The saddest thing I see in these comments are always people hating on some minor thing like Pocket or something and who has decided to go with Chrome instead :-/
I mean I get the frustration but this is "cutting off the nose to spite the face"-level logic IMO.
BTW: There was always something. Back in the day I think people hated on awesombar and used that as an excuse to stay with IE6 ;-)
> The saddest thing I see in these comments are always people hating on some minor thing like Pocket or something and who has decided to go with Chrome instead :-/
What should people do? Quietly put up with Firefox being hostile to them simply because it's Firefox?
Firefox has to pay its own way by being good. It can't just assume user blind loyalty because they think they're the good guys.
A week ago I've experienced a fresh-off-the-shelf PC without uBlock Origin. That was some scary five minutes, not gonna lie. I can't imagine using my Android phone without Firefox with uBlock.
> “Subscriptions are – I sometimes joke – like trading money for services, an idea whose time has come, rather than getting spied on and hoping everything works out.”
I laughed in a sad way.
I would actually pay for Firefox now, but I think charging for it isn't going to work out. (See also: Opera)
Indeed. A paradox inherent to the notion of paying to avoid ads is that it identifies you as someone who has disposable income and is willing to spend it, i.e. someone who advertisers really want to target.
Pretty much the only way to make it happen is a foundation that has it written into their incorporation documents that they will never take ads or government bans. The incentives are too strong, so the large corporations get to manipulate the development of technologies by dangling ad money.
Ad money isn't innocuous. It's about control, because if the recipient were to do something an advertiser doesn't like, they pull the money... for example strong privacy/anti-advertising technologies. This desire to please the interests of large corporations leads to large scale conformity.
Fundamentally, advertisers just want good ad<->user alignment and the zeitgeist is to accomplish this with invasive tracking. However, it needn't (I think) necessarily be this way. What if, instead, we looked at the material on the page and said, "This is a blog post about Linux. Let's put our advertisements about sysadmin books/seminars here." Or provide the content creator with a library of ads that they can choose from (they will typically be incentivized to select the most effective ads by performance-based compensation). Maybe prioritize the sorting of those ads against keywords in the content.
Essentially, as opposed to profiling the user, profile the content. And give content creators more control over the user experience to discourage sleazy ads and encourage ads creators actually want on their site.
There's some optimism wrapped into this, so I look forward to someone popping my optimism bubble.
You can't run a capitalist economy like that because everything is decentralized, requires growth, and advertising is an accelerant of consumer spending. However, if production is publicly owned and planned, advertising is mostly unnecessary. No market economy = no adverts.
Within capitalism, some regulations can make it slightly less invasive but the imperatives of the system will over time break down those regulations.
I don't think the problem is with ads. It's with personalised ads (or more specifically how they go about showing us personalised ads).
A model where a site shows you a notice asking to opt in for personalised ads (otherwise show generic ads anyway) would be fine. But this means no site, no third party service should be allowed to track the user or collect data unless opted in.
I used to work at a largely ad-supported community site.
Users requested an ad-free paid membership, but when we ran the numbers, we found that those people willing to pay made the site much more in advertising than a reasonable subscription could.
However a while after I left they launched the service, so maybe they’ve managed to make it worthwhile.
I cancelled a subscription to the Economist because after paying about 10x more than other news sources their online website still showed obnoxious ads. That irked me. If I'm paying a premium for a service good news I want it without ads and digital is my primary viewing media. But I don't think many companies can resist double dipping.
Also, subscriptions for software always have a kind of smell. I'm not paying for a service - the service is done by my PC via execution of the software (using my own power, storage and computing resources too, btw). So superficially, I'm paying for the permission to execute some software on my PC.
It makes more sense if this is understood as paying to continuously keep the software up-to-date. But then, this would be the most honest thing to do: Request money for each update but let the user executive a particular version as long as they want.
This leads to the issue of users running the insecure versions of the software, then blaming the vendor. Why didn't v30 have all the security fixes of v40!?
Yeah, sorry, then how about we stop producing so many security vulnerabilities?
Because otherwise, we will end up in a world where no running code can be older than a month and software that is not actively being developed as part of a profitable business is automatically dead.
Code does not rot and can be copied arbitrary many times. Why do we bend over backwards to turn an abundant resource not just into a scarce but into an expiring resource?
> But then, this would be the most honest thing to do: Request money for each update but let the user executive a particular version as long as they want.
What software subscriptions don't work this way?
The true desktop subscriptions, where you lose access to the software after you stop paying, seem to all offer the traditional alternative (pay once for the current version).
I was a big fan of Pluto TV until it got purchased by Viacom or whomever. Now, just like cable TV, there are 800 channels going at any given moment, and all of them show their commercials at exactly the same time.
I joke, but only partly, that there's not a jury in the country that would convict me if I murdered whoever instituted that change.
I’m afraid it’s inevitable. If there’s a large enough audience, someone will be willing to pay to market to them. Almost no business will be able to say no to the money.
One of the biggest problems with this whole discussion is that people, including those who should know better, are not making distinctions between ads based maybe on broad characteristics vs ads that are based on tracking every move you make across the internet, purchases in stores with credit cards, and micro targeting based on specific interests.
