the Firefox mission is to defend a open internet, not to lag behind Google implementing whatever APIs their services need to the detriment of every other player.
Those things go hand in hand though. If they truly were the best people would line up to use it.
I still use it because it's the least bad option. They have a long history of ignoring the community in favour of the mainstream, ironically a user group they have lost a long time ago. So now they're just alienating their remaining supporters in order to cater to users that don't even remember they exist.
Raking in 100s of millions and not improving Firefox is one thing. Another is spending those millions on acquiring companies that produce no revenue, aka setting money on fire.
Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns.
It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.
It's not 100s of millions. The previous CEO made between 2.4 to 7 million (she was really good at giving herself raises) and wasn't there long enough for that to add up to even one hundred million. Still she was very overpaid with the marketshare ever declining and the new one gets even more.
Nobody else got that kind of raise at Mozilla and they probably were much better at their jobs.
But hundreds of millions it was not.
I think the GP comment is talking about Mozilla Corp under her leadership, not her personally. She also didn’t buy other companies for herself.
> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation.
Yes. This is absolutely true. Most CEO’s are not worth this kind of money. In fact, most CEO’s could disappear overnight and cause zero disruption to the operation of the company.
I think the complexity of the job is _far_ overrated, and the main reason people think they’d suck at it is because they have no/less confidence.
People that become CEO’s are purely better at faking that confidence. If you are lucky, the confidence is built on skill instead of bluster, but they both get paid the same regardless.
CEO should exist, and it's normal that their compensation is the highest of the company.
However it shouldn't be a 268 to 1 ratio with the median worker like the SP500 average. There is no way the CEO is worth that much money to the company.
At a very large company, I think some individual decisions the CEO makes will have much more impact on the company than the work output of 268 employees. I think some CEOs really are probably worth that kind of money. People like Steve Jobs.
However, most ceos aren’t genius superstars. And I don’t think CEO pay really makes sense given supply and demand. I think there’s plenty of people who could do at least as good a job as many CEOs do, and would happily do so for a lot less money.
I suspect a lot of CEO pay is an arse-covering exercise by the board. If the board hires a super expensive CEO, and that person turns out to be terrible, the board can say they did everything they could do to get the best ceo. But if the board hires someone for much less money who turns out to be a turkey, they might be blamed for cheaping out on the ceo - and thus the company’s downfall is their fault.
Is the Mozilla CEO really so amazing at their job that they deserve such insane compensation? I doubt it. I bet there’s dozens of people at Mozilla today who are probably smart enough to do a great job as CEO. They just won’t be considered for the role for stupid reasons.
I disagree (not a CEO). What’s the median worker at a company like Walmart or Amazon paid? To think that a CEO of those couldn’t improve (or degrade) the company’s performance by many thousand times more than a Walmart or Amazon worker seems strange to me. They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.
Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for results. That range of results is very wide for large companies.
> They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.
Guess who turned Sears and J.C. Penny into what they are today?
A mix of bad CEOs at those companies and good CEOs at Target, Walmart, and Amazon. I don't believe the median worker held any blame at those companies.
From that, I’d conclude that CEO capability and effectiveness really matters and paying up for a good one is worth it.
That is a false binary. It's also plausible that those individuals had as much effect on important outcomes as the guy at the front of a marching band does on the music, with other factors making the difference.
Also possible is that the CEOs grossly overcentralized the companies such that they increased the apparent importance of CEO decisions and then just took some big gambles. Heads they get paid a lot of money; tails their bets pay off and they get hailed as geniuses who get paid even more money.
Jeff Bezos competed Sears to death.
Jeff Bezos? The Internet?
In theory, every one of the CEO's reports (other than their administrative staff) is capable of stepping into the CEO's job. If they aren't capable (albeit some with coaching and support) that calls into question the company's overall hiring and promotion practices.
In that case, for every CEO there's literally a dozen other people at that company alone who could do their job. Why do we keep repeating that good CEOs are in short supply?
Moreover study after study has shown little correlation between CEO pay and quality of decision-making. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer#Yahoo!_(2012%E2%...
And finally, rich people eventually look for other ways to feel valued. Status is a big one. Having the top job at the company is a big perk in and of itself. If they don't feel privileged to be the CEO, why the hell even take the job?
> I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO
If you just do nothing, you'll be better than the last 10 years of Mozilla's CEOs.
Everyone's acting like a competent CEO is some kind of rocket scientist unicorn.
In reality they don't do all that much. And most of the decisions are driven by data and advice from Gartner that just recommend the highest bidder, not some magical insights.
After all the CEO works for the board which is made up of shareholder representatives. They have very little industry knowledge and they just want the company to jump on the latest hype and "industry practices". They're usually very risk-averse.
So the CEO is kinda tied by what's happening in the industry anyway. The only CEOs that are capable of breaking that are the ultra confident ones like Jobs or Musk.
How did your CEO become CEO? Mine got there because he was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with the company that ultimately bought out my old CEO.
How does that make them "worth it"?
> but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company
Look, I've interacted with CEOs and frankly the job isn't nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. The most important aspect of the job is socializing, not managing the company like you might assume. It's putting on a good show and making potential clients like you. It's every bit just being a good salesperson.
There's a reason, for example, my CEO currently lives in California even though his company is halfway across the country and has no offices in CA.
Now, that isn't to say the Job of a founder CEO isn't a lot more difficult, it is. However, once a company is established the CEO job is a cakewalk. There's a reason companies like FedEx had a CEO literally in his 80s that gave up the reigns right before he died.
If you have the ability to schmooze, sit through meetings, and read power-points. Congratulations, you have what it takes to be a CEO.
This is a remarkably short sided and inexperienced sounding take on what that position does.
Well just look at that one CEO instead of doing the same mistake you accuse others of.
I have seen CEOs that where earning 250k in the EU with thousands of employees. The issue is an entitlement issue, where today's world makes people think that they deserve millions of dollars for leading a company, same issue as developers expectings hundreds of thousands for their work. Its a corruption of the system which is both a effect and a cause of the current death of capitalism in the US.
It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more sense.
Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation.
So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox.
For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox.
There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.
I don't hate Firefox. It is my daily driver. I hate that Firefox went from the dominant browser by market share, to the minor, insignificant player it is today.
I hate that Firefox is so irrelevant that most web devs don't test on it. For many sites that's fine, because web standards are web standards, and Firefox supports them quite well. But whenever I run across a broken site, or even one that mostly works, but gives me papercuts, and then fire up Chrome and see that it works fine there, a little bit of me cries inside.
Mozilla should be focusing a lot more on user acquisition, and on figuring out why so many of their users have left.
> As if the product itself dont matter.
That's sort of the point. Firefox is an excellent, even amazing browser. But because of the way Mozilla has handled it, it's become largely an also-ran, and its continued existence seems highly dependent on its primary competitor in the browser space. That's just incompetent given the quality of Firefox.
The hate on Mozilla. This entire thread is people saying that Firefox is great, but Mozilla is shit. Why do you think that hate on Mozilla is the same as hate on Firefox?
The thing is that in 2020 it was too late. Firefox have been lagging behind Chrome for so long, that the headstart they had when Chrome was launched didn't matter.
For example, Chrome had process in tabs when it was released in 2008. Firefox had a ticket in bugzilla open by the community that had been ignored by Mozilla for years, before Chrome was released. Even when it was released, Mozilla's first reaction was "meh, we don't need that".
There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners and having your costs inflate to match these donations, rather than something, anything to help the sustainability of Mozilla.
Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come.
Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation.
I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released.
I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not.
[0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!
Mozilla is making my cost inflate? That's weird. I started using Firefox a decade ago paying 0 and I'm still paying 0. I guess 10x0 is still 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
I feel like the only people who hate firefox are frontend devs
I’m more of a full-stack but I develop “Firefox first” on my projects if I can and leave it to my tester to see that it works on Chrome. X-browser issues turn up rarely, I wind up having more trouble with Safari than anything.
I know Mozilla does worse on benchmarks, but I never complain about performance. Recently I tried some sites from one of the spammiest sectors on the web and found I couldn’t move the mouse without my Chrome lighting up like a Christmas tree and navigating me to crap sites, but the Firefox experience was that I had to click on something for all hell break loose.
We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah. It performs great on Chrome and lags pretty bad on the fox. That’s the only bad screen, and we have a lot of screens.
Personally I don’t like it that they have an office in San Francisco. Emotionally I think, “the only thing anybody should be building in San Francisco is a homeless shelter.” Practically though, I think a browser company can’t “think different” if is steeped in the Bay Area culture, not least if they can get in a car and go visit people at Google and Facebook. If they were someplace else they might have a little more empathy for users.
Like you I have found Firefox to work pretty well in real world applications. The one place I found it did fall over was Microsoft Office Online. FF runs like molasses in a large online Excel spreadsheet vs Chrome.
Microsoft is absolutely terrible at Firefox support. I feel like they do it in purpose. In fact when I set my user agent to Edge half the issues in O365 disappear! Suddenly things actually work.
The latest crap is that it now requires me to sign in every single day on Firefox. And often after I sign in it immediately goes to "hang on while we're signing you out". Meanwhile they're pushing edge heavily as a vehicle of copilot promotion. So I'm pretty sure this is just intentional breakage..
This works because you're deliberately targeting a set of features Firefox supports, and the overwhelming majority of the time they're a subset of what Chrome (and increasingly, Safari) support
Read over the various web platform blogs out there, and keep a tally of how many times you'll see "Firefox gains support for XYZ in 139, bringing it to widespread availability. Chrome has supported this since 32 and Safari since version 16"
And many of these are fantastically useful features. Sure, they're not ground breaking building blocks like in the old days when IE didn't even support certain types of box model, but they're echos of the past
Worse than that, where I work I can only install an LTS Firefox so I am stuck with relatively old features, but, hey, I’m in React land using components with some time lag in their development that don’t use these new features. I was kinda shocked to see that mainstream toolkits aren’t using <dialog/> given that it is a huge leap forward for accessibility… screen readers do not see anything they’re not supposed to see, end of story. Trouble is that it does cause trouble for frameworks that depend heavily on portalization.
Just my two pennies. Firefox is the best vendor for adhering to spec. In contrast, Webkit drags its feet while Chromium releases and deprecates experimental API willy nilly.
There has been one debugging niche where I've found Chromium preferable: Chrome sometimes gives better WebRTC signaling error messages than Firefox.
lol market share doesn’t lie
I think you're going to have trouble defending this position.
Chrome hasn't been the best browser for most of its market share lead.
Internet Explorer 6 was never the best browser despite leading market share more than any browser in history.
lol of course it does? Every day at every scale of every category of every product or service.
> hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier
I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities.
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”
Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.
Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I realise that HN has different people posting different arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the years.
All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser?
In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.
These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.
The reason Mozilla is criticized on every front is because they've failed on every front. Their market share has cratered, none of their other projects have taken off, they haven't even succeeded at providing plausible cover fire for Google's illegal monopoly.
They're losers, plain and simple, in the unembellished sense that they have lost every battle they've fought; and people don't like losers. I'm sorry if that offends you.
Why don't the rest of us start a browser? Again, has that "Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing" point escaped you? Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor that would lead me to have some empathy for Mozilla, actually; but it would still be empathy for a loser.
>Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing
>Google's illegal monopoly
>Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor
As someone who switched from Firefox to Chrome a while ago, these remarks made me curious enough to research the case.
The judge ruled based on "billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets".
The crime of the century laid bare before our eyes. A search engine company caught red-handed paying companies to set its search engine as the default search engine as everyone everywhere knew and saw for decades. Utterly reprehensible.
Okay. If you think they should be above the law, that's who you are. Those are your values. Thanks for letting us know.
I'm of the humble view that it's at least as important to enforce the law when it comes to the most powerful corporations in the world, as it is to enforce it on the average person.
But maybe you see things differently.
Sure, the law should be enforced against them. The law's the law. I wasn't trying to imply they should not face the full penalties the law requires, here. Obviously they should. No one is above the law.
The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud or murder rather than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts with technology product providers and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations.
Aren't you implying that actual fraud, as well as things like copyright infringement, would be anything more than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations?
IMO buying defaults isn't as bad as Google's rigging the ad market. At least others have outbid them for search defaults in the past and in other markets.
That one is definitely a lot worse and a danger of a monopoly/extremely powerful market player. I would argue that a monopoly is not inherently "bad"* but has much more ability to do bad things if it chooses to, with not much potential recourse from others.
https://economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/ad-v...
