6 ms·

> What Mozilla is good at ... Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.

gkoberger 9mo ago
They do work on it. A lot. But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.
- beej71 9mo ago
  They could make it so we could subsidize development like with Thunderbird.
- viraptor 9mo ago
  > You can't charge for it They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a subscription. But they don't let me.
  - cjpearson 9mo ago
    You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. Any subscribers would essentially be donors. There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate, but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project to usable and competitive browser.
    - viraptor 9mo ago
      Oh no, it would be a donation and it's not going to completely replace all the funding of the parent entity of the project mentioned, therefore it's not realistic or worth trying. Right... That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
      - palata 9mo ago
        > That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote. What I understand they are saying is that donations wouldn't be nearly enough. Which is related to what you wrote, which is that you would gladly donate to Firefox (not Mozilla, but Firefox). They compared it to the largest non-profits in America, presumably because if we look at the money spent by Mozilla every year, that's similar. Right now Google pays for Mozilla, and if you wanted to replace that with donations, it would have to become one of the biggest charities in America. Which does not sound plausible. If I understood correctly, I'm not the OP :)
    - rtpg 9mo ago
      Thunderbird has succeeded at doing this and is in a somewhat similar spot (though huge asterisk there given the existence of Chrome)
    - dabockster 9mo ago
      > You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. You're forgetting that people will buy a product on brand identity alone. If the Firefox brand is solid enough, those forks won't matter.
      - palata 9mo ago
        I think the point is that if it was open source but free, it would require donations. And given the money that Mozilla spends every year, it would mean that the amount of donations they would need to receive would make them one of the biggest charities in America. Which sounds implausible. I think the argument makes sense, to be honest.
  - freehorse 9mo ago
    The problem I (and others that I see here) have is the lack of trust in mozilla's model, esp long term. Their economic reliance in google, their repeatedly stated goals of trying to engineer ad-delivery systems that "respect privacy", their very high CEO salaries, and their random ventures do not inspire much trust, confidence and alignment in their goals. And also the unclear relationships with their for and non-profit parts. If they can convince me that some subscription for firefox will strictly go for firefox development, that firefox will not pivot to ads (privacy respecting or not), and all the other stuff they have, including executives' salaries and whatnot, are completely separated, I would be more than happy to subscribe.
  - qudat 9mo ago
    They honestly should charge for it.
- Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
  > But the issue is browsers don't make money. What?! Browsers might as well be money printers! Have you heard how much money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari? The higher Firefox’s user numbers, the more money Mozilla can make from search engine deals. Conversely, if Mozilla keeps trying to push a bunch of other initiatives while Firefox languishes and bleeds users, Mozilla will make less money. If you don’t like this form of revenue… well, I don’t know what to tell you, because this is how web browsers make money. And trying other stuff doesn’t seem to be working.
  - palata 9mo ago
    On the other hand, we typically find it unfair that Google can buy their search supremacy by being the default search engine. We can't complain about Mozilla taking the money from Google and at the same time complain because they take the money from Google :-).