With just ads you can place a direct value on how much people are willing to pay to not see them. Netflix does this. Hulu does this by offering 2 services, as free and and supported at different prices. Normal business practices should create a market that allows people who are willing to see ads and those who wish to pay more to be ad free to both be serviced.
The problem right now with micro targeting and extreme spying is that you have a race to the bottom that has users paying for the services they use not through watching ads, or monetary payments but through data and information about themselves. That data is much more valuable than just for ads. It makes it extremely difficult for someone who isn’t the biggest player in a market to, for example, compete with the entrenched power. So it’s not just people watching creepy ads, but it also entrenches monopolies, and allows the likes of Google and Facebook to create new monopolies based on data they have gained from their existing monopolies.
Ads are, if anything, the least problematic part about the spying and data collection because at least they are open and obvious to everyone. Google and Facebook do far more creepy things than what they do with the ads privately, but the largest uproar has been about ads simply because that’s the most transparent use of the crazy data collection practices.
> distinctions between ads based maybe on broad characteristics vs ads that are based on tracking every move you make across the internet, purchases in stores with credit cards, and micro targeting based on specific interests.
That very broad and general advertising of which you speak will only dwindle with time and therefore the distinction will not be a very useful one. Already ordinary billboards are being upgraded to smart billboards that can scan and identify the people walking by (facial recognition, Bluetooth, perhaps soon gait, etc.). The decline of print media means that we’re losing the one kind of advertising that can't hook into technology to track you.
Ads have more adverse effects than just being distracting and facilitating spying. They are privately designed propaganda. They spread misinformation, establish harmful standards and desires, manipulate emotions and make it harder to find unbiased market information that would be needed for a rational purchasing descision.
Call me a pessimist, but I think Netflix will only be ad-free for as long as it is a competitive advantage. The day will come when that’s no longer true, and the ads will come. When their growth has stalled and they have raised prices as much as the market will bear, how long can they resist “free” ad money? Will their shareholders just let them leave it on the table?
Netflix invests massively in tracking how users engage with content on their platform. They’ll either sell these services down the road to third parties or become a kind of quasi-monopoly player doing this in the entertainment industry, like Google or Facebook.
Chrome is interesting because Firefox shows it could actually be a standalone business, and it's one of the scarier ones to let Google keep because of how much power it gives it.
Firefox is great. I use it as my primary browser on both my android and linux workstations. I do have to drop to Chrome occasionally for some aspects of web development, not because the tools are better, but expose things differently. I... should probably send Mozilla some money.
Have they? My impression was that you were never able to donate to Firefox directly. You could only buy the whole package, that is: Firefox + some stuff you don't care about and some stuff you might disagree with.
- Profits from the corporation (after engineers are paid for) goes to the foundation
Net money never goes from the foundation to the browser it seems.
(Please anyone correct me if I'm wrong. Also, I'm not necessarily saying their projects are bad, only that when they go at the expense of Firefox something is seriously wrong.)
There should be a "Firefoxium" version of Firefox with all base functionality, but without any commercial additions, like Pocket or upcoming VPN.
Would there be a way to sponsor such Firefox development directly with monthly subscription like OpenCollective or Patreon?
Would EU be interested to sponsor development of free browser to keep browser market competitive?
I like Firefox but the forced bloatware of Pocket, and the inability to remove it turns me off of Firefox. I don't see why Pocket isn't installed as a standard extension that could be easily removed.
I think it's an interesting point to discuss whether state funding is possible for FOSS software like firefox that creates market competition within a certain segment. It would certainly work well with a more pure view of capitalism, to prevent the monopoly that is the chromium browser (engine). And I also think the EU would be a great candidate for the size/importance of an alternative-to like firefox.
With the ubiquity of Web browsers today, it would be very disappointing and dangerous for a single corporation, and one whose business model is to exploit people's identities and online activity, to have that much control. Whether government or whatever, we really need to find a way to rescue Firefox in particular and have a healthier funding of FOSS in general.
The funny thing about this comment is that if Firefox had the market share of Chrome, then it makes perfect sense. And as other comments have noted, there are several forks of Firefox, which is great.
But the reality of 2020 is that Firefox might not exist in the near future because so few people actually use it. Splitting the user base further into a Mozilla-free version accomplishes almost nothing except helping ensure that that Chrome-only future comes to pass.
If having Pocket and VPN features bundled with Firefox helps keep Firefox around for the long term, that's a concession I wish we were all willing to make.
You did not mention Waterfox. It seems to have better compatibility with modern web sites than Pale Moon. Not sure what is going on with Seamonkey these days. I may have to give that a try. The problem I have with Firefox is that it is now way too similar to Chrome to bother with it. Maybe Seamonkey has retained its own identity.
I think I would like to see mozilla do is act as a micropayments service provider to websites based on aggregated browsing history, and take a small service fee for it.
I already use firefox. There's no other company right now I would trust more with some knowledge of my browsing history. I believe I would pay for a subscription service to support both mozilla and the news websites I visit.