*Strictly in an ethics and fairness sense. It might (or might not) be worse for consumers. Just worse in a kind of boring rather than nefarious or deeply harmful way.
Not every front, they gave us MDN and Rust, both of which will probably outlive them. KaiOS (the continuation of Firefox OS) is very popular in less developed areas of the world. Not that they managed to make anything off that.
MDN was a consolidation of several vendors’ web documentation efforts (I still remember Opera’s Web Fundamentals course fondly), which they collectively decided to put under Mozilla’s stewardship because surely Mozilla, among all of them, would maintain it neutrally and for the public benefit. It was a good run and Mozilla did do a good job at the maintenance for the last decade, but with their recent monetization efforts around MDN, I’m not hopeful for the future. (This is also why I’m incensed by Google’s web.dev—it’s not just the domain name, it’s that they are reneging on that old agreement.)
Their handling of MDN has been disappointing. Laying off their staff, asking for unpaid contributors, and selling more advertising space was greedy business.
They're currently running a REDIS advertisement that looks like a critical error. The ad is a bright red toast!
_Speaking personally_, MDN is Mozilla's most valuable resource. It is the only resource I want to survive Moz's leadership.
The Mozilla corporation made sure to wash its hands of all those successes.
kaios is basically dead
This is great: https://aframe.io/
A-Frame is awesome; I use it to share all the photospheres I take with friends and family. I'm not aware of another easy, cross platform way to do that.
That’s very... VRML of them. Not that VRML was bad as a concept, just surprised to see it make a comeback.
Kinda inevitable after we got good VR headsets.
I was in grad school when VRML came out, I used it for things like visualizing 3-d slices of 5-d energy surfaces embedded in a 6-d phase space. I almost went to the VR CAVE to try it out but didn't quite, ironically I work in the social sciences cluster now and the former CAVE is our storage area and still has some big projectors on the floor which were expensive once.
A grad student who sat next to me, who I had endless arguments about "Linux vs Windows" told me that VRML was crap and the evidence was that it wasn't adequate to make 3-d games like Quake.
Today I'd compare A-Frame to Entity Component Systems (ECS) like Unity. A-Frame still has an object graph and it still has the awful primitives that VRML had that Horizon Worlds is stuck with, but you can make complex shapes with textures and import real models.
My one trouble with it as a developer is memory management, if you load too much geometry on an MQ3 it "just doesn't work." I got stuck on a project with it, I've got a good idea how to fix it but it was enough of a setback that I've been working on other things sense.
I did learn a lot more about the ECS paradigm this year when I was in a hackathon and joined up with a good Unity programmer and a designer to make a winning game (brought my mad Project|Product Management skills as well as my startup-honed talent of demonstrating broken software on stage and making it look perfect.) Now I play low-budget games and have a pretty clear idea how you'd implement them with an ECS framework so one day I'll put down the controller and make another crack at my VR project.
Thank you for proving my point.
If you think what I said was a vitriolic personal attack, I have no idea what I could say that you wouldn't construe as one, and honestly, don't care enough about Internet debates to try; best of luck.
It’s not about getting overly vitriolic. It’s simply that they said this:
“The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers”
And then, they changed it:
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduce...
Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said:
“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating”
https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/
And they changed it.
So- sure, sometimes people change their minds.
But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data.
Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”
I cant buy your firefox data.
I can buy a huge block of aggregate data that has some things of yours in it.
- Advertisers buy user data from Firefox, who can then resell or provide this data to others.
- Others buy that data.
- Big data companies and others aggregate this information.
- Cookie or IP are not necessarily required to identify users; thumbprinting, datetime, and behavioral matching can identify users adequately.
- Advertisers and analytics giants can ingest data that includes PII, if it’s encrypted, and that can be decrypted.
- New methods of tracking have replaced old ones and new methods are even better than old ones.
- This data can be used to group users in many ways, so it can know essentially who you are, when you do things, what you will do, and who you’ll do them with.
- This information is used for targeting ads, but can be used for other purposes.
- Technology to utilize this data has been evolving much more quickly.
- Why just target ads? Why not provide users with a version of reality that optimizes their consumer behavior?
- Why attempt to ensure control through enforcement? Why not control motivation and thought?
- Why have political elections? Why not control decisions?
Firefox isn't supposed to be a business to begin with. Mozilla is a nonprofit organization, isn't it?
If they can't survive off of donations, then they don't deserve to exist. If they want to sell user data or search defaults, Mozilla should fork Firefox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H8wx1aBiQ
When Zuck said this, I could feel the smarm, but I respect his honesty, and I know what he's not saying. Mozilla is trying to spit the same game about its Google search default deal, as if that is the same thing. It's not, because when Facebook does it, it's a for-profit corporation selling out its users. When Mozilla does it, it's a nonprofit organization selling out its users to the single largest for-profit web property in the history of the Internet.
Google is a monopolist. They should lose the right to pay off their competition.
> Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet?
So now we're at "Why are you obsessed with this? It happened so long ago."
No one is having a "flamewar". This has long been a discussion that has been appropriate on the site. Now that we've seen the consequences of the decisions it's appropriate to discuss them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3793012
> In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.
Not until those calling it a flame war or something that shouldn't be surfaced admit it was a mistake and that kind of thing shouldn't happen. But I guess it's the kind of thing that people who are partisan/or tribal fanatics think is fine, to poison every open source project with their politics in the name of inclusivity and actually seeking a powerful monoculture.
I want internet to be free and Mozilla Firefox to be for the entire world and not have to fight the US partisan philosophy of the day, which increasingly wants to censor everything or restrict access to the Internet with the typical "feel good" excuses.
The hackers who treat information and people as equal and deserving predate a lot of the fake inclusivity which is all about power dynamics and divisions.
I will keep bringing Brendan Eich and censorship up and I will keep using firefox since it offers more freedom to the user. Both are not mutually exclusive. Mozilla as a company has been quite misguided for a long time.
You imply it’s the hackers or Hacker News that has changed to create a negative atmosphere. From my perspective, however, it’s the direct result of a very long series of hostile-to-hackers decisions made by Mozilla.
To quote myself:
> I get why people are pissed at Mozilla
My issue is that when you try to have discourse but everyone’s on the same side, it can easily devolve into a circlejerk where everyone is trying to see who can most dramatically burn the strawman. These kinds of feedback loops are just bad—it doesn’t really matter who the target is or how malicious they are—because they cause the participants to drift further and further from the reality of the conflict.
In the best case, if the target really is bad, the participants may just look foolish when they later deploy their anti-strawman ballistic missile against someone who actually has a slightly good pro-target argument they hadn’t thought of. In the worst case, this is how mobs work themselves up to eventually justify violence against a target that’s totally harmless.
One thing’s for sure though, once a circlejerk like this starts, rational thought ends.
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This was probably the day that Firefox jumped the shark for me:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theve...
I still use it, but I lost all respect for the management. This level of tone deafness should cause everyone on the board and c suite to personally write an open letter of apology to the users, but instead we got a half-hearted victim-blaming non-apology:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozi...
This is really rather telling. Here is how Mozilla articulates what they think users have a problem with:
> We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on.
Mozilla is willfully inept. They think that pre-loading third-party non-free code and ads without my knowledge or consent is not an issue! Moreover, Mozilla thinks that this doesn't conflict with Mozilla's interpretation of what opt-in means and the values it embodies.
Mozilla is looking more and more like controlled opposition. Mozilla undermined their own users' faith in Mozilla's add-on/extension capabilities and act like releasing the source after the fact resolves any issue at all regarding doing this without consulting users or receiving prior affirmative consent.
This comment is getting long enough as it is. I'll just leave this here.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-col...
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising!
That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.
> … Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness
It literally was not.
The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale.
Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades.
Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
Using Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully settled on the name Firefox— the days of "Firebird" and the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages like about:mozilla. Firefox is dear to me and it has been for a very long time now.
Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about.
(That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer
Let's start hating and discussing how much Chrome leads are paid too.
I don't really agree. By sitting at the big tech table you give up a lot of ethics.
I think it's similar to NGOs like Greenpeace. I respected them when they were using rubber boats to blockade toxic waste dumping. Now they have a millions earning CEO rubbing shoulders with the pollutors and ostensibly "changing the system from within". Which creates watered down measures and too much dependency on the industry. Just like Reagan's "trickle down" fallacy this doesn't work. Money and power corrupts.
Also yes a lot of us use Firefox but not because we still love it so much. But because it's the least worst option. Kinda the only option if you want to run the real Ublock Origin now.
I think the reason for that is that we are still using the Firefox that was made 5 years ago. Then the whole team that was working on making the browser more modern and speedier was fired (as I understand it anyway).
I love Firefox, and I’m happy that there’s a foundation working on it that magically gets funded, but I see that money going to things I don’t care about far too often to be comfortable with it. It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
> It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
I'll bet if Mozilla thought they could get away with canceling Firefox, they would.
It feels like Firefox is treated as lead generation for whatever new boat Mozilla builds to sell Firefox users down the river on next time. It's "finished" in that regard; it is a widget that passes network traffic to Mozilla and third parties, and in exchange, Mozilla gets a pittance from Google. How any of this is supposed to be accepted with a straight face is beyond me.
As someone who spends a lot of time on HN, I fully agree with you. I am beyond bored of seeing the same things just continually reposted and take over some good threads. I actually got to a point where I would not click on comment threads that had anything to do with anything that Elon touches, because it just got ridiculous.
On the flip side though, I know there are a ton of readers who only occasionally Read the interesting story, who are part of today's lucky thousand who haven't heard yet. For that reason, my position has become somewhat moderate in that I think the hyperbolic hate posts are still ridiculous, including some informative and reasonable comments is probably good. To be clear though, The majority of this thread is not that :-D
Though weighing "Let me pay for firefox" browser against potential conflicts of interest that Mozilla has wrt that browser is only prudent.
It's not so black and white. Firefox is my daily driver, this doesn't mean that I can't have concerns about the direction of the Mozilla Foundation or express them online with others who share those concerns.
Or maybe we are genuinely upset that a browser we've supported and watch grow for decades at this point has fallen so low. Market share matters a ton, and Mozilla has been a very poor steward of Firefox's market share.
Maybe stop ascribing incorrect motivations to those of us who are angry but also care very deeply. I'm so tired of others assuming some sort of ill intent or virtue signaling or whatever, and using that as a way to derail a conversation.
It’s not just Mozilla. HN in general has become quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.
It's not just HN. The public Internet in general has become quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.
They have ads on MDN. It's over.
I love Firefox and will keep supporting it but I hate the Mozilla that fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, that become all about US woke partisan culture and decided that instead of everyone being equal, they had to discriminate based on their exclusionary ideology "to compensate". In a space that was super hippie and equal and free, they had to make it corporate and fake.
They even went absolutely against the freedom of the Internet with posts claiming for censorship of wrongthink. Which one could easily tie to the Republican vs Democrat bullshit.
Open source, Linux and a free Internet are not about those petty Western centric politics.
I don't care if you don't like it. Many of us have lived it and used Mozilla from 1.x/2.x versions.
He wasn't fired. He stepped down because of the uproar not in Mozilla itself but in the user communities. Because that's what the shareholders care about, disgruntled employees don't affect the share value but a dark shadow over the brand does.
I was personally also happy to see him go. You can't be inclusive when you try to deny people you have nothing to do with their equality.
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Or maybe... Mozilla has to change?
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The sheer volume of sidequest projects they've put resources into that were clearly self-indulgence projects from internal staff, that had no obvious market need or target user-base put me off years ago.
They're kept in existence as a cost of doing business for the likes of Google, purely to ward off browser monopoly claims, and absolutely do not deserve to be taken seriously, or be given private funding.
I feel like these are stuff that the C-suite needs for justifying their pay. If it is "boring browser development", it will show that they are doing nothing, redundant, and cannot have bonuses and salary raise.
I‘d argue you don‘t need a C-suite to develop firefox and that‘s the root of the problem.
So a foundation model instead, like discussed in: [Open Source Security] Open Source Foundations with Kelley Misata of Suricata #openSourceSecurity https://podcastaddict.com/open-source-security/episode/19338... via @PodcastAddict
I'm genuinely curious, no experience in any of that.
Yep.
Also worth reading: Reinventing Organisations by Laloux.
Incredible book - absolute book of the year for me. They talk about the history of organisations and how organisations can be run differently & better. And they research companies who are trying this stuff out today, and talk about what they do. The modern CEO idea is pretty silly on the face of it. We take the - ideally - smartest person at a company, divorce them from grounded reality, then burden them with all the hardest decisions your company has to face. All while disempowering the people on the ground who do all the actual work. In many ways it’s a pretty stupid way to run a company. There’s plenty of other options.
