First focusing on AI and now this, already cancelled my donations, do we have a good fork to move to?
It’s hard because Mozilla need money to survive, and the world needs Mozilla, but it’s been hard for them to find a stable source of funding. Mozilla relying on their main competitor (Google) for most of their income is a massive risk. I can understand why they’re trying approaches like this, even if the users don’t like it.
Does anyone here have a suggestion as to a better way for them to increase their income?
Firefox Monitor and Firefox Relay are good ideas for subscription services that may be useful to users and hopefully get revenue.
When I looked closely at Firefox Relay, the email feature was redundant because I also have a service which does this, and the phone feature isn’t available yet. Looking at Firefox Monitor and the list of companies/brokers it monitors, these appear focused on the US which isn’t where I live.
I hope they can get revenue by promoting these services and making them useful for more people. This would be better than showing ads. I’d pay for a useful service, not to have an-free experience for something which is freely available with ads.
I think they should move firefox development back from mozilla corp to mozilla org, so the development process can be funded with donation again.
For example, wikipedia development and operation are funded by donations to wikimedia foundation, there is a commercial corp (wikimedia enterprise) but they’re not in charge of development and operation of wikipedia.
Firefox, on the other hand, is entirely funded by mozilla corp. Any money donated to mozilla foundation is not used to fund firefox development. Instead, firefox development must be funded from search engine deals and ads. Why can’t the community chip in to keep firefox alive?
I’ll happily donate 5 bucks now and again to Firefox development, but I don’t want my donation to go to a 5-6 million dollar CEO salary.
…and there is no way to do that, currently.
Which is why I’m not donating right now, even as a satisfied user of Firefox for 15+ years.
Wasn’t firefox a volunteer open source project at one point?
Mozilla has been a non profit for as long as I can remember, but they were never fully backed by volunteers. They managed to drag Firefox out of Netscape before that collapsed and worked on it, together with Thunderbird, but they have always paid at least a few people to do the work.
You can still work on Firefox as a volunteer, though.
Become a donation gateway for other opens ourselves projects.
Tell me about some cool opensource project on my new tab page, optional 1 click donation. Skim a few percent.
This way everyone else will promote firefox.
That’s not something that’d likely scale enough to bring any meaningful sum of money.
Even then it targets a tiny, tiny minority of their even current userbase, let alone if they want to approach more “average” users.
Why wouldn’t it scale?
The percentage of users that donate to open source projects they use is very low, and I’m not sure that’d significantly change just because Mozilla start asking people to do it.
Firstly, that’s not a scaling problem, you’re talking about poor uptake.
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters. That’s why a sophisticated organisation like Mozilla is so well placed to sell the stories behind some of these projects.
Thirdly, the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low. Particularly amongst more technical users.
Fourthly, this plan would actually drive users to Firefox. If Firefox is promoting donations for say, LibreOffice, then they would naturally have an interest in promoting Firefox.
With the advent of enshittification, free-as-in-beer tech is dead. I think people are realising that things need to be paid for. It’s very defeatist to just say “no one contributes to open source”. Why not try to find the format within which people might contribute?
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters.
That is a huge assumption to make without data to back that up. Do you have a list of open source projects with high numbers of user donations, with evidence that the numbers are due to marketing? Barring that, I think this is pure speculation.
this is pure speculation.
Of course it is.
That said, do you think it’s unrealistic to suppose that marketing might improve revenue? I do not.
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters. That’s why a sophisticated organisation like Mozilla is so well placed to sell the stories behind some of these projects.
This is definitely a good point.
the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low.
You’d be surprised. I’ve worked in ad tech. Retargeting ads (where you see ads for items you’ve viewed in the past) and abandoned cart ads (which you see if you add items to your cart but never check out, sometimes with a discount coupon attached) have very good clickthrough rates. Targeting based on customer list performs pretty well too.
In any case, I really doubt they could make even 1% of what they currently make with the Google deal. AFAIK they make around $400 million per year from that deal: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox
It’s hard for them to find a stable source of funding for the massive size of their org, correct.
But how many developers do you need to create a great browser? They don’t need 1100 people, that’s for sure.
1100 people does sound like a lot, but some of those employees are probably working on things other than the browser. I wonder how many people work on Google Chrome in comparison.
MozillaCoin /s
Nah, I think it’d be called something like… Mozilla Attention Token.
Hey what if instead of free adblock, we charged people for it? Also I’ll use a little bit of the profits to try banning gay marriage.
I really don’t understand where they are going with Mozilla’s new leadership.
Don’t they already show ads in pinned sites area. Since I am not a regular donor I click on the affiliate amazon link if I am purchasing something to support them. Now I feel like they are taking wrong signal due to this. More advertising enabled by default will make even harder to recommend firefox to new users.
This is a weird one. On the one hand, we have Mozilla, the last remaining browser company not sucking at the teat of either Google or Apple and we all expect for Mozilla to somehow generate enough money to pay enough employees to stay competitive on the other hand we have the users who expect them not to do anything to try and leverage their userbase to create financial independence.
The problem with Mozilla remains the same problem that they’ve had for a while. Mozilla doesn’t acknowledge the symbiotic relationship it has with its community and the community always over reacts, which means there’s a chasm where simple things should be easy but they’re not.
Take this for example, Mozilla only had to have a public facing discussion about this and then go and do it anyway.
Sometimes paying lip service works. But since they didn’t, you have people like OP who feel like something nefarious is happening and in the end Firefox users lose out as things like donations being pulled hurt.
Mozilla already shows ads, as do all the other browsers, however unlike the other browsers, you have a fully functioning uBlock that can and will remove anything that the preferences don’t cover.