Are you just curious, or is this like a witch hunt thing?
Brave doesn't "get us" (the people it was advertising to) but I also don't want to see them suffer for trying. So I don't think I'll share that information with you.
I'm just curious because I didn't find this supposed ad campaign within a few minutes of searching, so to me it seems like it might never have been an official thing at all.
The TOR browser is based on Firefox, so this also affects them, right? A chrome-based TOR browser would be the biggest joke in the history of online rights. I have the impression that Mozilla, and all of us, are at a crossroads here. I really hope they find a way to continue the development of Firefox and their other products without having to resort to prostituting people's identities.
Exactly what ffpip said. The TOR browser does much more than just run your traffic through TOR to counter website fingerpriting, and Google being an advertising company, I see a conflict of interest to provide you with the anonymity that the Firefox-based TOR browser currently provides.
tor "browser" is but not tor itself. for example brave (based on chromium) has a tor window built in. and its extremely handy for many use cases (not all but then for that other 10% you really should be running tails etc...)
I think the TOR browser does a lot more than just run a browser through TOR. It uses Firefox's built-in fingerprint counter-measures; it spoofs the user agent; it starts using specific window dimensions to counter resolution fingerprinting; and many more things that I am probably not aware of. Running a random browser through the TOR network does not really anonymize you from the myriad number of ways a website can fingerprint you, and the TOR browser / Firefox go to some lengths to protect you from those things too. I think Google, being an advertising company, would have a conflict of interest in providing that same level of anonymity.
I tried to buy a subscription to Firefox VPN to support Firefox, but it's not available in my country even though their partner, Mullvad VPN, had no issue doing business with me.
I also just now noticed that Firefox VPN has changed name to Mozilla VPN, and I'm not really interested in funding all of Mozilla since I don't agree with how they spend their money.
Even non users should donate to Firefox: the presence of a independent browser in a market dominated by browsers following the agenda of this le that huge tech company benefits the whole market. Of course using it (or any other independent browser, but only FF has a chance to stay in the double digits) and contributing to its market share would be even more beneficial. Apple’s Safari will never effectively stop Facebook’s sneaky spyops as Facebook is a core partner for Apple’s richest platform. And Chrome, well...
As far as I know I can not donate to or for Firefox development but only to Mozilla. And we all have seen and heard and read what they will use the money for (hint: massive paychecks for the C-level) and how their priorities are set.
So: While I love the product, I very much dislike the company. And that's why they won't get any money from me.
Mozilla is definitely NOT equal to your average open-source project like Debian or LibreOffice. The development on those projects is done entirely by volunteers. Maybe some of those "volunteers" are paid by companies to be contributors, which is the case with the Linux kernel.
But Mozilla is a large company. It may be a nonprofit, but there are HUNDREDS of millions in Google money funding the company and paying salaries for the 1,000 (??) or so employees, including, as mentioned above, a very well-compensated C-suite.
Firefox and whatever else Mozilla produces is funded with this very, very large pot of money. Could they run the Mozilla operation on $10 million (or $20 million) a year and invest the rest ($90 million to $390 million) a year in an endowment that could ensure Mozilla's independence in perpetuity? They could do that, but like many nonprofits, the "profit" goes to a large number of well-paid people. I can't think of another open-source project with such enormous funding that isn't part of a for-profit company.
Red Hat isn't asking individuals for money to fund Fedora or RHEL development.
I don't know what crazy universe a company -- even one hiding behind the framework of a "foundation" -- gets $100 million to $400 million a YEAR from Google -- and still has the chutzpah to ask individual users to make a contribution.
I love Firefox, and I absolutely agree that browser diversity is important. I use Firefox daily. But Mozilla is a huge outlier -- a "nonprofit" dragging in hundreds of millions and spending it. Do you think Debian collected more than $1 million last year? I'm not sure it did. It sure didn't get $100M or $400M. Mozilla is a huge company. It just doesn't have shareholders.
C-suites and layers and layers of managers are a cancer in this industry. All they do is talk, virtue signal and "strategise". Firefox needs to part from Mozilla. You put 6-10 engineers and a good technical lead together, they'll fix this madness in 6-12 months.
Like mentioned in "bullshit jobs", most of these managers (not all), are there to create bullshit and deal with bullshit created by those like themselves. It's the tech leads, engineers, DBAs, sys admins (and teachers, nurses, doctors, garbage collectors, etc) who should be driving Rolls Royces.
I used to use Firefox. After I learnt about Mozilla and their corporate structure, I changed to Brave. Now I use Brave and Vivaldi mostly.
If the situation is so bad that Firefox is seen as necessary to prevent the internet being dominated by Google et al, there should be regulation that prevents those companies from privatizing the standards of the web.
It honestly doesn't seem reasonable to ask people to donate to a fundamentally commercial software product for the sole purpose of fixing a broken ecosystem. It's like as if Ford was starting to write laws and regulations for road usage and we'd start donating money to Volkswagen
Totally agree, in theory. In practice US regulators are too short sighted, incompetent and possibly corrupt (in that they benefit from the status quo, and are heavily lobbied) to deal with the situation; also, if Firefox dies, it’s another thick nail in the web’s coffin.