Just the other week the economist did an interview with the CEO of Supercell, a Nordic video game company. They have the same idea - the ceo in many ways doesn’t run the company, which frees him up to do actually useful work. And it lets the team leads take initiative and lead. Much better model in my opinion.
They're trying to diversify their revenue so it doesn't all come from Google. All these 'self-indulgent projects' are attempts to actually make enough money to compete with a multi-trillion dollar company's resources because they know they can't compete long-term.
The parent is referring to things like Coop (social media), SkyWriter (IDE), Persona, Solo (website builder), “data futures”, Servo [1], “big blue button”, most of them have little to no potential for revenue.
Meanwhile you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing, and it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
[1] including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF, making it more of a vanity project - it’s already thirteen years old at this point
> including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF
They integrated at least a couple of components from Servo into Firefox before they cancelled it, so I don't think that's fair.
> it’s already thirteen years old at this point
Mozilla only developed it for 8 years.
I think that would be believable if a massive portion wasn't spent in venture capitalism based gambling, where they put 90% of their eggs in the AI basket, of which, 70% are small unknown groups, 30% is just hugging face which really doesn't need their money, but at least that was a good bet.
Because they are a non-profit, they have to spend their money every year. That’s why Mozilla is/was over employed and following all these projects that die, because they need these engineers to work on something.
My friend worked at Mozilla 15 years ago, arguably during their golden years and he said it was a joke how much money they wasted because they had to spend it.
That’s not how NFPs work. I’m on the board of a NFP, we absolutely are able to save money year to year. The big difference between us and a regular corp is we don’t have shareholders or paid board members.
Charitably, I'd like to believe that all these side quests were in search of actual, real, substantial, alternative revenue streams, in order to reduce dependency on Google.
The problem, of course, is that all of these side projects just flat out failed. Maybe they were self-indulgence projects or maybe they were pursued in earnest, but either way, they failed.
They have cut back on those a lot now, haven't they?
I maintain Waterfox, so I recognise this isn’t a great look criticising another fork. But there’s a contradiction in abandoning Mozilla over spending and leadership concerns whilst supporting Floorp, which initially used open source extensions to build up their USP, then switched to a non-open licence to prevent others from doing what they had done.
They only reverted after community backlash (or being “inspired” if I recall correctly). You’re comfortable supporting a project that actively betrayed open source principles, whilst writing off Mozilla for issues like executive compensation.
It doesn’t strike me as more morally consistent than supporting the organisation that actually develops the underlying engine?
It's kind of disheartening to see what happened to the Mozilla Foundation. And it makes me kind of afraid of what's going to happen to linux once Linus is out. It seems that a great project requires a great BDFL, otherwise it will be taken over by ghouls.
Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized than Mozilla? We're so so blessed with Linus and everyone is afraid of the moment the project has to stand without him. But I'm confident he's aware and working towards that point in time. I'm not too much into it though, so this is more or less assumptions.
Same with e.g. PostgreSQL.
But these are fundamentally different type of projects. Many businesses and products run on top of Linux and/or PostgreSQL. There is a very clear and obvious incentive to contribute, because that will help you run your business better.
With user-oriented software such as a browser, this is a lot less clear-cut. Organisations like Slack, or Etsy, or Dropbox: sure, they've contributed resources to stuff they use like Linux, PosgreSQL, PHP, Python, etc. But what do they get out of contributing to Firefox? Not so obvious.
I think this is one reason (among others) that Open Source has long been the norm in some fields oriented towards servers and programmers, and a lot less so in others.
With PostgreSQL my biggest concern is what happens when we no longer have Tom Lane, Petere, etc. Rather than the project dying I see the opposite happening; it gets feature crept by contributors adding in their own custom behaviour and it becoming too complex.
There's always a large overhead of adding something new and it's always the experienced devs on the project that know where the right balance is.
No project or development style is perfect and they all come with their own set of upsides and downsides. PostgreSQL is no exception. Maybe the PostgreSQL 20 years from now will be a different type of project with different types of trade-offs. That doesn't mean it will be worse. I'm not so worried about this.
Linux is a trademark of Linus. Which is why Linux Foundation which is run by corporates like Microsoft, Google etc is staying aside. After Linus, it would like corporate board memebers changing CEOs at their wish.
The Linux Foundation also runs several other projects, none of which do I see being ran terribly poorly from a corporate meddling point. I can only hope that is a strong signal of things to come.
Did I say anything is run poorly? Or good for that matter? The difference is intent. Run for community and run for corporate are both different. Currenlty Linus is the only thing standing in the way of LF pulling another Rust Foundation. Cos it's run by corporates as well. Time will tell.
What do you mean by "pulling another Rust Foundation"?
Rust foundation has not been very community friendly. That's cos corporates run it. There was a fork of the language called crab or something cos of this at one point. Take Linus out of the scenario, it's the same thing that's probable about Linux Foundation.
Has he ever hinted about successors?
I did a quick search. Names were named by him here [1] in 2024 - but not as successors per se. More like candidates for important roles in the future. This [2] interview from 2020 touches the subject as well.
I interpret it in a way that he tries to cultivate an environment where a good leader/successor/main-whatever emerges somewhat naturally.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/990534/ [2] https://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/torvalds-say...
(Prime example of my personal behavior which I really don't like: Put a half-baked assumption/hearsay on the internet. Get 2 replies. Start actually researching the topic only afterwards.)
> Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized than Mozilla?
Is it? IME Linux kernel development is a somewhat toxic place.
>IME Linux kernel development is a somewhat toxic place.
I think that's why it's healthier. A bit like the human immune system.
There is a sad parallel to Wikimedia Foundation, rooted in the same argument: We don't know the correct price. These entities are effectively monopolies with no competitors, and there is no public negotiation on what the annual budget of these entities should be.
So once they get away with nag screens on the world's biggest billboards, CEO pay is suddenly 'justified'.
But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
> But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
Certainly when it comes to Wikipedia: there is oversight. I know people don't like the fact that Wikipedia spends money on things other than server racks, but spending money on developing the community is a pretty legitimate thing to do! How else can you maintain such an encylopedia? You need to attract knowledgeable people to write and review articles!
The exact same way it always worked.
It's also obscenely disingenuous to ask for donations like they do with this current model. Downright insulting.
If only.
A very informative comment.
https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core [a submodule of their main repo] is noticeably missing any licensing information
I went there to find out how they're tracking upstream releases, because that's my major heartburn about any fork of one of the biggest attack targets on a personal computer. Since 12.0.14 doesn't tell me anything about what version of Firefox it's built against, I guess https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp/blob/v12.0.14/brow... is the best one can do and since it says 128.anything and the current production release is 140.0.4 I got my answer
That's the latest ESR (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/notes/), which seems good enough for Tor Browser.
I wish there were a way to donate to the devs who work on Firefox directly.
Like a pool where we donate and money goes to devs to work on user-centric features (eg: I’d also want to exclude those working on first party spyware and adware).
Agreed. Until I upgraded phones and just couldn't be bothered anymore, I kept around an old build of Firefox from before they messed up extensions. I have to run nightly now to get my extensions and just pause updates at relatively bug-free builds. It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost it. I've even switched to edge canary because it gives me extensions and didn't have a few regressions (that eventually got fixed) that prevented smooth video watching
> It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost it.
No, it's obvious. Google Pays for Firefox. Google doesn't want Adblock Extensions.
No, contrary to you and GP, the stable version of Firefox for Android (on the Google Play Store) supports all Firefox extensions, including ad blockers.
There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
> There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
They got rid of extensions in August 2020 and brought them back in December 2023.[1] Fenix has lacked full extension support for more than half of its existence since release, and it has been less than two years since extensions were brought back.
1. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-lov...
That reminds me of the people who give money on the street and say “but not for drugs or alcohol”.
Oh well, thanks for mentioning Floorp, I'm gonna try it right now.
I use Firefox, but I'm curious about whether I'll 'feel' a difference with Floorp, in terms of performance.
I don't feel that firefox is slow on anything I use it on other than Android. Its reasonably responsive on all the machines I have ever used it with including some pretty old laptops. It seems pretty smooth, its been a while since I used chrome.
It might not be that hard to finance Firefox improvements. We should establish a Firefox improvement group. And then set a plan for bug improvements roadmap. Then publish that roadmap and set up a fund for the programmers.
I think what you are asking for is better steering of the Mozilla foundation. And maybe better steering for Firefox development. Possibly with less opinions. We might be better off supporting servo devs instead.
I agree with your opinion of that corp which as of today exists solely to employ the highly paid CEO for doing less than nothing. Or something on those lines.
But Firefox (+ forks) is a lost cause. One simple non-statistical reason, I mean it seems so, is that whenever I see that “I donate to Firefox fork” mentioned somewhere, it’s almost always a different fork. So maybe now Firefox will die a 100 deaths.
When donations feel like they're funding bloat instead of a better browser, it's hard to justify hitting that donate button
It would be possible to create a new foundation that works on Firefox and is not Mozilla.
It is possible to create a new foundation that works on a new browser product based on Gecko indeed. You just can't call it Firefox because of trademark ownership.
It would be interesting to see how it collaborates / competes with the origin project, how fast and how far they diverge etc.
Donate to Ladybird, Firefox and forks are unfortunately over.
Ladybird has a chance to become a new truly open source browser written from scratch.
The article doesn’t advocate for donations, however.
It's not the pessimist in you, it's your rational brain doing basic pattern recognition.
Mozilla has consistently been losing donor trust for over a decade.
Sounds exactly like paying taxes in Seattle...
I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.
How are you expecting to run an entity with developers, support, and operations without any leadership?
I don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy, but in my experience that is almost always a disaster.
I'm worked on many larger teams and leadership is independent of compensation.
The fact that "high performance leaders" need to make tens of millions of dollars is one of the greatest lies being told in the modern age.
Right now my chief in the fire company where I volunteer makes the same amount of money I do: $0.00. He is the greatest leader I have ever personally met, and I've been around for a while.
When I was in the Army, my company commander (a Captain) made ~4x what the newest private did. The highest-paid officer makes ~9x.
There are government senior executives and university professors running labs with budgets and teams that make Mozilla look like a lemonade stand for practically nothing.
Mozilla should ask the Linux Foundation what their budget is, what their leadership structure is, and do that.
Mozilla, no matter what they say or think or try, is and will always be a web browser developer. A web browser. Anything else is a side project, a hobby. A distraction. Every single molecule of fuel used by their brains while at work and every single microwatt of power used by their infrastructure should be wholly and aggressively dedicated to building the tools and organization needed to create the best web browser possible.
Bloated payrolls are tolerable if the decisions made are wise, responsibility is taken, and strategies exist and make sense.
Mozilla seems to have none of these.
But man they're spending a shit-ton on "AI"!
Three examples off the top of my head — PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, and Debian — are doing just fine without someone "taking responsibility" (when have Mozilla's CEO ever done that?).
Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.
There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.
PostgreSQL is just a community of volunteers as far as I'm aware, not full-time developers employed by the project.
FreeBSD seems to have three paid directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/our-team/
Debian has a leader and also seems to be more a volunteer organisation than a full company: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
All of the people on Postgres, FreeBSD, and Debian combined make a tiny fraction of what the Mozilla CEO does.
Like what?
I agree that probably the three mentioned projects don't total a 6 million USD budget, which is the CEO salary at Mozilla, but is only close to it.
I think all of these projects have contributors who are getting paid at other companies for the work, notably Linux. Not quite so for Firefox. I mean, tell me where does Linus get his income? You think that can be fully replicated for Firefox?
Leadership doesn’t mean earning more money.
I’m fine with twice the amount of a developer. Taking into account responsibility, public involvement and special clothing. Travel costs and so on are separate. The developers are doing the hard work.
There is not “team” if a MBA or lawyer gets 38 times the wage of an actual person doing the work.
Worth thinking of it also "the other way". As long as some people (developers) accept an MBA above them getting 38x, without adding much value, this will happen.
I don't personally like it (so generally did not allow to happen to me), but if some people feel "safer" getting lower pay (less chance of getting fired, easier to get re-hired as there are more low paid positions than high paid positions), the natural result is that it will happen.
My experience is that both high and low paid positions are not as "safe" as people think they are (seen multiple changing in various organizations types), so people should care more about finding a reasonable organization.
