Google was recently successfully sued for being anit-competitive by paying third parties to set Google as the default search engine.
That payoff by Google is like 90% of Mozilla’s income, which is probably disappearing. So yeah, they’re in full panic to fill that gap.
Maybe if we support firefox we could reach the same amout of money than google
Frankly, I’m surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt…
May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.
June 2024: Mozilla purchases Anonym, an AdTech company.
Not good
But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history.
Is it?
I would rather have a world where Mozilla is actively engaged in creating positive solutions for hard problems, than one where we only critique from the sidelines.
Maybe your users don’t.
Yeah adblock plus said the same thing. A lot of companies have said the same thing. It always comes down to greed
In addition to your good points:
a world where Mozilla is actively engaged
That doesn’t have to mean a world where Firefox itself is involved in this engagement, despite her insistence that it for some reason must be. Firefox is not Mozilla as a whole.
fuck
Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck
But at least forking is still an option. The instant they make any moves that inhibit forking or privacy on forks, Firefox will be completely dead. For now, it’s just gangrenous.
I wish that most forks wouldn’t be even worse. Pale Moon, the most interesting one, is a gang of patent trolls.
Pale Moon feels like it forked during the peak of Windows Vista, and hasn’t updated its UI, or extension library since.
LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, and Waterfox feel the most up to date, while being FOSS.
Good luck with even maintaining that fork up to date , with security threats and web standards changing so quickly.
Chromium manages (obsfucated binary blobs from google still being included aside)
Chromium is developed by Google. It’s not some grassroots fork with user interests in mind…
The thing is, people willing to maintain a fork could contribute to Firefox today, and reduce the development cost, reduce the need for income.
Sure, some people will be more willing to contribute, if it’s a pure grassroots effort, or if they’re left without a browser otherwise, but to just assume that a fork will fix it, that’s wishful thinking.
In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech it’s built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.
Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.
Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Bingo.
As if de-anonymizing hasn’t been demonstrated, repeatedly.
No one starts a company because they care about people
Ladybird is not usable yet, but it’s an independent browser and engine that accepts donations
repo - https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
youtube channel with monthly updates - https://www.youtube.com/@LadybirdBrowser/videos
So is NetSurf, and has been for most of this century already. I mean, it’s great to see people even caring about independent browsers, but NetSurf surely needs much more love (and more developers). :-)
Not everyone?
Does anyone?
Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it’s kinda sad to watch a previously good org die
Does anyone?
I don’t want to see Mozilla shutdown because Google no longer pays them, or due to the loss of another funding source.
Diversifying their income sources is a good thing.
Fork, blah, blah, blah.
When one of these forks doesn’t depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.
So just stick with firefox?
Well, if users don’t the source of the actual work, then none of the forks survive. I don’t know what people think are going to happen.
Shitting on Mozilla seems to be a competitor sport around here sometimes, and it’s fucking self-defeating. In 5 years, there will only be the Chromium engine, and then Google will shut down the opensource side like they pretty much did with Android. And then we’re truly fucked.
I’ve been using librewolf over the last week. Honestly… It’s a drop in replacement for me
Does it support containers and sync settings between installs on multiple systems? If so I’m in without hesitation.
Yeah
Thanks. Just set it up on one of my computers. I’ll be doing the rest as time allows. There’s a lot I love about it already, familiar but with better defaults, and including search engines like SearXNG. I hope enough of us can switch and send a message to Mozilla, though that feels very unlikely to stop the enshittification.
oh they’re full on corpo now it sounds like, which is too bad. They should have gone the proton route and go full non-profit org controlled, but here we are.
It’s basically hardened Firefox, you can do all the same things here too. Alas using it with an account kind of defeats the purpose. However you can use your account once to sync everything.
The problem with those sorts of forks is they still require moz to do most of the heavy lifting.
If Firefox stopped being developed they’d all pretty much freeze in place.
I agree to a point, I think some people would pick up the development. Idk if it’d be librewolf or if someone would fork off that, but if Firefox completely shit the bed I think someone would pick up the mantle a bit. We wouldn’t have nearly the release cadence of firefox though.
Burn the phoenix again.
Oh you mean one of the only two reasons I use this fucking thing? Ad blocking and privacy?
You’re shitting on both. That’s like… Idk, Craftsman making tools out of plastic and removing the lifetime warranty… Wtf do I even need you for then?