I don't think there is any way to donate to Firefox.
Even if there were, they can never survive on donations. Google gives them around $400m/year. The Mozilla Foundation only gets around $3m/year in donations. Hell, Wikipedia only gets around $100m/year in donations and they push really hard for it and literally everyone uses Wikipedia.
When you understand the scale of funding it's pretty obvious that donations are irrelevant.
Unfortunately the overt political stances of Mozilla, the questionable executive Pay Packages, the continued reduction in their support for developers, and their clear mis-steps when it comes to user trust and privacy preclude me from supporting the Mozilla Foundation with monetary contributions.
I think we need a new Foundation that will fight for the Users of the Open Web, Mozilla is not that foundation any longer and in fact their continued existence I believe prevents something new from raising up from their ashes
I wonder if they should, actually. I suspect a large part of what keeps the money flowing to Mozilla is the fear at Google of antitrust proceedings against them if Firefox dies. Maybe I'm wrong and Safari is independent enough, but I do wonder, especially with IE dying as an independent browser, whether or not it'd cause antitrust issues in the EU.
Given the questionable decisions Mozilla has made in the last weeks, I feel that donating to them is wasting money on politics, not making sure a critically-necessary product will continue to exist.
I'm using Vivaldi now. Yes, it's Chromium-based. But it comes with preinstalled anti-tracking / anti-ad filters, and it's crazy fast.
Every few months I open Firefox to see if they have fixed pinch to zoom on Windows touch screens / track pads, an issue which has been underway for literally years[1], and every time I go away disappointed. It's one of the most basic operations on a modern computer, supported by every other browser and almost every other piece of software, and it utterly beggars belief that it doesn't work in FF. There is zero chance I contribute my hard earned cash to such a poorly run project.
How do other companies that develop free/open source software make money? (Other than the professional support/training model that Canonical and Redhat use - it probably doesn’t apply to Firefox)
They mostly don't. There's practically no companies that make meaningful revenue from opensource. Pretty much all of OSS development is a side effect of building services for other revenue streams.
Interestingly Igalia seems to be making money off of contributing to browsers, among which Firefox. On quite a smaller scale than Mozilla though, I imagine.
Igalia's model almost certainly couldn't cover maintenance of the entire browser engine and the desktop/mobile browsers, yet alone any ongoing improvement. It gets specific platform ports supported on an ongoing basis (typically for embedded platforms) and new features of interest to their paying customers supported (which are, inevitably, mostly major corporations), but that's largely it.
As far as I'm aware, Firefox is the browser engine they contribute least to: they have many more clients who have much more interest in WebKit or Chromium based browsers and that's where the majority of work goes.
You mentioned Canonical and Red hat IBM. For Canonical I actually don't know their model (they had Amazon search integrated but haven't seen them in any business context) RedHat (now IBM) has servicesl/support.
For other I see with notable scale
- MySQL (nowadays Oracle) with services/support and dual licensing
- Qt (Trolltech/Nokia/Digi/Qt Company) with dial licensing and consulting services
-MongoDB, Redis, ElasticLabs all burning VC and support, dual licensing
After those the list becomes short for me. Most other open source software is side business, from doing something else (i.e. many Apache or Eclipse projects) or supported by small companies/individual developers who do consulting around it or got sometime from their employer to work on it.
- npm: burning VC (and offering commercial repo) (now GitHub/Microsoft not sure they want to see profits from it or only control of the environment)
I know they sell it, but I haven't seen them (my bubble is small of course) I only see desperate attempts (like different attempts of bringing an "app store" to Linux, now with snap)
Canonical is Mark Shuttleworth's passion project, like the Gates Foundation. It makes a little money but only survives because he feels it's the most efficient use of his funds for charitable purpose, not financial investment.
Giving software away for free isn't a business model, was never meant to be, and the math just doesn't work. There are some very small niche projects where a few small core developers make a living doing contract development implementing features and fixing bugs, but it typically doesn't scale into a company.
Most successful "open source" companies use an open core model, where they provide services and proprietary add-ons related to an open source project that they contribute to but may not actually own. Think GitHub or Docker.
In addition to other comments, every year proprietary software gets more power and profitable, providing more funding for development that makes it harder for open source to compete. That's why "they year of Linux on the desktop" gets a little farther away every year, for the largest software products like the UI shell, web browsers, video editors, etc
There were multiple successful open source projects here where companies payed for taking part of the planning of new features. Google already pays for the built-in default search for Firefox, I don't see a reason why other services couldn't be built in as long as the user gets something in return and keeps its privacy/freedom.
Like Pocket/etc.? I seem to remember the userbase of sites like this excoriating Mozilla for including that, so I would assume any such effort now would be similarly rejected.
Pocket was a too strong integration probably. Offline browsing on mobile phones is still a missing feature, and pocket doesn't solve it well. Firefox could have added the necessary features for a great pocket plugin (and its competitors) instead of just integrating with it (and buying it).