They wrote "pad the CEO salary", not "support any leadership"
Compare to Torvalds. You may or may not like his leadership, but nobody feels sour about his salary.
It can be done; an example is Igalia: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/
> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.
If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.
> If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable
That's a big if. AFAIK most open source project developers don't get remotely enough donations to support them working on it full-time. The ones that do are the exception, not the norm.
I've been in organisations with great developers but no leadership. It's a shit show.
I think you need a CEO, you just don't need a CEO that is paid $7m/year. That's ludicrous. What amazing decisions have they been making that were worth that amount? Have they really contributed more than a team of 70 developers could?
There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.
It doesn't even have to be that. Take that and bump it 5 times like a million dollars. Throw in more cash if they can increase Firefox's market share. Have clauses to penalize anything about opt-out telemetry or anti-privacy features. I'm happy to add more carrots as well as more sticks.
All said and done, that will still be way more reasonable than that ludicrous salary.
If the CEO changes his salary to 200k then fine I have no problem with that. CEOs are overpaid relative to skill and that does not sit well with my sense of generosity.
> How are you expecting to run an entity with developers, support, and operations without any leadership?
Unfortunately, CEO is not always leadership.
Aside from that, leadership can come from the people doing the work. It is working in many cases.
I don't know, but ask Mitchell Baker or the board because that's exactly what happened during her tenure.
If dev work is paid for by the community, the CEO payments can increase since the budget of Mozilla will stay the same but now have less cost to carry elsewhere?
CEO is typically needed for-profit purposes on a scale. Donating for devs to build browser without that purpose does not need CEO. Just a lead engineer and accountants.
It's bizarre. In Japan, the custom is to revere your elders, in the US its apparently whoever is titled "leader". All of HN shivers in exaltation at the mention of the word.
The reality is that Firefox would have done much better had Mozilla fired their CEO 15 years ago and never hired another one. All of them executed significantly worse than mere government bonds did.
> don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy
I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.
I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.
Yet we happily do that for everything else.
Either software developers have to figure out how to out compete the CEO ghouls (without becoming CEO ghouls themselves), or we just have to accept that the CEO ghouls will take their cut. There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.
I think that's because those everything else are products with an opaque structure, and Mozilla, and for example Wikipedia, are more transparent. Really highlights why some people don't open up, either themselves, their source code, or their organizational structure: it's just inviting endless criticism.
Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.
This has been part of my conclusion too.
There's an irony that in providing people the option of not paying, you are also inviting them to find flaws in your organization to avoid paying. We are all aware that Microsoft sucks, yet there's never any doubt that you'll have to pay for a 365 subscription if you're a serious business. At the same time we'll also gladly accept that small companies don't donate to the Linux foundation, because they have to pay their bills.
By using the control we advocate for (forking projects, reducing funding, etc) we only harm the projects that afford us that control. Not paying Mozilla does nothing to reduce the control of Google over chrome. It only hurts the one browser that gives you the choice.
I think you are being too pessimistic. Maybe it is difficult for this to happen for Firefox due to its system already subverted. However, it is not true of OSS in general. Folks already directly donate to creators/maintainers with no executive in between.
That's true, although I will point out that we've long had a funding crisis in OSS. Tons of very valuable, very necessary OSS work is being done for no or little pay.
Add to that the value capture that happens outside of that exchange. We may say that valkey is well enough funded to continue development, but that doesn't account for the immense value that is being captured by the big cloud providers charging a premium for hosting it. Azure, AWS and GCP are only as valuable as they are because there's some software you can run on them. The cheaper that software, the more they get to charge.
This is sort of a general problem with the American system of "philanthropy". We can say that the Linux Foundation is developing the Linux kernel independently for free, and that various other companies then donate, but that ignores the fact that the Linux kernel has been tremendously valuable for those same companies. In a more real way, they are paying for the development of the kernel, but they are not paying anything even close the value they are deriving from it. Value is in that way being extracted from the Linux kernel outside of the Linux Foundation, and that looks a lot like "an executive in between".
Isn't this the idea of charity though? To give without expecting something in return? I think open source software had a tremendous positive impact even if some companies also made profit out of it. How would it have been otherwise? Only walled gardens with no possibility of doing anything (like forking) and probably a miserable developer experience.
You give the examples of Azure, AWS and GCP - do they really have that much secret sauce? My impression is that AWS is mostly giving a new name to open source stuff. If all would decide tomorrow to double their prices competitors will appear immediately. And my guess is that their profit is due to forgotten or over-provisioned resources of other organizations anyhow.
I think we should focus on the benefits for society of open source, not on reducing the profit that some will make from it here and there.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before
I'll need to think about this more but one difference that comes to mind after giving it some thought is that donations are a choice. Buying food is not really optional. I'm not going to the store and giving them 50€ because I hope they continue to operate, I give them the money as an equal exchange
There is a group of people who would choose to shop more frequently at a certain place, or tip more, if their favorite place is having trouble, but as far as I know this is only a small effect and market forces decide for 95% whether a place can continue to pay its bills. With open source software development like at Mozilla, barring other income sources, they rely on those 5%. The donators don't need to accept that their money is spent on drugs and mansions¹, the way that they do when buying groceries and the big boss might indeed use the profits in that way
¹ I have no clue what else you would do with the 7M USD a year that someone else quoted. Even at a 50% tax rate (idk what the tax rate is for someone who operates a non-profit in the USA), an average person could literally retire after six months of telling others what to do at this "non profit"
I can't get around doing it for good products that are better than their competition. Firefox isnt that. I'd pay if it meant supporting enthusiastic engineers that try to make the best browser and strive to compete with Goliath. I'm not going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a product that is worse than the competition.
>There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.
Well then I’m just not going to pay.
What I'm trying to get at is the irony that making that choice just incentivizes everybody to not give you that choice.
We almost always have that choice. It's just unpalatable to some.
>Yet we happily do that for everything else.
Is it because we're >happy< to do it, or there's no choice?
Or in slightly less fatalistic words: In any entity with more than 1-2 employees you need someone to make decisions and be accountable for them. The normal solution is to have a director/CEO for this. You may be able to get away with paying them slightly less than market rates if they are doing it for a good cause, but if you want someone competent you will need to pay them a relatively high salary to compete with other employers.
Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.
Happily? We seem to have a choice here, ergo the expressions of preference to exercise that choice.
Firefox's entire appeal is that it is not like every other corporate entity. Its legitimacy hinges on how far it can separate itself from intrusive corporate interests.
If Mozilla goes the same way, Firefox loses all goodwill it gathered over the years and stops being an option against Chrome et al.
Yes exactly! Except for developers who I don't like and except for the development of features I don't like and except for certain functions within the code which I don't fancy, and also they have to use tabs instead of spaces if they want my hard earned money! Also which text editor is each developer using?
We need more paid stuff. Making everything advertising funded has given advertisers too much power over society. We don't see real human opinion anymore, we see advertising friendly opinions.
Nothing can compete with the ad model + ad blocker.
The suckers can watch the ads, and we can ride for free. (And we can complain that the content progressively caters to the suckers and not us).
Did you notice that chrome removed the ad blocker extensions?
Google is also getting pretty aggressive about blocking people with ad blockers from YouTube. I think it is great. I ad-block everywhere, but if people don’t want me around for that reason, that’s their right. If I wanted to watch short videos, I’d actually have to become a paying customer somewhere!
Ads have many more perverse effects than wasting your time or being ugly, and you can't fix all of those with an ad blocker. They're a constant pressure to make everything retain your attention for the longest time possible, or to editorialize out content that would detract from clicking them.
You also end up paying for all this advertising indirectly, in the price of everything you buy. So you might think you get free content, but you're really not. And let's not even mention the insanity of constantly pushing everyone to consume more trash in a world that really doesn't need it.
Yes, and we are still paying money for it. In fact, now we pay twice, once with our attention and then ...
Firefox is free, none of its users are paying for it.
Hard agree. I pay for monthly hosting like FreshRSS, Wallabag, etc and support the devs who make those projects. Privacy and developer support. And it's not that much.
Definitely interested in making Firefox, Thunderbird, etc sustainable too.
Agreed. I'd pay £10/m for a browser that fits with my use case. I imagine there's a critical mass of other people willing to do the same.
It's not easy when the purchasing power of the working class has been falling steadily for the last 45 years. We have now blown past Gilded Age-levels of economic inequality and there's no signs of stopping.
This is a very, very Western-centered take. It's been growing in most other areas of the world, although from a much lower starting point. I'd say it's been "reverting to the mean".
> when the purchasing power of the working class has been falling steadily for the last 45 years
Yeah? How much did an always-on pocket sized computer connected to the internet cost in 1980?
Manufacturing a pocket sized computer has become equivalently easier as it is cheaper to purchase.
This is a weird strawman and it has almost nothing to do the parent's claim. The guilded age is 1870-1890's.
I was replying to the bit I quoted?
Even if you had managed to come up with a point by selectively quoting the post, that would still be bad. The good-faith way to engage with somebody’s post is to reply to the meaning of the overall post. It might be necessary to cut some parts out for logical flow, but that shouldn’t change the meaning of what you are replying to.
Attacking a point by attacking its supporting points is a pretty standard way of going about arguing.
This is my kept-warm take on Signal.
Signal personal should continue being free. Signal needs to develop a business line for enabling authenticated, private communications to individuals on Signal.
There's at the very least an entire area of secure healthcare messaging which is full of terrible bespoke systems, or just goes over SMS, which would more effectively and with better user experience go over signal (i.e. the ability to send longer messages, encrypted attachments etc.)
This is the Threema business model: https://threema.com/en
Public app, and a separate business offering - both with E2EE
Germanys healthcare systems goes Matrix
That is cool! https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germany-s-national-health...
Welcome to the world of MacOS X, where there is a very healthy ecosystem of pay-once apps made by everything from giant corporations, to boutique software shops to individual developers.
I have found that whatever software I need or want, I can always find the best-in-class option to buy for a very reasonable price.
The best part: If you experience a bug or a problem, it's usually fixed within a few days at most after you report it.
I don't understand what these comments are actually criticizing in terms of side projects. They got rid of stuff like Rust, Firefox OS, Pocket, etc. Mozilla has streamlined to make web browsers and web browser accessories. VPN/Relay are both profitable projects that inhibit surveillance, so clearly that's not the issue. Do you want, not just these projects gone but the CEO gone? That happened already too, https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-cha...
We've been through a decade of the Mozillas blackholing money with zero telegraphing of any intent to bring financial sustainability to Firefox. The (expensive! ugly?) rebrand did not include any meaningful recommitments (which filtered down to me, anyway). I've just now clicked around the Foundation's website trying to figure out what my prospective donation might have gone towards and it's still kept very vague. Am I donating to Firefox, to non-software activism, to a podcast? I couldn't even find a single mention of Firefox on https://www.mozillafoundation.org in a minute of looking.
I don't mind side-projects, I mind that Mozilla looks completely directionless from the outside. It might even look like a Google-funded adult daycare. I can't trust that.
I just took a look at that site after reading your comment. It almost appears as if Mozilla just isn't interested in making a browser anymore.
"In the early 2000s, the Mozilla community built Firefox. We toppled the browser monopoly, gave users choice and control online, and helped create a healthier internet.
Twenty years later, Mozilla continues to fight for a healthy internet — one where Big Tech is held accountable and individual users have real agency online."
They list a bunch of projects on the site that are kind of all over the place. It's almost as if they don't know yet what they want to do. Mozilla is synonymous with Firefox and the Mozilla browser before that, but it is clear from the site that browsers do not fit in with their future. I'm not even sure they know what their future is. They look like a research organization that's dong research for the purpose of finding something to do? They are also accepting applications for funding.
The only purpose Firefox has in this organization is to fund exploratory research via the Google search deal. There is no plan. These people don't deserve our money and are not responsible enough to be custodians of a project as important as an independent browser.
A new organization should fork Firefox, rebrand it, contribute real resources and monetize it enough to keep it healthy. I'm not talking about junk like Zen or Floorp where they just put a skin on Firefox and have no real development resources to speak of. Someone should do to Mozilla what Mozilla did to Netscape.
Personally, I think that's a more worthwhile approach than what Ladybird is doing, although I'm rooting for them to succeed.
Whoops, it happened. An internet argument changed someone's mind. :)
According to their latest financial transparency report[1], software development as a line item is about 60% of their expenses. However, your question wasn't about where revenue has gone, it was about where new donations would go. That lead me to the donation FAQ which reads:
> At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. The Mozilla Foundation programs are supported by grassroots donations and grants. Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all. This explains the lack of Firefox on their website. Any mention of it as a product of the foundation would be misleading about where the donations go. From the point of view of the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is just another revenue stream for outreach efforts.
