40 replies
2d1h
It is obvious why Firefox does this though; they have no income otherwise like Google does. Firefox users somehow think that using is "supporting" Mozilla/Firefox, but it is not, and they would not pay for the browser, or pay a subscription free. Privacy-friendly ads are a reasonable way for Mozilla to survive long-term -- if they are indeed privacy-friendly.
Ultimately you probably either need a clean-room NGO that ensures the data cannot be de-anonymized, or accept that ad impact counting is BS anyway and only measure profit increases across A/B ad phases.
I would pay for a browser that was 100% ad- and tracking-free. I pay for an email account. I pay for YouTube. I pay for several streaming media services. I get that people are used to browsers being free, but no reason that can't change.
You are very rare. Most people are not like you.
Apple tried this with iOS 2 and 3. Minor versions cost users roughly 5-10 USD per update.
Therefore many users did not install the latest OS on their devices. The cost, although small, was a barrier for many people.
Apple quickly pivoted and now all software updates are free of charge to all supported devices.
If Mozilla starts charging for Firefox, I predict either people stick with the oldest version that is free, or stop using Firefox and use a fork that maintains its free (in cost) license. Or maybe only 2% of users convert to a paid version of Firefox.
OS updates are not comparable.
Apple charging for updates is idiotic because as a user I don’t have a choice to go use a different OS.
You do have a choice, just keep using the OS version you have. Just like using the an older Firefox version.
Adding security updates and new features costs time and money.
Apple seems to have made the economics work out well with devices alone.
You don’t even have to touch their services revenue to consider ongoing iOS development a significantly successful return on their investment.
If Apple delivers a defective device to the customer, I see no reason why they shouldn't be fixing it using the money the customer originally paid. A security vulnerability may eventually leave a device completely unusable.
There are a couple of problems with this argument. One is that with a device (especially a premium one) the cost of support for a reasonable lifetime is considered baked into the price. The other is that security updates imply a security issue, meaning the company sold you an insecure, i.e. defective device in the first place.
The point is that with browsers there's also the option of using an entire different one, not just keeping an older version of the same browser.
I don’t disagree with your point — however apple only charged for the early iOS updates on the iPod touch. And they only did it to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — which required that if you upgraded a device not on a subscription, you had to charge.
They stopped doing it after they lobbied congress to change the law.
https://www.macworld.com/article/189247/ipodtouch-3.html
Honsetly, pay-what-you-want-if-you-can would work well. Just make a button appear once in a while (that you can permanently turn off in about:config).
If firefox asked me once a month "Enjoying the entire internet? Is it worth $1 to you?" I'd press the button often.
What stops you? Are you not satisfied with the ones on offer? Is there a compatability issue that's a show-stopper?
What paid browsers are on offer with good technology? The only ones I'm aware of are still chromium based or I think mac only, so that's a pretty bad feature set.
The thing is, you cannot pay for Firefox even if you wanted to*, so the assertion that people wouldn't pay is unproven (but has good circumstancial evidence). I'd still prefer they make a paid version without this crap.
* Donations to Mozilla go to a non profit which is separated from Firefox development and has questionable effectiveness in general
After all these "I would pay for Firefox if I could" comments, it would be fun for Mozilla to start a Gofundme like page, where if it hits $300M (or whatever amount they're getting from Google per year) they'll make it an option, otherwise they'll go back to trying to find another revenue source.
It's very hard to believe that an average user would ever pay for a browser, when alternatives like Chrome and Safari exist. It's the same as paid email services, in my opinion. Like sure, there will be some segment of users who'll do it, and they'll probably get $10-20M/year if it offers some features free email services don't. But hitting that $100M through donations on a yearly basis would be hard when there are free equivalent alternatives.
Mozilla is like Wikipedia, where the vast majority of the funds they receive go to causes unrelated to development or maintenance of their core product (web browser or encyclopedia).
For example, acquiring ad companies.
Mozilla Foundation did not acquire an ad company, and none of their dollars can be legally used to acquire and ad company. Once again, HNers fail to understand the difference between Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation, and conflate all their criticisms.
I'm well aware of the convoluted corporate structure and that convoluted structure is one of my primary criticisms of Mozilla.
You're attacking two strawmen:
1. The average user doesn't have to pay for the browser in a donation model, you just need enough users to feel passionately enough about it to fund it sufficiently to develop it.
2. No one is arguing that Mozilla should replace their revenue from Google overnight with donations. We're just asking that Mozilla give us the option to pay for Firefox already.
Another user (trying to demonstrate to me that donations would never be enough [0]) figured that if we assume a similar rate of donations as Thunderbird gets then Firefox would bring in $70m/year just in donations.
That is a heck of a lot of money. That funds 140 developers even at inflated Bay Area salaries, 280 developers if you're willing to branch out of the Bay and offer closer to $200k/year on average as a base salary (still an insanely high average rate in most of the country and the world). Even if you took a full 50% for general/administrative and overhead, that sum would still pay for 70 bay-area or 140 rest-of-the-world developers.