Blender is a much more successful example (and there was another open source project here on HN with $300k income where companies could pay for features to be implemented, but still not company specific).
1.) Many of the companies that make the most on open source are not software vendors per se but still significant contributors in their own right. Example: Google, Facebook. Kubernetes exists because of Google. Facebook has a ridiculously long list of significant projects. [1] It's really important not to ignore this because you are otherwise missing the core economics of the open source movement.
2. There are lots of companies making good money operating open source in the cloud. Data Bricks, Confluent, MongoDB, and Amazon (specifically Aurora) are good examples. I'm not saying the companies are necessarily all profitable, only that their COGS look good and they will be profitable in due time. The key is you need to have software that is worth paying other people to operate. Data management is common to many of the main contenders.
Mozilla's problem is they aren't #1 and don't offer software that would allow them to become #2.
I many cases they’re selling a complementary product. Think Vercel for Next or consulting for Ubuntu. The free thing creates a market for the expensive thing.
There are many ways, one way that likely will not work for FireFox either is to charge for the Complied version with a packaged installer. So while the source is open, and if you know how to compile it you can do so yourself, most people and businesses are lazy and will just pay a few dollars to have someone else do that.
The problem is Edge and Chrome are free already so charging for a compiled browser is probably not going to work
With more than 30% of employees laid off this year, it is going to be extremely difficult for Mozilla to get back market share from other browsers. If they were not able to do it before, how can they do it now with fewer people? And without market share, there will not be enough alternative revenue streams to have a google-free future. Firefox will continue to slowly lose users, at around the current 10% a year, until it becomes too small for google to even pay them anything anymore.
Sad but that’s the reality. Trying to compete in extremely competitive areas like VPN services is not going to work.
They did not fire employees working on Firefox. The questionable layoffs were the Servo devs, which were arguably working on next-gen stuff. But the Gecko team remained intact.
It’s actually not bad for orgs to trim expenses. Given Mozilla still has solid revenue, we could view these layoffs as refocusing on stuff that matters (Firefox, plus revenue diversification via services), while ensuring they stay in business for years to come.
Everyone knows that they are too reliant on Google’s revenue stream. Now that they are taking steps to diversify and to be leaner, everyone jumps on them.
Well I for one am optimistic about Mozilla and Firefox’s future.
They did, and some pretty notable ones at that. Filtering https://talentdirectory.mozilla.org/ to the "Engineering" department is largely people who worked on Firefox. The loss of David Baron for one has got to be felt: he's one of the few people who had a good high-level view of all layout and style work in Gecko and its integration with the rest of the engine. And he's not the only pretty senior engineer who was let go: there's definitely some dubious lay-offs there.
The Servo team was pretty small (around half a dozen people by the end, I think), and many would've been fantastic people to keep within Mozilla, even if refocused to Gecko.
And it must be said that Mozilla have been trying to diversify for years, largely to little success. Losing Mozilla entirely would unquestionably be a loss for the web, and it would be a real shame to lose another browser engine.
They strayed too far from the core product and had to be cut. I consider it a sensible decision from a budget perspective? How much does it make sense for a nonprofit to fund a growing language? Now corps can spend their money on Rush instead directly
Getting a large enough group of contributors is hard. For Linux this works since it was built over decades and contributors come from variety of backgrounds (students who want to learn, hardware companies who want to have support of their hardware, users who want it to be fast, companies which want to make it sort of a product (distributors etc.))
For "end user" software like firefox this is harder. In the kernel a contributor can start by providing a self contained device driver. Such a concept doesn't exist in a browser in similar form. From such a driver the kernel contributor can grow into neighboring subsystems.
Google decided to go with Chrome. Microsoft jump on their ship and is unlikely to switch, again.
Who else could push this? Facebook (would we like that!?), Twitter, Amazon?
I'm most probably somewhat naive here, but if you could fork the latest release, remove all Pocket, VPN, whatnot stuff and just give me that as a build, I would be totally fine with it.
I love the core product, I really don't need any of the fluff around it.
>, but if you could fork the latest release, remove all Pocket, VPN, whatnot stuff and just give me that as a build, I would be totally fine with it.
You've overlooked the main idea of the parent post. Let me try to restate it another way...
You can't just fork a web browser's source code and be done with it. A web browser needs constant ongoing new programming coding to keep up with the ongoing changes in the web ecosystem.
Already, we've seen the complexity of new web standards make Opera give up on their Presto web rendering engine and Microsoft abandon their Trident engine for Internet Explorer. Both companies switched to Chromium source as a base to save money and resources.
So no, you eventually would "not be totally fine with it" -- because your forked browser would eventually be useless without a big team of programmers to maintain it.
As examples of web browsers quickly becoming obsolete, I tried Opera 12.18 (last old 2016 version with Presto engine) and here are many problems I encountered:
- Google Maps -- Zooming in and out makes everything blurry. Street View hangs the browser. Opera is missing WebGL acceleration that today's browsers have
- godbolt.org -- compiler explorer online C++ website is broken with a blank screen and doesn't show any code panels
- chase.com -- that bank doesn't allow sign in with old Opera browser
- reuters.com -- images on news stories are blurry and don't load correctly
- various websites with newer TLS encryption protocols break because they don't exist in Opera
Nobody wants to take a fork of the Presto engine and expend 1000 man-hours to fix all those problems. Same would happen with a hypothetical fork of Mozilla Firefox. You still need an active programming community to keep up with evolving web technologies. Again, if Opera and Microsoft (with its billions) gave up, it should give an idea of how daunting it is.