This really bums me out, because I'm a huge fan of Firefox. It's my go to browser on my computer and my phone. I advocate for it as much as possible. I've donated before, but I've likely never actually financially supported development of Firefox. I support the EFF, so it's possible I could have donated to this foundation on its own merits. But I didn't.
[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
[2]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...
> If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all
Yes, this is what so many people here on HN have complained about for years :) and is also being raised by the OP:
> To be clear, I very much support the Foundation, and it does amazing work, but I want to know this money in particular would directly support Firefox development.
I'm curious, how capital intensive/wasteful were these aimless projects? Compared to their operating expenses? What better way could they have spent this money? (Development isn't exactly a good answer, if it's not a lot of money, it won't exactly buy a lot of R&D and even if it did, R&D doesn't necessarily translate to more income).
It takes time to win back trust.
I keep seeing comments on HN that misunderstand what's happening with Mozilla and it's kind of frustrating.
Right now, if you were to take away Google's money, Firefox would not be able to compete with Chromium and Safari. It would die.
All these side-projects are attempts to find a source of revenue aside from Google and are necessary to Firefox's survival. So saying they should stop doing them, completely misses the point.
Unless we want Firefox to die, we should understand Mozilla's situation and encourage this exploratory process, not hate on it.
If you had put all the money Mozilla executives have spent on buying then winding down bizarre startups, occasionally connected to them, in index funds instead, you would probably have an actual revenue stream to support Firefox, other than what they have now, which is nothing, because like their leadership, these purchases never amounted to anything other than damaging their brand.
I've grown very tired of all the whining about the Mozilla Corporation. The browser, MDN, and certificate trust auditing work need more money than the foundation is getting. Making the browser paid for would kill it. This means that they need to find another way to pay the bills.
People whined about search licensing and it now seems there is a court order imminently about to kill those deals. That leaves either running other services or putting ads in the browser both of which attracted much complaining.
And no, forking is not the answer. Mozilla does the lion's share of security work and maintenance. If the mother ship dies the forks will slowly wither and die as they don't have the funding to replace Mozilla. If Mozilla can't make the numbers work a fragmented mess of forks will not do better. A few of these forks have made the problem worse for themselves by insisting on bringing back and maintaining the exploit ridden mess that was XUL based add ons.
I think it’s fascinating how languages shape our society. In this case, the ambiguity between free as in “at no cost” and free as in “freedom” is probably hurting the FOSS landscape. In French, there are two very distinct terms for this: “gratuit” vs “libre”. And it doesn’t sound as an oxymoron to pay for a “logiciel libre”.
I think people on tech forums overestimate the significance of this in today’s world.
Back in the early days of FOSS, when almost everyone who used software was also a programmer, it made a difference.
Today, nearly all people who would care about libre software licenses, are aware of their existence. The vast majority of computer users today are just attempting to do some other task and do not give a shit about the device or the legal consequences of using it, even if you warn them. They simply don’t care about software.
Isn't English actually the only language where "free" can also mean "at no cost"?
German is the same as French in this regard, we have "kostenlos" (literally cost-less) "gratis" (the same) and "umsonst" (which interestingly can also mean "in vain").
The German "frei" can mean "free of charge" sometimes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frei#Usage_notes
(Native German speaker here), it's a very rare use of the word "free" and usually only used in fixed terms like "Freibier", it wouldn't even work for other drinks, e.g., you can't say "Freisaft" or "freier Saft" for free juice, it has to be kostenlos there.
The other Wiktionary example of "freie Krankenversorgung" sounds wrong to be, but it seems to be used rarely in some more formal or legal contexts, no one would say it like this in a casual conversation. Google results also show a 4x difference between frei and kostenlos here in favor of kostenlos. But both are low since "Krankenversorgung" is already a very unusual word. I suspect many of those uses might be bad translations from English.
"Freier Eintritt" seems to be used quite often.
“Frei” can have the meaning of “kostenlos” (https://www.dwds.de/wb/frei#d-1-1-7), but these are limited circumstances that are usually perceived as metaphorical idioms. “Freie Software” has no direct connotation of being “free as in beer” (unlike “Freeware”).
I think in some way it has become that, but I assume the roots are different. People might have said "Freier Eintritt" before it became associated with money. One might be able to see this in "Portofrei" which does not mean "free as in beer" but no postage required - for my feeling it doesn't feel like "Freier Eintritt" yet, it does not have as much money connotations (though when it wanders to the front like in "freiporto" it feels more to be about money).
I do think there is a spectrum. Funny things like "Freifahrt" or even "Freifahrtschein", or "Freikarte", or "Freiexemplar", "Freiparken", "Freiminuten" or "Freivolumen" (people might use "Inklusivvolumen") - so I'd argue when used as part to form a new word it is a synonym for "kostenfrei" (not yet in "Freiwild" which changed a lot).
The use as a suffix "-frei" is something different I think. I'm pretty sure it has kept its meaning of "-los" ("-less") since a long time ago.
How could I forget about Freibier. Unverzeihlich.
Spanish has separate words (gratis and libre) and so does Dutch (gratis and vrij).
On the other hand, how come that the desired connotation is not the immediately prevailing one in the land of the free which is not the land of no cost.
Nobody thinks of it as "land of the free" nowadays
> Nobody thinks of it as "land of the free" nowadays
I feel like it is, but it’s not headed that way, though neither is the world:
https://github.com/t3dotgg/SnitchBench/blob/main/snitching-a...
Well, the prompts used in testing ( https://github.com/t3dotgg/SnitchBench/tree/main/prompts) are pretty serious and basically about covering up public health disasters with lobbyists, so I'm not sure this is the kind of freedom you might want.
Still, the contacted_media field in the JSON is pretty funny, since I assume it's misfiring at a rate of several thousand of time daily. I can only imagine being on the receiving end of that at propublica and wapo. That bitch Katie was eyeballing Susie again at recess and she hates her so much? Straight to investigations@nytimes
> though neither is the world
That doesn’t excuse or justify it. And the reason the world is headed that way is in large part because of the US doing it. Clearly it was a mistake to trust one country to do the right thing. When they proclaimed themselves “leaders of the free world”, the rest of the free world should’ve raised an objection. Worse still, the US is so high on their own supply they believe they’re the best at everything, despite ample evidence to the contrary, which breeds stupidity and arrogance in a vicious cycle. And like every other junk produced in the US, they’re exporting that attitude too.
That has been true for a long time, even when liberals were happier with american policy.
I do. Bit of a rough patch at the moment tho.
It has become quite a stretch.
Consider re-evaluating your beliefs.
The more someone has to tell you that you're free, the less you actually are. C.f. North Korea.
I will not reconsider. I will work to make my belief reality.
> in the land of the free which is not the land of no cost.
Maybe it is exactly what that means, and we’ve just been interpreting it wrong all this time.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8
> Free installation. Free admission, free appraisal, free alterations, free delivery, free estimates, free home trial, and free parking.
Freedom isn't Free. There's a hefty fuckin' fee
In Russian as well, свободный vs бесплатный. Free software = свободное ПО, free beer = бесплатное пиво
“Gratis” meaning “no cost” is an English word, albeit an uncommonly used one.
Technically that’s a Latin word that just happens to have kept the same spelling and meaning in English.
> kept the same spelling and meaning in English
So it's also an English word, then?
Arguably it’s really only an English word once it deviates from the original spelling and meaning. Like how the original British English “Aluminum” is now the American English word for the metal represented by the newer British English “Aluminium”, all of which borrowed from, but didn’t outright steal, the Latin roots.
You’ve made the faux pas of presenting the spiel that a word’s etymology or genus means it cannot be English.
While an entrepreneurial view, this mammoth disinformation is equivalent to plaza cafe sofa schmooze.
(I know this isn’t the most coherent post I’ve ever made, but I wanted to make a point by cramming in as many borrowed words as I could)
I’m enjoying the schadenfreude (note, the English word, not the German one) of watching this thread unspool.
English has not been in its final form forever, therefore there was a language or languages that preceded it. English words derive from one of these previous languages. Since a word from another language cannot be an English word, English does in fact not have any English words except ones that sprang arbitrarily out of nowhere.
> Since a word from another language cannot be an English word
This is false, so your argument is also false.
> English words derive from one of these previous languages. Since a word from another language cannot be an English word [...]
You sabotage your own argument with these two sentences.
Technically it’s now both a Latin and English word. And several other languages as well.
I have seen OS projects use the word "libre" in English before to distinguish between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" uses of the word. But I can't remember which projects I've seen using that.
LibreOffice?
is an "as in free beer" project.
The intention was great, but I find the word awkward. Leebraayyy
It looks/sounds foreign and feels a bit pretentious to use in conversation
.. or I feel like some gringo speaking broken Spanish
> It looks/sounds foreign and feels a bit pretentious to use in conversation
“Entrepreneur” is worse on both counts, yet I don’t see those complaints about it. Must be because it’s associated with money.
Sure sure, and Omelette, but once the word hits everyday usage it starts to feel different. There is a awkwardness hump to get through - and libre has a large one. So I feel it'll never catch on unfortunately
It already caught on once. It's already in the dictionary (though OED suggests it is obsolete). Though English was probably much closer to the Norman/French influence then. It may be the Tudor influence on unifying England under a common language was what killed the historic use of libre.
It’s a popular line of fragrances from YSL. ;)
In British-English "libre" is French from Latin roots (liber). Though Spanish has the same word, I'd guess all Latin languages do.
We get liberty, liberal from the same root.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libre gives a pronunciation which matches my own (lee-bruh).
Japanese: muryou (cost free) vs. jiyuu (freedom)
Browser is the most intimate piece of software we have on our computer. Paying for it (vs someone else paying for your browsing) is a no brainer.
From day one Orion browser [1] has been designed with this business model in mind.
Napkin math also shows that if only 5% Firefox users decided to pay for it, Mozilla would not only replace Google search deal revenue but also align incentives with its users, leading to a better product down the road.
[1] https://kagi.com/orion
With ~200M Firefox users and Google paying ~$400M annually, a $5/month subscription from just 7% of users would fully replace that search deal revenue.
One of the core problems of the internet is that the "everything-is-free-if-watch-ads-but-you-can-also-easily-block-them" paradigm of the last 25 years has created a generation of people with an innate entitlement to free services.
Asking these people to directly cover the cost of the services they use incurs a level of incredulity and anger on par with charging to breath.
Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening all over the place, there is also a growing market of people who are willing to pay for something of high quality that won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?
Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.
The problem is that people like yourself don't even register on the radar.
Nebula for example is the choice answer to the enshitification of YouTube. Lots of the top creators push it to billions of viewers. Pretty much everyone who does the YouTube rounds knows about it.
Yet they only have ~750,000 subscriptions.
That is an awful conversion rate, and why these creators will be stuck making ad supported yt content for the foreseeable future. People overwhelming do not want to pay directly.
Completely unrelated but being that typographically close to "onion browser" made me confused for a second or two
converting 5% of users to paying is frankly beyond plausibility, if they got 0.1% I'd consider that a miracle
Only if the product sucks. Kagi converts at much higher than that. It incentivizes you to create a better product, a wonderful positive feedback loop.
I paid for Mozillla Pocket Premium and they canceled their product within a few months, did not properly open-source the server, did not export my "permanent library" and refunded 6$. As the websites in the "permanent library" are partially offline, that data is now lost. No thanks, not buying again.
I suspect that they don't actually maintain the permanent library, but rather a formatted view of the content that used to be there. Some of the sites I have the URL saved have transitioned to paywall and/or merged, goes offline or disappeared for some reason, so I can't actually read many of the links I exported from it. Though for the one that actually catches interest, I'll look for it in archiving service, but it's a tiresome work to search for it one by one.
I still don't get over the fact Mozilla bought it and shattered it less than a decade later. Perhaps it doesn't make enough "impact" to justify their time and resources, and if this behavior subsists, I would be more discouraged to give them money ever again.
The permanent library was strange. Not very transparent what happened there. I am still shocked they did not invest in the original idea (tag and archive web page), but instead tried to build another content stream with recommended articles and such.
I agree in the abstract: I'd rather pay for a product that I need, use, and love, than be the product, and have it supported through ads or unfortunate deals like Mozilla has with Google (default search engine).