Mozilla makes hundreds of millions from Google. Every single person could stop donating and they would continue along just fine (Well the CEO might need to take a 10 million yearly pay cut).
What weird is seeing people champion the enshittificstion of FOSS software.
My post covers all of your points.
And you don’t see Mozilla’s reliance on financing from its main competitor as a huge issue?
What weird is seeing people champion the enshittificstion of FOSS software.
People keep using this word in places it doesn’t apply. “Enshittification” is specifically about online platforms that are two-sided markets. That’s not the case here. It doesn’t just mean that something is getting worse over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Words mean whatever you want them to mean.
Only if you aren’t interested in a conversation where all parties have a clear understanding of what’s being discussed.
Eh.
The examples Doctorow user when coining the term were two sided markets, but if you actually read the original article for understanding, rather than to “well actually” on the internet, that the process being described is much more general than that, and is one of products or services becoming worse over time so that whatever value they provided becomes increasingly shifted toward shareholders.
This may seem weird in this case, still, because the only shareholder of Mozilla Corp is the Mozilla Foundation, but the principle still stands.
Moreover, you sound like a ridiculous pendant, because what’s actually happening here is that Mozilla is turning Firefox into a vehicle for advertising, which means it’s fucking entering a two-sided market… You’re arguing that the sky isn’t blue because it’s night time at fucking sunrise.
Is mozilla is showing ads, then it is a two-sided marketplace.
I don’t think this should surprise anyone, given the new CEO they got and the announcement that was made immediately afterwards, followed by the layoffs. Fortunately, there are Firefox forks that we can switch to as a form of protest, provided that the forks keep these changes out of their codebases.
One thing I predict happening is that this move by Mozilla could spur more activities for the Firefox Forks. It would be a good opportunity for the developers of Mull, Librewolf, and Waterfox to think of ways to make their respective browsers stand out or be unique. Maybe we can one day see an Android version of Librewolf or a new web engine get developed in response to all this mess. Just a thought, of course.
New browser engines already exists : servo ( rust), Ladydbird (C++) are actively being developed. Both are still far from being daily driveable, but considering mozilla is apparently shiting the bed it’s better than nothing.
Interesting… What would people shitting on other browsers for offering OPT-IN ads do now?
Oh, wait. Mozilla can do no wrong /s
Nothing to see here.
That bugzilla page says they targeted version 122 for this change. I have Firefox 122 on my PC and when I look at the about:config page, that setting is still set to False. I think y’all are freaking out about a very small thing.
If you use Firefox, and you check your about:config page and you see true for that setting, then just change it to false and go about your day.
Or are we all just talking philosophically about this?
Sure, you can change literally everything about Firefox if you pay a time cost. The defaults do matter because that’s one more thing to fix when installing it. We could say this about any negative feature.
I agree with all of that. 👍
I just didn’t see anyone else addressing where the change lives in the browser and how to un-do it if you want to opt out.
The tech communities are trying their hardest to get people to switch to Firefox. Meanwhile Mozilla is trying its hardest to get people off Firefox with decisions like this.
The purpose of Mozilla is to kill Firefox. That’s what Google is paying for.
I remember the last few versions of Netscape Communicator had a “Shop” button.
This was the sign that Netscape had lost the browser war and was giving up.
I remember the Amazon icon on Ubuntu. It is why I initially gave up on Linux after the first install…like WTF I don’t want Amazon in this new to me OS.
I’ve been hearing good things about waterfox
WTF?
I mean good, as long as they don’t build in shitty tracking and stuff.
It makes them less dependent on Google money.
Is there a picture of what this actually looks / would look like? Honestly, although it is going down a bad path, it isn’t actually all that surprising. Firefox already has sponsored address bar suggestions by default.
Pale Moon is the only independent fork that I know of that doesn’t depend on gecko or ff
ill be happy to be wrong, but there is no alternative. if we dont support firefox; were all fucked.
Pale Moon is the only alternative I can think of, it’s independent of Gecko and FF
Last I heard, which was admittedly a long time ago, Pale Moon was dangerously out of date with respect to security and web standards and not much more than a meme. I feel like I remember a significant change in leadership relatively recently, but has Pale Moon actually become a viable alternative?
Beyond that, WebKit is still a thing. Ladybird is too though it’s still quite a ways from primetime.
Hence why we need a public option.
I’m not planning to move anywhere tbh.
Mozilla is almost 100% financially dependent on Google right now, if that funding goes away then so will Firefox, the Gecko engine, and likely all the forks. With all the layoffs happening in the industry, we can’t rule out Google shareholders looking elsewhere to cut costs too, such as the massive subsidization of Mozilla. The little we can do is allow Mozilla to find other sources of funding that are optional for users IMO
Yes, stuff like pocket is garbage. But at least Mozilla allow you to turn it off, which is more than can be said for Google: on Android devices manufacturers have to pay a hefty “fee” just to allow users to remove the Google search bar from the launcher.
Regarding AI, mozilla’s memorycache is completely local (runs on the user’s machine) and does not call out to any servers. The new translation feature is the same. The only exception to this that I’m aware of is the AI helper on MDN, but the target audience of that site is already in a position to determine whether that is a useful feature or not.
I’m not planning to move anywhere tbh.
I do. If they go through with it than they’re not much better than Google.
If they don’t have enough money maybe they could start with cutting the CEO’s pay.
Likening this to the evils of google is such a wildly dishonest take lmao
On the contrary, it’s the only comparison you can make, since they are literally the only options.
Why? Do you really think Google started out evil, and not step by step by implementing “improvements” similar to this one?
this need to start from inside the company, lile the employers timing a walkout of something, other than that everything gonna stay the same
already
How considering to show ads and allow to opt out is worse that google? Have you watch Youtube?