You're right. I was thinking that "add-ons" like Pocket might be modularized enough so that removing those parts would be easy with every release, maybe even (semi-)automated. Like a "Firefox Light" version.
Maybe this could even be maintained by Mozilla, I would not care in that case. Just the bare core browser. You can always choose to install "the normal" Firefox if you want the "full experience", but for me a browser is just another tool, I don't need pocket and alike.
Yeah, maybe it's a little piece and nothing to worry about. But what will they come up with next? Maybe at one point they`ll integrate the "Mozilla VPN" functionality directly into Firefox. Or any other fancy thing they thought the world would need... So I guess it's more about software simplicity, but I find that helpful. I think it also helps developers if they have a clear goal ("build a great browser!") and don't need to take care about integrating side-projects and stuff.
See the other comment: I would have hoped that removing "modules" like Pocket would be easy enough so it would be feasible to maintain a "Firefox Light" version.
> Getting a large enough group of contributors is hard.
Not really. This is a thought-terminating cliche in the form of a just-so explanation. The group of volunteer contributors who were underpinning Mozilla's success at its peak was quite large and healthy, complete with its own governance model. But then Mozilla Foundation essentially handed the keys over to the Firefox subproject, which in turn made a bunch of questionable hiring decisions, including people that deeply affected the project at an organizational level.
The really perverse thing is that a very similar thing had already happened once before—with Netscape. It was those very circumstances that led to Mozilla's original governance model as an insurance policy against any one corporate group accumulating too much power after getting it into their heads that they were the real reason for the project's upward trajectory and the only thing they needed to do to really get things on track was wrest full control of the golden goose. Mozilla's "failure" began when every random yahoo who managed to get through the company's hiring process was ipso facto part of a privileged class and anyone not on payroll became second-tier consideration at best (or more realistically, seen as a nuisance).
This "failing", of course, is the kind of failure that grew revenue to half a billion per year even as Firefox was getting thrashed, so whether you consider that a failure or success will come down to principles. If your idea of success is tied to the organization's charter, its openness and approachability, enabling people to shape the future of the Web even when not on the payroll under a browser vendor, and its "market" adoption and the tractability of developing an independent browser engine, then Mozilla is a failure. If, on the other hand, you're predisposed to seeing high revenue as a success, then Mozilla has been winning up to the point when it will inevitably fail due to unsustainability and its approach of salting the earth around it, pulling up the metaphorical ladder, etc.
> For Linux this works since it was built over decades and contributors come from variety of backgrounds (students who want to learn, hardware companies who want to have support of their hardware, users who want it to be fast, companies which want to make it sort of a product (distributors etc.)
That's a pretty accurate description of Mozilla for a large part of its history pre-FirefoxOS. Mozilla was incredibly effective even before the number of people getting paychecks from anything called "Mozilla" had reached the low hundreds.
Yes, Mozilla had/has non-employed contributors. But I (wrongly?) never had the impression the amount of contribution was thaaaat notable (while individuals like Ben Buksch, whom I remember from that time, got some attention)
How hard it is, we can see even within Mozilla related products: Since Mozilla stopped the Mozilla Suite (SeaMonkey) hasn't seen much uptake, and Thunderbird is mostly stagnating as well.
Agreed in principle. It's my primary browser and it seems to me that it's already in good shape (technically, and feature-wise). And the project is not starting from scratch.
So if the financial incentives aren't there yet, and the only remaining value that Firefox provides is privacy and user freedom (along with good but not perfect performance), I'd imagine the FSF could be interested in managing something like this. And can maybe start with part-time volunteers.
This makes it even harder from my p-o-v. Most contributors want to create something new and not maintain old legacy, grown over a few decades. Diving deep enough is work and might happen once in a while for a bug which is a pain for somebody curious ... but tough sell.
The unfortunate reality is that there probably isn't a google-free future for Mozilla. I don't see any way they can generate the same amount of capital that they get by partnering with Google, etc. But, that doesn't have to be a bad thing. As far as I know, Google doesn't pull Mozilla's strings and, the 2 companies can exist as competitors and partners.
As long as devs keep drinking the Chrome kool-aid it won’t. Developers actually have a lot of pull but do not exercise it. As the job market shifts to more blue collar workers. There is less expertise required and those workers are responsible for running tools they don’t understand rather than coding and making ideas. Google’s best interest is to keep development behind closed doors until they’re ready for the public to use their tech, rather than having new tech developed by other companies or via open source.
I think this is a case where "It's the economy, stupid" gets right.
We need to build a economy for open-source projects or else the tech titans will eat the world.