But I also need to believe that the money I'm paying is being spent wisely. Given how poorly Mozilla has been managed over the past decade or so, I wouldn't care to give them any of my money. I've watched Firefox go from nothing to the dominant browser and now back to a tiny minor player that gets dropped off site compatibility lists. It makes me incredibly sad that this is the state of affairs, but... there it is.
Mozilla needs to be spending a ton more money on user acquisition in order to become relevant again. I would be happy to support that, but I have no faith that's where my money would go, or that they'd spend it to that end effectively.
There are many comments from people wanting to pay for Firefox, but not to Mozilla.
As an independent alternative, the Ladybird browser (https://ladybird.org/) is being developed and could possibly benefit from more financial support.
Security is my top priority (even above privacy) when it comes to internet browsers. My impression has always been that browser technology is a very hard subject and incredibly difficult to do right. This approach is the main reason I keep a distance from any software that is not widely adopted. Even if it's innovative and novel. This being said: If I switch to ladybird today, am I a beta tester or is this a project I can count on?
Ladybird is advancing rapidly but I personally wouldn't use it as a daily driver yet. It's quite a small project in comparison to the giants like Chromium and Safari, but despite their talents and the from-the-ground-up approach free from legacy crap, it lacks a lot of functionality and performance enhancements for it to be a daily driver at the moment.
Give it another year or two and things may change, but if you daily drive it now you'll be either a beta tester or a volunteer part of the Q&A team.
Out of all the new and upcoming browser engines, I think the usability ranking is Flow, then Ladybird, then Servo, with none of them being a great daily driver yet.
Thanks for the respond! I'll definitely follow the project and happy to jump when the point is there.
I'll try it out once I've finally set up my virtual machine.
"How to drop the Firefox market share to 0%?"
1.Waste the budget on irrelevant side projects.
2.Neglect user expirience and cut features.
3.Add a price tag to alienate users.
4.Perhaps a humiliation ritual like mandatory 2FA and "Login to Firefox"
5. heavily push pocket and add annoying blank space left and right of url in the toolbar in the default settings
Personally I really hated getting Pocket shoved in my face, but it seems some people missed it.
No I didn't miss it but it made me hate it so much I wouldn't even try it. And I wouldn't have used it even if I liked it, in order to disincentivise this behavior.
I’m used to this behavior in Microsoft Land. OneNote was pretty good but I’m sure they killed it by putting three icons for it on the taskbar and making the ‘print’ dialog print everything to OneNote if you didn’t quadruple-check what you were printing to. I liked the local XML files cause I could write scripts that extracted stuff from them. Then they killed it for me by making it cloud only. Then they just killed it.
OneDrive was dead to me in the first week because (a) it was the default save location for Office and (b) if it was broken I could not save at all. That’s how to be sure somebody never uses a product ever again! It’s shocking to see how vertical integration can so utterly fail —- DropBox can make a product that doesn’t fail catastrophically on a large number of platforms, kernel integration and all dooms Microsoft’s product on their core platform.
It was nice for its Kobo integration and (for now - apparently Kobo is considering alternatives) there is no direct alternative.
You forgot the "claim a license on everything users do with it" and "promise to never ever sell data and then un-promise".
Mozilla Corporation is the problem.
You missed 0. - where does the budget come from https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...
[dead]
I have a Firefox account. I will gladly pay a yearly fee for it! It provides significant value to me.
For example I pay Bitwarden $10/year for both myself and my wife. We will be moving to a Bitwarden family plan soon as our kids are getting old enough to have online accounts. Similar pricing structures for Firefox accounts would be totally reasonable!
Clearly some people would prefer a free way to use Firefox and that’s ok, too. In the same vein Bitwarden have a free plan. This kind of pricing structure already works in the market. Please copy it.
Mozilla, please stop screwing up and just make a great Firefox!
Yeah idk why that they just did not have an structural subscription like that or like patreon community etc
without google money,doing this maybe can be make profitable
This is basically an optional way to pay for the features that a decent fork like librewolf provides.
This is really just a long way to donate really in some sense directly to firefox somehow just because everybody feels like mozilla takes the donated money and tries on some "zanky" product
See The Ville_Lindholm comment really, those were my first thoughts too but I wouldn't really donate to mozilla like ever.
Ladybird's cool though. Maybe donating to them makes more sense but I understand they are not mature but that's exactly the point, they need way more funding (IMO) to get to a genuinely stable browser and need all the help that they can get as compared to the past.
Sure, we all like to stick the big firefox guy to beat the monopoly of google, but firefox/mozilla survives on a single deal by google, and if google ever stops the deal of paying for search engine, it can really shut down mozilla or maybe hinder it extremely.
I do hope that ladybird grows in a way where I can use it in compared to firefox in like hopefully 5 years since browsers are a mess.
It's become a meme, but consider WinRAR. Odds are, it's installed on your machine and you haven't paid for it. It just works. It brings up a polite nag box but it doesn't sell your data. It doesn't invade your privacy. It just works and makes enough money to keep getting updated.
It sounds hokey but, perhaps, Firefox should be trialware. Don't cut off the people who can't pay. Make a browser that just works and see how many people will pay for it even if they can use it without paying.
What is the size of the team that makes WinRAR or SublimeText? How frequently are these programs updated? I suspect web standards change more frequently than compression algorithms.
WinRAR is such a simple app compared to a browser. It probably only needs two or three full time developers to stay updated.
I was going to say "a better example is Reaper, a full-fledged DAW that has a similar business model..." then I realized even Reaper is probably a small piece of software when you consider what behemoth a modern browser is.
Does anyone choose to install WinRAR when 7zip or the default windows options exist these days? I haven’t downloaded it since the 00s
I do
I'd wonder if there's enough willing to pay within individual consumers or professionals that would support a browser development team, and my impression is that file compression and browsers are pretty much a software commodity where they can be easily swapped with other options. I doubt there would be a lot of uptake on licensing within companies, and any bundling a licensed copy with an OEM build PC would probably involve mozilla paying them instead of the other way around.
It seems like the browser only exists with a very important secondary motivation, for microsoft and IE it was tying the web and windows together with activex, and for chrome it was to give their ads/services a good presentation. The other alternative I wonder about is the Document Foundation with LibreOffice, where their offering is distinct from MS Office, and there's still space for other players to exist healthily.
The WinRAR model is actually a brilliant (and weirdly wholesome) example. It trusts users to do the right thing, doesn't punish them for not paying, and somehow it still survives
Works for Sublime as well.
The "paid Firefox" the author wants already exists, as LibreWolf ships almost the exact same code minus the telemetry, ads, and Google defaults for free. If people wanted that, they'd already be using it. The real problem isn't the business model, it's Mozilla's leadership, which has been compromised to hell and back at this point. No pricing experiment like this will fix the exodus.
Aren't they just piggybacking on Mozilla's work though? The point is to make the work that Mozilla is doing sustainable, not to pay someone else to ship a slightly modified version of it.
Yes, forks do indeed piggyback off of their code; that's the point of free and open source software anyway. And Mozilla, in its current state and current leadership, is not sustainable and still won't be with people paying for Firefox. Its marketshare is dwindling, and people are moving to forks such as Zen or to other browsers like Vivaldi. Adding a paid version will just make that trend go faster. And you don't even need to make a fork, because user.js tweaks such as Arkenfox or Betterfox exist anyway.
Mozilla has already millions of dollars than can be put into Firefox's development instead of the business they're getting into. It doesn't need even more money, it just needs to put part of it into engineers who would make Firefox what we need.
If I could pay Mozilla to not do specific things, it'd be pretty tempting
I don't think paying for Firefox is going to lead to Mozilla making decisions that benefit Firefox.
Probably would take that money and immediately spent it more on https://mozilla.vc/
I'll happily pay when what happened to Netscape, happens to Mozilla.
How about crowdfunding campaigns for specific browser features? Some users require compatibility, others - performance, some might pay for offline translation tools improvements, and, of course, GenAI stuff should get its own separate tier, if anyone is interested.
A few years ago I wanted to buy some Mozilla merch in order to support them. I'm glad they removed it because I would have regretted it.
Forget about Mozilla, donate to Ladybird—or another open-source non-browser project you like. If a competitor eats away the remaining market share of Mozilla's only "working" product, maybe they'll wake up.
Some people say that the hate for Mozilla Corp is not deserved. But the thing to understand is that ten of thousands of people have rooted for Firefox. Even if not contributing to the code or money, supported it, pushed for it, like telling everyone to use it, ensuring that what they do works well with Firefox despite corporate interest regarding the market share and all. Lots of people have proudly distributed Firefox/Mozilla marketing stuff to help with that. People have accepted what was forced to be done to accept the money from Google to support the project.
And there, in parallel, there are greedy executive in Mozilla that took a big cut of the money, and wasted shitload of it in stupid and useless things that went to trash In the end, achieving really little.
Yes firefox is a little bit better than in the past, but like just a single digit percent better compared to what it should have been if the money wasted was really used to develop the project. Interesting other projects that could have changed the world were underfunded, like thunderbird (that never thrived as much as now since the Corp is not charge anymore) and market shares are still as low as ever...
> Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model.
This is not true for the vast majority of people leaving. It might be true in the hyper focused tech bubbles that we frequent, though they certainly don't represent the vast majority of users.
First, all the normal people left. Those leaving now, like me, are former Mozilla fans, techies, die hard Firefox users. That hate the Mozilla business model.
I like Firefox idk
There should be a donation box solely for Firefox. If that exists, that is no different than paying for Firefox. We will see how many people would actually "pay" for Firefox.
If I am a customer, not a donator, I have different rights and expectations.
I want to be a customer. Of a Firefox that blocks ads, not serves them to me.
The risk with paid Forefox will be privacy loss, because the app will need to verify somehow the paid status. So there will be some unique, personal licence on the device and Mozilla can identify users using payment info.
The licence will be likely checked via remote API on app start.
Sell license keys... no need to check online.
Anyway the boat has sailed here as every browser connects to dozens of places automatically and if you go to any bigger site you are basically cyber attacked so advertising companies can fingerprint and track you.
Not trying to single you out here, I want to argue against how standard it has become to require a license server. A license server puts an expiry date on the software at an unknown point in the future. At some point the binary you downloaded after you paid for the software will stop working because the server got turned off, changed API, your internet connection is down, your local CA store got corrupted or any other kind of problem in the huge list of dependencies that goes into making a secure API call over the internet. Sure, you can put in safeguards against all kinds of issues, but that also comes at a development cost and you can never reach a point where the software will just continue to work, no matter what.
Even if you, as the company selling the software, can accept all of the above, a license server still is a liability. You sold someone a product and now you need to keep a public API running "forever" (as defined in your legalese). If something goes wrong on your end you are now denying the product you already sold to your customers who already paid for it. I know this is in the end all mitigated by some legalese, which is a whole different can of worms. You also need to make sure your license API is secure and can not leak user data or be twisted into exploiting your software during license checking. There is an ongoing cost to keep the infrastructure running.
As a sibling comment pointed out you can use local only license management like license keys or just nothing like WinRAR or FUTO Keyboard[1]. Yes, you will get users not paying for your software, there will be keygens out there. But even if you use a remote license check, there will be cracks on day 1, if your software is popular enough. I know this is an old and flawed argument, but if someone is willing to navigate a website full of malware infested, blinking ads to avoid paying for your software, they probably would not pay for it anyway.
As an example of what the end stage of hooking up every software to a remote API looks like, Stop Killing Games [2] has done a great job of highlighting just how bad it has gotten in the gaming market. I know there have been some heated discussions around the movement, but the core idea of being able to keep using the software you paid for, is something I absolutely support.
[1] https://keyboard.futo.org/
[2] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&query=stop%20kill...
I realize it's far from a perfect solution to finance the creators of the only browser I consider usable today - but I subscribed to Mozilla's VPN service some two years ago, even though I virtually never use it, and mostly to help them make a bit of a buck through me. (And still, it is nice to have the option of geoblocking circumvention at the ready, although I'd wish for them to just support "ordinary" wireguard/wq-quick as a client option).
Hmm that might make them reallocate developers from the browser to the VPN ...
I could be wrong, but Firefox VPN is a relabeled Mullvard VPN, which probably has enough engineers to keep things going well. Plus, it's a VPN service, I imagine a small number of developers is all it takes to keep it up to date.
But then your payment goes to this Mullvad company although maybe Mozilla gets a small fee.
Subscription to their email forwarding service Relay is another possibility.
I still like Firefox however I think it has lost already. It was Mozilla's management failure. Chromium past it years ago and I don't think it can be changed.
I am always surprised Rust came out of that org.
But not surprised that they canned the team & cancelled the project. It thrived outside Mozilla.