If Mozilla really does need more developers than that for Firefox specifically, then fine, they can keep accepting money from Google—no one is saying they should only be funded by donations. But that they don't even make it an option is frankly bizarre.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901664
You can, since Firefox is open source. Just hire a dev.
For example, these folks:
https://www.igalia.com/
The reason many companies don't offer a paid option to remove tracking is it can be seen as an admission by the company that they know tracking is wrong to some extent. So these companies would rather just force it on everyone and pretend like there's nothing wrong with it.
I pay for Orion through Kagi. I would gladly contribute to the salaries of developers to maintain the Firefox project.
I also pay for Orion, but can’t use it much until the multi-container support is working well. Right now Firefox is the only browser that does this right.
Upvoting you in the hopes that more people in this thread will put their money where their stated principles are and help support a privacy focused browser with clear funding sources so that Orion doesn’t go the way of Opera.
I also used Firefox’s containers a lot. In my case, I often need to log into multiple AWS simultaneously, or at least bounce between them quickly enough to be a major hassle if I had to log out of one to log into the other. Now I use Safari’s profiles to do that.
What’s your Firefox use case that Orion doesn’t handle? (Sincere question; that wasn’t meant as “it works for me so stop complaining!” snark.)
I'll be honest, I was waiting for Orion RC 128 to get released, since that's when the multi-container feature was supposed to land (according to [1]). I just updated Orion RC, and the profile management is pretty nice, but seems to be missing some things: (1) assigning full or partial URLs to always open in a specific profile, and (2) profile assignment on a per-tab basis, rather than per-window.
Other than that, the browser is pretty amazing. Blazingly fast, support for both Firefox and Chrome extensions, and lots of customization. There's a lot to love about it, and as soon as the two features above land I'll likely be switching to it as my primary driver (on MacOS)
[1] https://orionfeedback.org/d/43-something-like-firefox-multi-...
Orion isn't available for Linux.
True, not yet. It is still proof that people are willing to pay for a browser that aligns with their priorities.
You can't reasonably claim "they would not pay for the browser, or pay a subscription [fee]" when it is not even possible for a user to donate to the Firefox project specifically.
You can. There are a lot of open source projects that solicit donations, and if you talk to the developers you will find out that practically none of them get donations that would support even a single developer.
The only thing that seems to somewhat work is Patreon, which seems to work fine for some developers that are good marketers, but even there the number of creators that can support themselves is very small, and I don't know of any Patreons that support more than a single person.
To support a browser, you need a team, and there is no plausible way to pay for that team with donations.
It's not that nobody has tried financing open source with donations, it's just that nobody has found a way to make it work yet.
No, AFAIK you cannot.
The inability to donate to Firefox is a valid and longstanding criticism of the Mozilla corporate/foundation setup.
Mentioning this deficit in a comment chain about the projects financial sustainability is relevant and appropriate.
It is also true that many projects have funding problems, but that does not negate the parents point.
Mozilla is not a particularly good steward of Firefox and there should be a way to donate specifically to Firefox development, if just for Mozilla as an indicator on what should be their priorities.
Sorry, I think I wasn't clear. I meant to contradict the statement "You can't reasonably claim ..." with "You can [reasonably claim]".
What I am saying is that it is extremely unlikely that people would donate to Firefox, even if was possible to do so. At least not enough to actually pay for more than a few developers. (And you need more than a few developers for a browser, even if you cut useless features nobody asked for like Pocket integration.)
Its rather annoying that theres no way to support firefox without sending money to a Mozilla ceo who could use it for some silly side project
What browser has a subscription user base that could support Mozilla?
At some level, trusting that privacy-friendly advertising through Firefox actually respects privacy is going to have to involve trusting Mozilla. Mozilla seems to have gone out of its way over the years to erode user trust, and this is just one more step down that road. As the author says, if Firefox is even sneakier about this than Chrome, what scope is there for trust?
I don't think Mozilla is going to pull a Google and deliberately choose to become evil. Mozilla simply doesn't have (or want?) the resources to hire competent product people (if such a thing even exists) to manage features and marketing. This is the problem with running software as a company instead of an open project where the product is the end rather than a means to profit.
I paid for an Orion Plus lifetime license (browser made by kagi). I'd happily pay for Firefox too if it was an option.
"Privacy friendly" (not really) ads are not a reasonable model. That just makes them a chrome knockoff, and there's no longer a purpose for their existence.
A reasonable way to survive would be to have invested part of the half billion dollars per year they've been taking in for the last 15 years and built up a trust to permanently pay for developers.
Besides money, market share must also be important for Firefox. Otherwise the web becomes Chromium-only.
I'd pay 100 dollars yearly for Firefox. At least. If it would deliver on the core product, and drop all advertisement crap in the build they ship me. It baffles me that this is still not an option.