People need to wake up that its not the nineties anymore, and without a better ecosystem for independent projects to thrive, we are doomed to depend on the scraps of what the titans left to us (mostly their open-source collaterals)
Some independent project might pop here and there, but keep them going without structure will lead them to a slow burn to death.
That might be like saying, in 2001, there isn't a Microsoft-free future for desktop computing. Apple gained a little market share since then, but it's a mostly moot point because of the rise of mobile. There's going to be a next big thing, and there's a good chance it won't be Google...or Google will just buy it.
If we didn't have our own issues with zero-funding and all-volunteer efforts, we'd have gotten Snowdrift.coop launched by now (we're still working on it, hope to show some real public updates soon). Our focus on 'crowdmatching' is aiming specifically to address this type of dilemma, and we'd be thrilled to see it work for Firefox. We just need to get the whole thing functioning (and proven with more likely first adopter projects, tweaking and solidifying the platform) before Firefox dies.
The basic point: we all (the users and general public) do need to be donating. But I do not donate myself to Firefox. After all, I'm underemployed, low-income, and volunteering thousands of hours for related software-freedom and anti-ad etc. efforts. For me to donate won't change the overall situation. We need a critical mass of donors, hundreds of thousands, millions of donors. We cannot get there by just asking each person to unilaterally sacrifice. I want to pledge to the world that I'm willing to be part of that critical mass. I'll donate more of what I can for each of you others who join me in such a pledge.
This is about the best we can do short of funding these sorts of public goods with taxes. As long as it's open to the public and not paywalled (and that's fundamentally important), we're stuck with the freerider dilemmas and need to resolve the challenges of collective-action and coordination.
I read (probably on HN) that Google keeps paying FF, so Google can point to FF as a viable competitor during anti-trust investigations. Since it seems those investigations are able to launch in the US, it will be interesting to see what happens to the relationship afterwards.
These conspiracy theories ignore how from ~2013-2018 Yahoo was the main source of income for Firefox. How is Google convincing their competitor to help them in an antitrust case?
You were suggesting that Mozilla's deal with Google was secretly for the purpose of protecting itself from antitrust regulations. Two groups, secretly planning something.
>That was a period during which Firefox had 2-4x the market share it has now.
In Jan 2013, they had 22%, in Jan 2018 11%, in Oct 2019 (last on Wiki) they had 9%. Most of their drop happened under Yahoo, and Google did not change their fortune.
>I hear that they pay them 450 million dollars a year (out of 500 million dollars in revenue.) Are you looking for another reason?
Their competitor in that sentence was Yahoo, how is Google convincing Yahoo to spend around $500 million a year to help them?
There's zero chance that google being the default search engine in firefox is bringing in a half-billon dollars a year. The number of people who make the effort to seek out and install firefox, but don't care what search engine they use so use whatever the default is - has got to be somewhere in the triple digits, if not the double digits.
Really? It seems to me that you're not understanding the average user at all. Everyone who gets a new computer starts by opening Edge and typing "Chrome download" or less often "Firefox download". Normal people know how to install a browser and like Google _because_ it's the default everywhere.
Firefox wouldn't even need the money if web standards weren't so insanely bloated that you actually need to hire teams of professional programmers to write and maintain a browser.
Web standards are bloated because that's what users want: features. That's like saying "Firefox would be fine if there wasn't any well funded competition driving up the feature count of browsers to meet consumer demand."
Actually no, Web was perfectly fine with HTML 4.01/XHTML, but then some people at browser teams decided to declare war on native apps, HTML 5 was born and we are a couple of years before ChromeOS takes it all.
I’d rather use and develop a PWA than a native app. So would all of my customers. iOS is the only thing holding them back. Usually we just wrap our web app in a native app for iOS and everybody is happy.
Google is adding to Chrome all the missing APIs from ChromeOS, and folks keep using Electron instead of daemons alongside system browser or Web widgets.
So from point of view of world browser market share, Safari is the only browser strong enough between what is left of Web and ChromeOS platform.
I don't see how this helps or even relates to your point that "Web was perfectly fine with HTML 4.01/XHTML"
Obviously it wasn't. Folks keep using Electron, ChromeOS, Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari and the HTML5 APIs that are common to all of them. If you took away everything that didn't exist in HTML 4.01/XHTML the entire world would grind to a screeching halt.
Anyway, I don't see any problem with the Chrome taking on all the features of ChromeOS. Give me more features and higher quality for free, I'm not going to complain :)
Also, Microsoft Edge has more users than Safari on platforms that I care about and they're the ones I'm jumping ship to if Google tries to take away uBlock Origin.
Meh. Everybody ran Windows too, until they didn’t. Software moves too fast. Even the hegemony of Android and iOS which is even more bothersome to many, will be broken before long.
Also, Edge is not Chrome. So, you can always run that if you don’t like Safari or Firefox. And I really don’t see Edge Safari or Firefox going anywhere so double meh.
I'm not complaining about well sandboxed multi-platform multi-arch webapps. Better than running an app in Wine because the publisher doesn't care about supporting Linux.