How? How does one corp mess things up this bad?
They're not a real corporation in the "making profit by shipping widgets" sense. They've been funded by a huge annual grant from Google. So none of the management understands in their bones how money is made or how money is necessary for a company to survive. They have never built a successful, profitable product.
Instead of play-acting as a corporation, they might have decided to become a non-profit software foundation, which would have been a very honourable thing to do. But they have not, for example, built up a huge war-chest in case the Google spigot ever stops. Instead senior management has frittered the money away on their own salaries and absurd money-losing projects and acquisitions.
That was Eich-era, and the org was very different then.
Tbh firefox is excellent.
Having an £1/month subscription that you could take any number of (including zero), would be easy and generate some income.
There have been some mis-steps to be sure, but also some cool stuff. People often focus on the negative.
If you want to help fund Firefox, you can for now just pay for a product https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ and not use it (if you live in a country Mozilla accepts money from). Be vocal about it that you do this to support Firefox (e.g. reply in the discourse thread). I personally recommend leveraging MDN for this as it's right now the closest to Firefox, as in it's part of the Firefox organization within Mozilla. I would hope down the road we could just directly for Firefox, but we need to put money where our mouth is.
I was going to respond with my usual point that money paid to the Mozilla Foundation cannot legally be used to support Firefox, but it turns out you're right: MDN and several other products are actually part of the Mozilla Corporation. The exception seems to be Thunderbird, which is MZLA Technologies Corporation.
The VPN product is very good, it's basically a thin wrapper around Mullvad, arguably the best VPN on the planet right now. At least from a privacy standpoint.
It's not anymore. They blocked port forwarding which interferes with torrents, are moving away from OpenVPN which I need.
In my opinion they are well on their way of enshittification and I moved to protonvpn.
Just let me donate directly to firefox. It's seriously about time this happened. Split off from all the Mozilla bs, it has its own independent management, and runs on donations, same as Thunderbird.
I even theorise they could cut the Google funding. There are so many people who would donate to firefox, but don't, because 1) they dont need the money, and 2) the money wouldn't go to firefox anyway. I even remember talking to a long time Mozilla employee at fosdem, and him telling me donating was pointless for those reasons.
They're not a good steward of this project and imo they should let it fly free. The problem is Mozilla would die without it because nobody cares about anything else they do, so their donations would plummet.
Firefox is supposed to be committed to serving the user before itself yet I see that as a sham. They put ads on their new tab page and phones home when starting and exiting. It’s the least bad alternative but I’m not stoked about helping Mozilla which I feel betrayed by.
Yes! My pet peeve is people keep saying "no one would pay" or "it wouldn't work" but the thing is, as far as I know, it has never been tried.
For example Thunderbird is fully funded by donations.[1]
Of course Thunderbird's budget is in a different magnitude than Firefox but I'd guess the amount of users is also in a different magnitude.
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
> as far as I know, it has never been tried
Opera, up until 2000, was trialware that nagged users to pay. At that time, they were one of the first browsers to support tabs. In 2000 they put ads for non-paying users, and from 2005 they removed ads and survived entirely on Google money. Then in 2013 they became yet another Chrome-based browser.
Obviously, that was quite some time ago at this point. Perhaps paid web browsers' time has come again?
Opera corporation had most of income from embedded devices. Presto engine (and something they had before) could run on low end CPU without MMU and floating point math, with a few megabytes of memory! Browser wss just a side gig for them.
Weren't they also (at least in part) acquired by Chinese investors at some point in the not too distant past?
Yes, Opera has done a Theseus and is nothing like it was.
First of all, your donations to Mozilla don't go to funding the browser.
Even if they did, it isn't even enough to sustain the company to continue developing the browser.
> First of all, your donations to Mozilla don't go to funding the browser.
This is exactly my point. They should establish direct Firefox donations. I agree that it won't change anything overnight, but they need to start somewhere.
It would be death for Firefox given the scope of its mission
I already pay mozilla for relay. Let me pay for firefox so someone can make the case that suits should care about it
Running on donations is not a viable strategy for any long-term goal.
Mozilla needs to learn how to do the very hard thing and passively invest these donations. This is a viable long-term strategy. FF would have extra monetary momentum or inertia, and donation stall-out, however and whenever it occurs, would not be game-over for Mozilla.
Let us donate directly to Firefox development. That is the solution. You don't have to look anywhere else. Thunderbird is a good example of what can be done when the donations reach the project. I just hope they don't screw it up as well. I have zero belief in Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla leadership. And every decision they did to screw MDN and Rust among other things puts their competition in a better position.
Unfortunately, I am done pretending otherwise. I haven't seen anything that is indicative of otherwise. Especially after acquiring a behavioural ads company. I will believe when they make decisions that aligns with it. Not with marketing materials saying otherwise or cos of whatever Firefox fans are left is saying. I stuck through the Firefox abandoned phase until Quantum release even for work. It's not cool that Mozilla is doing this.
I already pay for my email and for my search engine. I would gladly pay for my browser if it came with an ad-free, privacy preserving model. Good software is worth paying for.
The tricky part is psychological: once you charge, you implicitly promise consumer-grade polish. If the address-bar jitters after an update, people will cancel faster than they would stop donating.
Since 85% of Mozilla's current revenue comes from Google paying to have their search engine set as the default on Mozilla, and given that this is at risk due to last year's antitrust ruling against Google, they will need to diversify regardless.
Mozilla dropped the ball and their financing structure killed my goodwill. I'd actually pay for a completely trackingless and privacy-focused Chrome since it's a better product, but I'm not going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a worse product.
> If Mozilla doesn’t do it, I fear someone else will.
What stopped someone else from doing that in all those years?
> Am I suggesting Mozilla entirely pivot to this business model overnight? Of course not. [...] Run an experiment...
But Google can see it happening and pull support overnight.
Mozilla cornered itself into this situation, any official effort to make Firefox "more independent" has to happen really fast if they don't want to get almost entirely de-funded instantly.
Their revenue in 2023 was $653 million. They would need 5.4 million subscribers willing to pay $10/mo, which is about 4% of their total userbase. Clearly that's a steep hill to climb, and couldn't be done all at once. The transition would be tricky.
Very tricky. First, it needs management change willing to go Jerry McGuire on the c-suite and Foundation, plus deal with all internal culture debt and oxidized dynamics.
Secondly, Mozilla would have to deal with Google - could be done, Google pays so a major browser exists, paid subscribers may help recover lost browser share for FF... And, that Google deal may be going away soon anyway. Probably negotiable.
Third, the free-tier and paid tiers need to be set in a way that everyone (OSS advocates included) are happy and there's tangent value for people on the fence for a paid subscription. Having people just pay because they want to pay for their browser is not a business plan, and Mozilla needs a real business plan moving forward.
I’m going to bump this figure once again here: Mozilla has made $37.5M from investment income in 2023. [1] That might not be enough to sustain browser development alone, but it is surely a lot of money and charging for Firefox would likely be a drop in the bucket (considering many people would just stop using it instead).
Cut the bullshit initiatives, fire the C-suite and put that money to work.
https://mozillapetition.com/
[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
Wouldn't the ones in charge of firing the C-suite be exactly themselves?
I have no idea how to solve such an organizational problem.
Actually I have no idea either. In a for-profit company shareholders could do the firing, of course, but for foundations it’s tricky.
The CEO is accountable to the board of directors and the board of directors is accountable to shareholders. As a nonprofit perhaps Mozilla's board is accountable to nobody - not sure.
After 30 years of Firefox, because of their wasting money and not improving Firefox, switched to Zen, very happy Zen user - hope they will switch to Ladybird engine if that ever becomes a thing.
I already posted a hot take [0], but this one is even hotter: there's no strategy that Mozilla could have employed to make any of their products popular.
I will substantiate that assertion with a simple argument in the form of a question: what were the most popular internet browsers in each period of history, for each platform, and why?
IE was popular because it came with Windows. Safari is popular because it is both Mac and iOS default browser. Chrome became popular because Google convinced you that IE was slow because it was IE, not because your PC was slow already.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549224
I too would be happy to pay for Firefox in a way that the majority of the payment went into Firefox development.
Perhaps we should stop calling open-source software "free" due to the stigma that comes with it. It's no longer a selling point, nor should it have been.
There are about 5.5 billion people on the internet. Firefox's "small" market share of ~5% is still about 250 million users.
I'm reasonably sure that a small fraction of those 250 million people are even aware of the concept of "Free Software" or "Open Source", or how it relates to Firefox.
Open source is a good enough label.
Open does not imply any freedoms. A software source could be openly put in the public but without license, hence you would not be free to use it nor to learn from it.
It isn't: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
Yes!
Telegram is a good example of a public app that was free, and bleeding, they introduced paid features and are profitable.
Never they forced you to pay for existing stuff, nor sold your soul on the way to profitability.
You might want to be more specific on the definition of "not sold your soul" when praising a messaging app that holds the encryption keys of their homemade encryption scheme on their closed-source servers.
Telegram also introduced ads, but yeah, it’s a good example. (It does however suck, but for unrelated reasons.)
.. as of yet, promises aside.
Someone should try porting the open source TG clients to the matrix protocol by the way..
I'm going with a hot take: these kinds of products should be supported by tax dollars, not with individual donators/payers. The market doesn't solve the problem of public goods, it just makes it worse.
Then you get into the situation like in US today, where a party/person can just cancel it entirely out of spite.
There is no one-fix solution for this.
This is not "hot" take, this is correct take in itself. The problem is the execution: how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency? How do you ensure that the funds are not stolen? How do you make sure that the product is actually used and you don't fund a thing that no one uses? And so on.
Those are the problems that every govt funded project faces, but they are particularly tough in software. We have many examples where it went very wrong so not many governments acting in good faith are eager to step into it. And you can't allow the government to intervene in development or management here, because this how you'll end up with government-mandated preinstalled browser on smart phones or with added backdoors.
One solution could be participatory budgeting where the end users will directly decide where to invest part of their govt-collected taxes. E.g., on your declaration you'd have a field where you'd like to invest X% of your paid taxes into project Y. This comes with its own set of challenges and admin overhead, but I don't see any other good solution for cases like this, because they are impossible to run under direct government control.
> how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency?
You don't. The state doesn't know what a project needs at a given time, and will try to apply cookie cutter solutions when they don't need it. What you actually do is two parts:
- Give a budget for each institution to spend on open source projects (defined by some industry criteria, or something)
- Force institutions to consider open source projects for free (as in no cost) digital goods, and a report as to why open source solutions when paying for a digital good or service. The later should be evaluated by a central organization that promotes the rational use of digital products, like the U.S. Digital Service, EU Digital Services Directorate, Digital Transformation Agency, European Data Innovation Board, Secretaria de Governo Digital, etc.
These two policies in conjunction would supply projects with the cash needed and foment projects to do useful things.
The post seems to present a false dichotomy:
I believe counter-examples exist for both models. Many FOSS projects have avoided becoming tools for user exploitation, while numerous paid software products have deteriorated due to corporate greed.The poster worked at Mozilla Corporation, so I think they’re saying that unless you pay for Firefox, it’s getting funded in other ways that aren’t in its users’ best interest, like MoCo selling user data, which they’ve admitted to.
But, when MoCo sold out its users, they lost the ability to ask me to pay, because what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
I’ll gladly donate and have donated to an organizations whose products I use where those organizations would rather fail and be dismantled than sell their users’ data. I’ll even pay companies that don’t lie about it. But, Mozilla said they’d never sell out, and then they did.
Fair. My main disagreement is with the "general principle" the original poster used to support their argument regarding MoCo.
> what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
nothing.
It's why i think browser (and other platform software, such as OS, or telephony/mobile platforms) should be FOSS funded by taxes, and "regulated" so that its always open access etc.
Relying on donation (ala, altruism of individuals) do not work at scale.
I don't think 'FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices' is implied by the article. What the article implies IMHO is that relying too much on ads leads to enshittification and bad practices.
If anything the average is the exact opposite. Venture capital ensures enshittification to recoup costs.
The problem is that a lot of the most influential FOSS only exists because of VC capital (or other dysfunctional markets), either because they sponsor projects directly, or they pay the salaries of the people who happen to do it themselves. FOSS has become a form of economic dumping that could be causing more harm than good. If Google couldn’t “dump” Chrome for free, or Facebook couldn’t “dump” React for free, maybe browsers or front-end frameworks would be regular, functional, competitive markets. Making it “FOSS” is just an inoculation against what would otherwise be considered an anti-competitive practice.