- tigroferoce 9mo ago
  You can and you should. There are people that are happy to pay for email, for search, for videos, for news, for music. I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser. The idea that software is free is completely wrong and should be something that an organization like Mozilla should combat. If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.
  - dabockster 9mo ago
    > The idea that software is free is completely wrong > If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that. Strongly agreed. Free software, either $0 or through stronger licenses like the GPL, have their economics completely shifted as an unintended side effect. Those new economics tend to favor clandestine funding sources (eg ads or malicious supply chain code). But sustainable funding honestly isn't Mozilla's strong suite (or tech's in general, for that matter).
  - palata 9mo ago
    > I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser. I admittedly didn't check the numbers, but a comment in a sibling thread says that if Mozilla was to replace their revenue with donations, they would have to become one of the biggest charities in America. Is that even realistic? Like would they make that kind of money just from donations?
- enlyth 9mo ago
  Doesn't Firefox make them the lion's share of their profits just from the Google payments? If they let Firefox atrophy to the point it will have no market share, let's see how that works out for them
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- account42 9mo ago
  That should not be a problem for a nonprofit which the Mozilla foundation supposedly is.
  - gwd 9mo ago
    Non-profit doesn't mean non-revenue. They don't have to pay their investors, but they certainly need to pay their developers.
    - account42 9mo ago
      Most nonprofits don't generate "revenue" from their "product". They provide a valuable service and get paid by people who agree with the mission.
      - Rastonbury 9mo ago
        Based on comments in here and people willing to pay I wonder why they haven't got the Wikipedia route of getting donations, would that piss off a lot of users? I do think most people would understand a non-profit needs donations.
glenstein 9mo ago
>Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed 12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.
- roenxi 9mo ago
  > They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis. Is that comparison supposed to make their management of the code base seem better or worse? Chrome, Linux and Rust are arguably colossi in their niches (Rust having the weakest claim). Firefox's niche is Chrome's and it doesn't do that well. It used to be that at least Firefox had it's own little area with more interesting extensions but obviously that was too hard for them to handle - yes I'm still grumpy about ChatZilla.
  - glenstein 9mo ago
    Well I replied to a comment suggesting they weren't working on Firefox, by noting how much work is being done on Firefox. But you seem like you want to change the subject to a different one, which is the extent to which you can gauge "success" relative to competitors, or infer management efficiency, which is fine but orthogonal to my point.
  - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
    You might be interested to know that there are still some legacy extensions that work on today's Firefox. Specifically, when Firefox breaks VimFX, I'm done with it. But while it works, I'm sticking with Firefox. It's like having the power of Qutebrowser but with the extensions and performance of Firefox.
mmooss 9mo ago
I assume they work on Firefox 10x more than anything else. Is there data?
autoexec 9mo ago
I might be in the minority here, but I actually like Thunderbird.
- dabockster 9mo ago
  I've daily driven Thunderbird for over a decade. You have very few options for having a single program manage multiple email accounts outside of Outlook and Thunderbird anymore. Maybe Apple Mail on Mac (and whatever Microsoft is preloading on Windows these days), but that's it.