I seem to recall Flash being developed well before HTML5 along with ActiveX components and Java applets? People have been trying to embed "native like apps" into web pages for a long time, they certainly weren't just satisfied with plain html pages.
As means for easy distribution of native apps, and designers not wanting to dealing with the crap of doing Web design, which still hasn't been fixed in 2020, despite all attempts to make Web apps take on native apps UI engines.
None of those things would've lasted if the users didn't use the things created. Flash enabled video in webpages, games in webpages all things users flocked too and enjoyed.
Firefox is hardly at the forefront of 'thwarting advertisers'. Apple & Safari have been far more aggressive at this; Firefox is merely mimicking the policies that Apple applied ~3 years past.
We really need to have a way to talk about things without making it into yet another Good vs Evil fight.
Whoever it is that allows UBlock Origin/UMatrix on their platform, without making moves against them, is at the forefront of thwarting advertisers. Apple doesn’t allow it on iOS, so I’d still put Firefox ahead of them.
Mozilla would be smart to build up and endowment while Firefox still has a user base and is still paid for searches by Google.
I'd be really hesitant to subscribe to Firefox because looking at other things the company has done (Pocket, for one, and I feel mixed about dropping Thunderbird) and how Firefox was left to languish as Chrome gained a user base, I'm not sure this is something I want to directly support.
Given the Mozilla is turning on the developer network, discontinuing RD in to the browser space, and focusing on "other products" like VPN, Pocket, and other services I am left to wonder if there is a future for Firefox at all
Dev Tools is dead, Servo is Dead, MDN is dead, what is left.
The current administration of Mozilla seems to want to turn it into a "consumer services" company focused instead of a browser developer. I am wonder how much longer before they drop the pretense, shut down the foundation, and change their mission statement
hell I would not be surprised that with in 5 years they do not fall in line with what Microsoft called for [1] a little over a year ago and just make Firefox another Chromium based browser...
I wonder if the alternative is for the Rust foundation to one day buy out Firefox and pull it out of the claws of Mozilla if they are just going to have a nonprofit receiving donations not even going towards Firefox. Has anyone figured out what jacked up reason this is? My best guess is that if Mozilla is seen as selling adspace services (default browser search engine in this case) it is somehow seen as a for profit venture and would not allow them to have a non profit status, but at that point why not just have Firefox be like Chromium vs Google Chrome? Firefox Libre and Mozilla Firefox.
I fail to understand why we cant directly donate to Firefox and only Firefox. Most people really dont care for anything else Mozilla is doing outside of Rust and Thunderbird and tbe latter two seem to have a solid future as far as I can tell.
> I fail to understand why we cant directly donate to Firefox and only Firefox.
Because the amount of money donations bring in pales in comparison that the search engine deal does, but since that's something they actually sell, it (and therefore Firefox) is managed by the Corporation. At least, that's how I understand it.
Or have the Rust foundation continue to develop Servo, with financial support from corporations and users who would benefit from an independant browser engine.
I'd prefer a new browser that drops e.g. pocket in favor of secure communications features at this point.
The complex legal structure of Mozilla has always been some what sketchy to me anyway, The Foundation at this point I believe hardly has anything anyway, most of the employees I believe work for the Mozilla Corporation, which is owned by the foundation, but the Mozilla Corporation is for-profit, and is where most of the assets (IP, Pocket, etc) for Mozilla is owned.
At this point I see the Foundation has simply being a Marketing ploy for the corporation as they abandoned the core mission of the foundation long ago, it is just another for profit company at this point
Which is a damn shame. I'm okay with them building real products to subsidize the cost of developing Firefox, but they acquired Pocket which isn't really going to rake in much money from what I can tell anyway.
Well, a direct consequence of the ownership structure is that Mozilla hires FAANG-caliber engineers while paying them approximately 60% of what FAANG would (since there's no RSUs).
A Chromium based Firefox would further kill it off. It would only give Google full control of the web and is a very poorly thought out idea. It would cost more money to rebuild in Chromium than continue investing in Firefox. It would offer no better ability to bring in revenue either.
Gecko is stagnate and in maintenance mode, all of the improvements to Gecko come from Servo, thus no servo no improvements
>>Firefox Desktop, and Mobile
I am not sure what you mean here, these are core products so sure they remain, but they are advance on the backs of the other teams, the core parts of both FireFox Desktop and FireFox Mobile depend on the advancement of all the components that go into them, thus if all R&D is shut down which is appears has been, it is functionally a Maintenance project now...
Sure we may get things like Moving the Address bar from the top to the botton in FF mobile, big whoop-de-do....
All of the cools things coming out of Servo, DevTools, and other core systems are gone now....
Three of the four MDN engineers are still there, but their manager and all of the tech writers were made redundant. It's a damn shame, but it's not dead yet.
What I can't figure is how much browser core debugging will suffer with DevTools no longer available to inspect misbehaving in-the-wild JS/HTML/CSS -- code that behaves "right" on Chrome but not FF.
I mean I get the frustration but this is "cutting off the nose to spite the face"-level logic IMO.
BTW: There was always something. Back in the day I think people hated on awesombar and used that as an excuse to stay with IE6 ;-)