I use Firefox but donate to Ladybird and Servo. Mozilla Corp is too far gone but hopefully the next generation of browsers will have less corporate baggage.
I'm so exhausted by these threads. Hacker News is, if it's anything, a site built by tech entrepreneurs for tech entrepreneurs. If you really think you can do better, fork Firefox, hire some engineers, and have at it. Brendan Eich did exactly that! Go work there! Or skip some steps and look at the other browser startups to see if they already had all the ideas you do.
Do you have every right to whinge here, roughly ever few months? Absolutely! Do I have a right to call you a bunch of wingers? Also absolutely!
Discussions like this are exercises in true futility. Developers are a practically impossible customer base to monetize
IntelliJ and Github beg to differ?
There are so many privacy improving Firefox forks out there. These people should unite and start a non profit to handle further development that's in line with the least common denominators of what they all try to achieve and abandon Mozilla for good. Giving more money to this compromised entity won't help anyone. Mozilla should just die.
I, too, have been saying this on occasion. In my observation, Mozilla has been in an increasingly suboptimal position with Firefox, for a while now, as Google and Microsoft have largely settled on splitting the market in between themselves where the core of Chrome is developed by the former and Microsoft spends their effort on what they are [better] at -- integration with Windows in the form of UX-level features and whatever else that they do with it to build Edge. Firefox is increasingly seen as a "fair" nuisance that is slower, and by comparison can afford less effort development-wise. Look at some of the practically critical issues in their Bugzilla database -- there are features there that have been waiting almost a decade for implementation, and the discussions point to a combination of code complexity that requires acute insight into the browser that is your typical bell curve distributed over developers familiar with it -- the number of developers who are able to actually deliver on those features, can probably be counted on two hands. And that is in part because most of these people are getting paid to do other things. In the very least Mozilla directs their effort in a manner that speaks for itself -- why are some of these features, like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360870 that would be considered critical in today's Web development environment, not implemented after nearly a decade? -- If Mozilla _is_ paying the developers?
This is why I too think we ought to migrate to Patreon-like direct sponsoring of individual (or vetted group) effort to generate some development steam for Firefox. It might make Mozilla deny these developers write-access to Firefox repositories for all I know, but a fork cannot be prevented.
I've been using Firefox since its "Phoenix" days (good memories!), but it's lagging behind the competition more and more, and while I'd be first to admit we don't need half the features Google is busy putting into Chrome which then "magically" appear in Edge (what a devious alliance, that), some of them are sound design but are absent in Firefox, to the detriment of developers. In short: Firefox is losing more ground faster than ever before, at some point the boundary conditions will cause it to no longer be a viable alternative for the average user, I am afraid. Which will cause a "cascading failure" where no developer will test for it, and you know what happens then (because we've been there before).
I feel like we would pay and it would get worse somehow
I would rather pay for Kagi/Orion if they ever went cross platform. I like the idea of paying for my search and browser package with LLMs bundled in. I don't want to get locked into the Apple ecosystem even more than I am so I going to need Linux/Android support at least in Beta
I would pay for Orion if it was open source (at least their WebExtensions implementation). Still a nice browser though!
The real idea here should be that if Mozilla is accountable to its paying users, a bunch of incentives are fixed.
I would be very happy if paying for firefox meant that I knew when it would become Servo
Remove blockingWebRequest from Firefox, much like Chrome has done. Then charge $20/year for a version that allows you to use it across all of your devices.
I'd definitely pay that as its adding a lot of value.
This thread is a perfect example of why the ad-driven model will win every time. Most people don’t actually want to pay for things (that’s just what gets parroted in anti-AdTech posts here).
It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).
I don’t feel optimistic for the future of Firefox given it seems they’re likely to lose their primary source of funding in the coming months.
What alternatives are there? The temporary benevolence of a mega-Corp with a vested interest in online advertising? Crypto mining in the browser? Replacing affiliate links?
I haven’t seen a solution that seems practical here but it seems clear to me that if privacy-motivated, anti-BigTech HN commenters won’t pay for it, no one will.
>It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).
I think this is in larger part because people don't like the decisions they have been making. I think an executive team that had stayed focused on firefox or successfully brought in revenue to support it would have much less backlash on this point. People boycott other companies for similar reasons.
I have no intention to pay just for Firefox, the browser. A browser is not that special anymore and there are plenty of alternatives.
However, I do want to pay for additional features and services, like a solid ad-blocker, integrated VPN-networking, privacy features like email relays or anti-fingerprinting, a safe and reliable cryptocurrency wallet, a smart cross-platform password manager, a privacy focused gmail alternative, integrated detection of fake reviews, bot messages and sloppy AI content, AI summaries, …
Add value to Firefox, in a coherent, meaningful and effective way to make using the internet secure, enjoyable and interesting again. Do that and take my money.
> A browser is not that special anymore and there are plenty of alternatives
All Chromium forks.
Browser engines are special. Firefox is the only non-WebKit derivative with relevant market-share currently.
They'd kill Mozilla for working on those instead of X.
Let me donate, at least...
By the way, how do you prove that a paid for version has no tracking?
By releasing the source. FOSS software doesn't mean gratuit.
Not enough since you get binary builds. The sibling comment is a solution.
What stops someone else from just offering a download of release builds for free?
I understand FOSS can be financed when the customer is a business, but when it's a user?
Nothing, just like nobody stops people from releasing modified builds now in fact people do (waterfox, ...). Trademark law provides a moat, as do fees to get into proprietary app stores.
Nothing, but it doesn’t work for closed source software either.
Pirating a FOSS app would probably have less of a psychological barrier, but I think it would be more frowned upon instead. (I won’t judge you if you pirate Photoshop, but pirating Inkscape? Shame on you!) We’ll have to see how it plays out though.
By shipping the source code and doing reproducible, signed builds
I'd pay too for a version without sponsored shortcuts and suggestions.
I don't want Mozilla to sink so I see why they've done this kind of thing in the past, but I really don't like it.
> Today, I happily pay for software (including free and open-source software!) that puts users first, including Proton, Standard Notes, Kagi, and others.
Uhh two of those are primarily services with dedicated clients not just software.
I totally agree with the article otherwise. I don't want to donate to the foundation to support Firefox. They'll just use it for side projects and it does nothing to reduce their dependency on Google. Just let me pay for a version of firefox that has a nice contributor badge, and doesn't have Google as a search engine installed. It doesn't have to be something that's worth the money.
Also they could make the sync service paid. And reduce the free version. I'd gladly pay for it. They've said they'll never make us pay for it but I don't understand why not. It's a service that costs money on an ongoing basis.
IMO they should also go back to a more community driven approach. Not treat themselves as a mega corp with an overpaid CEO. But more like a startup. Because really, size-wise they're only startup sized. The only reason they pretend to be a big tech is because they have so much Google money to throw strong. A project like KDE (Which I sponsor monthly) provides a lot more software without all this overhead, and works much better along with the community. This is how I would love to see Mozilla.
But maybe ladybird will be what I'm looking for.
Ideologically I am all for this. The usuals: if you don't pay for the product then you are the product, and what not.
But practically, this will likely just kill Firefox (and Mozilla).
Obligatory: Thunderbird improved its situation, including financially, and code quality, after Mozilla discarded it. Perhaps Mozilla is just bad, and we need a new foundation.
People want to support software that respects them
I entirely agree, if there was a browser that let me be a costumer instead of a product I would 100% pay and use it everywhere.
Kagi.com/orion
It's apple only ? Linux pls
can someone explain what is happening to firefox for posts like this to exist?
I use firefox daily and while i'm aware of market share dropping, it's still a reasonable browser to use.
Is it just speculation now on the future of firefox?
Why not fund LibreWolf instead? Or maybe even ladybird?
Librewolf is just mainline Firefox with a bunch of tracking patched out, so not much work happens there.
This all sounds counter-productive.
Free software of such magnitude could and should live only by source code contributions, not money.
More millions for the CEO!
Mozilla pushed out Brendan Eich because of his poltical ideals. Because of that I am unwilling to support them.
To clarify, by "political ideals" you mean thinking gay people don't deserve the rights straight people do, right?
And then they promised to be the browser which would "protect your privacy"! Then they went on to do opt-out telemetry and claim ownership of user data so that was all a joke as well. The org deserves so much worse than it's grappling with.
Are you describing banning gay marriage as an "ideal" here or is there more controversy I didn't hear about?
Nope, that’s the one. They’re upset that someone who is against human rights was ousted.
Opinions and actions have consequences.
Exactly! We're discussing so many of the consequences!
Lobbying the government to restrict his employees’ freedom to marry who they want was indeed a political “ideal”, but its actual content is of course important to the context.
You make it sound more noble than him trying to make his personal “ick” into binding law.
> Mozilla pushed out Brendan Eich because of his poltical ideals. Because of that I am unwilling to support them.
Specifically - it was his PERSONAL ideals, not affecting the company in any way, shape or form. THAT's why it is so outrageous.
I wonder how “political” that was and whether it was more office politics. Maybe he was standing in some people’s way and they found an excuse.
Undoubtedly that was part of it, but it also was a nationwide struggle session with articles in major news outlets.
Which political ideals?
no. It is very clear that they will either spend it on bullshit, or pay it out to the ceo or something. And then selling out because "they're broke"
Who's going to tell him about Mozilla's situation?
> Charging for open-source software may sound hypocritical, but even the Free Software Foundation believes software fees and software freedom are completely compatible.
Paid support always has been allowed in free software. The issue here is two-fold:
1. When most people hear 'free software' they immediately think it is 'free' as in gratis (for nothing) and expect free support.
2. Especially for funding browsers it has always been an issue around who is going to pay for the long-term support without ads, tracking or VCs.
I would pay for the development of a decent free browser. I'm sure a lot of people would.
The problem is that Mozilla is so badly mismanaged that we don't feel paying for the current state of Mozilla. Mitchell Baker's tenure as CEO was disasterous, and the new CEO Laura Chambers had a bad start.
We already paid for Firefox through decades of donations in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars MoCo has received over the years from Google that was definitely not a bribe in exchange for sandbagging Firefox by firing most of the Firefox devs. That's what the community got in return for our decades of support because again, we've already paid for Firefox.
At this point we should just fork Firefox or focus on IceCat instead.
How could anyone consider tossing money at an organisation that wastes as much as it does pretending it's a publicly traded company?
The executive pay is disgusting and reflects in no way the performance of the products. This money should be going into engineering and outreach.
>"Some might worry that people would flock to alternatives if Firefox became a user-funded product. I disagree. In fact, I think the exact opposite is true. Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model"
Sorry but that's just... delusional. Yes the moment Firefox would charge money and become a paid product 90% of people would switch over to Brave et al. The average internet user or even Firefox user does not now what Mozilla's business model even is because they're not terminally online.
A browser like Firefox if it wants to compete with Chrome and wants to have an impact on the internet needs to be free because the average internet user is willing to spend exactly zero dollars on software. If anyone could make more money charging for their software than not they'd already be doing it, unless you think they hate money.
Same goes for all the tirades about Mozilla's management. Again the average person has no clue about it, they don't read news about software company management. Firefox has been losing ground because Google owns half of all major sites on the internet and Android and ships as a default on tons of devices, it's that simple.
> people would switch over to Brave
Ironically, one can pay for Brave.
you can pay for services they've tacked on the browser, just like you can with Firefox if you want to, but neither of them are, as the author demands, going to charge for the browser because they know perfectly well they might as well burn the office down
[dead]
Someone should fork Firefox, strip all copyrighted stuff, and severe all ties to Mozilla. Worked great for Rust, Servo, Thunderbird and several other projects dumped by Mozilla.
But honestly Firefox has way too much technical debt. Starting new browser (Ladybird, webkit) seems like much better way to go! There are several independent browsers!
Thunderbird is de jure still a Mozilla project (through a subsidiary, MZLA).
And no, severing all ties wouldn’t work – not unless you find a viable financial model. Selling access for builds (Ardour-style) might work, but I’m not too sure.
My understanding is Thunderbird is self funded from donations.
> not unless you find a viable financial model
First reduce expenses by several magnitudes. There is no reason browser should need more than a github project, build QA servers, and 10 paid core developers. But you would need much better codebase for that!!!
As for income, donations come to mind. You can still sell default search, just not to google.
20 years ago browser companies had income from selling their rendering engine for embedded use. They also did consulting...
I mean I do agree – donations plus endowment should work pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549144
There is also Servo which shares some code with Firefox (Stylo, Webrender) while rewriting significant parts.