gkoberger 9mo ago

They do work on it. A lot. But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.

beej71 9mo ago
They could make it so we could subsidize development like with Thunderbird.
viraptor 9mo ago
> You can't charge for it They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a subscription. But they don't let me.
- cjpearson 9mo ago
  You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. Any subscribers would essentially be donors. There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate, but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project to usable and competitive browser.
  - viraptor 9mo ago
    Oh no, it would be a donation and it's not going to completely replace all the funding of the parent entity of the project mentioned, therefore it's not realistic or worth trying. Right... That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
    - palata 9mo ago
      > That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote. What I understand they are saying is that donations wouldn't be nearly enough. Which is related to what you wrote, which is that you would gladly donate to Firefox (not Mozilla, but Firefox). They compared it to the largest non-profits in America, presumably because if we look at the money spent by Mozilla every year, that's similar. Right now Google pays for Mozilla, and if you wanted to replace that with donations, it would have to become one of the biggest charities in America. Which does not sound plausible. If I understood correctly, I'm not the OP :)
  - rtpg 9mo ago
    Thunderbird has succeeded at doing this and is in a somewhat similar spot (though huge asterisk there given the existence of Chrome)
  - dabockster 9mo ago
    > You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. You're forgetting that people will buy a product on brand identity alone. If the Firefox brand is solid enough, those forks won't matter.
    - palata 9mo ago
      I think the point is that if it was open source but free, it would require donations. And given the money that Mozilla spends every year, it would mean that the amount of donations they would need to receive would make them one of the biggest charities in America. Which sounds implausible. I think the argument makes sense, to be honest.
- freehorse 9mo ago
  The problem I (and others that I see here) have is the lack of trust in mozilla's model, esp long term. Their economic reliance in google, their repeatedly stated goals of trying to engineer ad-delivery systems that "respect privacy", their very high CEO salaries, and their random ventures do not inspire much trust, confidence and alignment in their goals. And also the unclear relationships with their for and non-profit parts. If they can convince me that some subscription for firefox will strictly go for firefox development, that firefox will not pivot to ads (privacy respecting or not), and all the other stuff they have, including executives' salaries and whatnot, are completely separated, I would be more than happy to subscribe.
- qudat 9mo ago
  They honestly should charge for it.
Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
> But the issue is browsers don't make money. What?! Browsers might as well be money printers! Have you heard how much money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari? The higher Firefox’s user numbers, the more money Mozilla can make from search engine deals. Conversely, if Mozilla keeps trying to push a bunch of other initiatives while Firefox languishes and bleeds users, Mozilla will make less money. If you don’t like this form of revenue… well, I don’t know what to tell you, because this is how web browsers make money. And trying other stuff doesn’t seem to be working.
- palata 9mo ago
  On the other hand, we typically find it unfair that Google can buy their search supremacy by being the default search engine. We can't complain about Mozilla taking the money from Google and at the same time complain because they take the money from Google :-).
tigroferoce 9mo ago
You can and you should. There are people that are happy to pay for email, for search, for videos, for news, for music. I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser. The idea that software is free is completely wrong and should be something that an organization like Mozilla should combat. If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.
- dabockster 9mo ago
  > The idea that software is free is completely wrong > If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that. Strongly agreed. Free software, either $0 or through stronger licenses like the GPL, have their economics completely shifted as an unintended side effect. Those new economics tend to favor clandestine funding sources (eg ads or malicious supply chain code). But sustainable funding honestly isn't Mozilla's strong suite (or tech's in general, for that matter).
- palata 9mo ago
  > I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser. I admittedly didn't check the numbers, but a comment in a sibling thread says that if Mozilla was to replace their revenue with donations, they would have to become one of the biggest charities in America. Is that even realistic? Like would they make that kind of money just from donations?
enlyth 9mo ago
Doesn't Firefox make them the lion's share of their profits just from the Google payments? If they let Firefox atrophy to the point it will have no market share, let's see how that works out for them
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
account42 9mo ago
That should not be a problem for a nonprofit which the Mozilla foundation supposedly is.
- gwd 9mo ago
  Non-profit doesn't mean non-revenue. They don't have to pay their investors, but they certainly need to pay their developers.
  - account42 9mo ago
    Most nonprofits don't generate "revenue" from their "product". They provide a valuable service and get paid by people who agree with the mission.
    - Rastonbury 9mo ago
      Based on comments in here and people willing to pay I wonder why they haven't got the Wikipedia route of getting donations, would that piss off a lot of users? I do think most people would understand a non-profit needs donations.

glenstein 9mo ago

>Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed 12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.

roenxi 9mo ago
> They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis. Is that comparison supposed to make their management of the code base seem better or worse? Chrome, Linux and Rust are arguably colossi in their niches (Rust having the weakest claim). Firefox's niche is Chrome's and it doesn't do that well. It used to be that at least Firefox had it's own little area with more interesting extensions but obviously that was too hard for them to handle - yes I'm still grumpy about ChatZilla.
- glenstein 9mo ago
  Well I replied to a comment suggesting they weren't working on Firefox, by noting how much work is being done on Firefox. But you seem like you want to change the subject to a different one, which is the extent to which you can gauge "success" relative to competitors, or infer management efficiency, which is fine but orthogonal to my point.
- MarsIronPI 9mo ago
  You might be interested to know that there are still some legacy extensions that work on today's Firefox. Specifically, when Firefox breaks VimFX, I'm done with it. But while it works, I'm sticking with Firefox. It's like having the power of Qutebrowser but with the extensions and performance of Firefox.

mmooss 9mo ago

I assume they work on Firefox 10x more than anything else. Is there data?

autoexec 9mo ago

I might be in the minority here, but I actually like Thunderbird.

dabockster 9mo ago
I've daily driven Thunderbird for over a decade. You have very few options for having a single program manage multiple email accounts outside of Outlook and Thunderbird anymore. Maybe Apple Mail on Mac (and whatever Microsoft is preloading on Windows these days), but that's it.