Eh, I care about a third: browser engine diversity. If they drop Gecko, I’m out, there’s literally nothing left to keep me here.
Did you read the article?
Funny that’s exactly what Black & Decker did the moment they got their hands on the Craftsman brand
This breaks my heart.
I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.
I was wrong.
I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.
So it goes.
Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant’s grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.
What makes you think that developing a free web browser needs to grant anyone any income?
Do you think developers don’t have to eat? or pay rent? And donations alone do not cut it.
Being a developer myself (with no ads in his software), I don’t think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. That’s why I also have an actual job.
You are aware that there are full-time developers working at Mozilla, yes? Developing a browser is not a hobby-project that you can pull off with some volunteers in their free time. You need professionals that work on such a giant project with their full attention.
Developing Firefox is their job. And of course they want to get paid for that (and deserve it). Just like you get paid for your actual job.
(and deserve it)
Please enlighten me: how do they deserve to be paid for a non-profit product?
How does someone deserve to be paid for work done? Is that your question?
Is this some kind of pathetic troll attempt?
I will not reward that with further attention.
Non profit means their earnings must match their expenses or be used to actually improve the product/service, not that they earn nothing at all
People who work at non-profits aren’t volunteering.
Non profit does not mean what you think it means
Non-profit doesn’t mean that there’s no employees. They’re still organizations that have a cash flow, seek to raise funds, and employ people to serve their mission. Most non-profits have paid employees.
Ideas:
- directly ask for donations, and actually use those donations to fund browser development
- build an add-on to pay sites instead of seeing ads - Mozilla could take a cut here
- push harder on existing, optional add-ons that generate revenue, like their VPN
But the article here reads like, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas. Have ads…”
How about not have a multi-million-dollar-costing CEO? Seems a bit rich (pun intended) for a supposed non-profit org.
Yeah I’m not defending that but CEO pay only rounds to like 1% of their total expenditures. Developing a browser is expensive.
only 1%? That’s about on par with a fortune 500 company, which supposedly Mozilla is not.
Maybe im a dumbass, but im currently using an entire operating system that is community funded, and made. How is it that its possible to do it with linux, and all the things that go with linux, but a web browser can’t do it without getting into ads? Why are web browsers so special that they just need oogles and oogles of money to function?
sadly, the web has become so complex and it changes so fast that it’s now almost impossible to keep up with the standard, so only google and mozilla are able to do it
thanks google!
I could see them trying to take themselves away from Google which wouldn’t be a bad thing as that’s where most of the money comes from for them … Unless that’s changed recently…
I’m afraid it won’t last long without it. That’s the key problem.
People hate ads, as do I, but what’s the alternative?
Pay executives less. Focus on grants and PBS-style ‘underwriting’. Subscription services like email and VPN.
Getting into advertising is just jumping into an intractable conflict of interest.
No ads?
People need money mate. Not everyone can afford to run a website.
Ideas:
- donations - these need to actually go toward Firefox development, they don’t, so I don’t donate
- paid services (e.g. their white-labeled VPN, they could also white-label Tuta or Proton services)
- and add-on that pays sites to not see ads (my preference)
- funding of privacy-oriented startups - they have something like this, so do more of it
Well, Thunderbird gives me hope.
Same! Check the telemetry line in about:config that still has a value in it though (I forget what it is, just that it had one)
Wow, utterly shocked that a company with a shit CEO that takes most of its money from Google would have these viewpoints.
I’m sure it is completely coincidental that ublock is about to die as well.
I’m sure it is completely coincidental that ublock is about to die as well.
wtf are you talking about?
Not in Firefox specifically, but many chromium based browsers are about to lose access to the original ublock. I’ve been planning on switching to Firefox when this goes through for a while now.
I thought they have lost that a few months ago. Firefox though claimed that
- they will keep Mv2 support for some time
- their version of Mv3 will keep the superior network filtering API
the original ublock.
You mean the original uBlock Origin. The original uBlock has been gone for a long time.
I think the bigger issue is them potentially losing their Google income.
They’ve failed to diversify their income with a bunch of failed subscription services, Google is in hot waters because of anti-competitive behaviour; they’re going to need something.
Which isn’t to say I like it. But “this is happening because they take Google money” is parroted beneath every slightly negative thing Mozilla does.
