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Someone should fork Firefox, strip all copyrighted stuff, and severe all ties to Mozilla. Worked great for Rust, Servo, Thunderbird and several other projects dumped by Mozilla.

But honestly Firefox has way too much technical debt. Starting new browser (Ladybird, webkit) seems like much better way to go! There are several independent browsers!

I used to want to donate to Mozilla Foundation, but I've long lost any hope that the corporation would spend that money in a way that makes sense to me. The pessimist on me would expect donated money to be spent on more built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. Or maybe a bonus for their executives.

I just want Firefox to be faster. I'm donating to Floorp (a Firefox fork), at least they seem focused on making the browser better.

> Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model.

This is not true for the vast majority of people leaving. It might be true in the hyper focused tech bubbles that we frequent, though they certainly don't represent the vast majority of users.

It's become a meme, but consider WinRAR. Odds are, it's installed on your machine and you haven't paid for it. It just works. It brings up a polite nag box but it doesn't sell your data. It doesn't invade your privacy. It just works and makes enough money to keep getting updated.

It sounds hokey but, perhaps, Firefox should be trialware. Don't cut off the people who can't pay. Make a browser that just works and see how many people will pay for it even if they can use it without paying.

I am always surprised Rust came out of that org.

Running on donations is not a viable strategy for any long-term goal.

Mozilla needs to learn how to do the very hard thing and passively invest these donations. This is a viable long-term strategy. FF would have extra monetary momentum or inertia, and donation stall-out, however and whenever it occurs, would not be game-over for Mozilla.

A few years ago I wanted to buy some Mozilla merch in order to support them. I'm glad they removed it because I would have regretted it.

Forget about Mozilla, donate to Ladybird—or another open-source non-browser project you like. If a competitor eats away the remaining market share of Mozilla's only "working" product, maybe they'll wake up.

Just let me donate directly to firefox. It's seriously about time this happened. Split off from all the Mozilla bs, it has its own independent management, and runs on donations, same as Thunderbird.

I even theorise they could cut the Google funding. There are so many people who would donate to firefox, but don't, because 1) they dont need the money, and 2) the money wouldn't go to firefox anyway. I even remember talking to a long time Mozilla employee at fosdem, and him telling me donating was pointless for those reasons.

They're not a good steward of this project and imo they should let it fly free. The problem is Mozilla would die without it because nobody cares about anything else they do, so their donations would plummet.

I’m going to bump this figure once again here: Mozilla has made $37.5M from investment income in 2023. [1] That might not be enough to sustain browser development alone, but it is surely a lot of money and charging for Firefox would likely be a drop in the bucket (considering many people would just stop using it instead).

Cut the bullshit initiatives, fire the C-suite and put that money to work.

https://mozillapetition.com/

[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...

This is basically an optional way to pay for the features that a decent fork like librewolf provides.

This is really just a long way to donate really in some sense directly to firefox somehow just because everybody feels like mozilla takes the donated money and tries on some "zanky" product

See The Ville_Lindholm comment really, those were my first thoughts too but I wouldn't really donate to mozilla like ever.

Ladybird's cool though. Maybe donating to them makes more sense but I understand they are not mature but that's exactly the point, they need way more funding (IMO) to get to a genuinely stable browser and need all the help that they can get as compared to the past.

Sure, we all like to stick the big firefox guy to beat the monopoly of google, but firefox/mozilla survives on a single deal by google, and if google ever stops the deal of paying for search engine, it can really shut down mozilla or maybe hinder it extremely.

I do hope that ladybird grows in a way where I can use it in compared to firefox in like hopefully 5 years since browsers are a mess.

Yes! My pet peeve is people keep saying "no one would pay" or "it wouldn't work" but the thing is, as far as I know, it has never been tried.

For example Thunderbird is fully funded by donations.[1]

Of course Thunderbird's budget is in a different magnitude than Firefox but I'd guess the amount of users is also in a different magnitude.

[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

There are many comments from people wanting to pay for Firefox, but not to Mozilla.

As an independent alternative, the Ladybird browser (https://ladybird.org/) is being developed and could possibly benefit from more financial support.

I too would be happy to pay for Firefox in a way that the majority of the payment went into Firefox development.

If you want to help fund Firefox, you can for now just pay for a product https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ and not use it (if you live in a country Mozilla accepts money from). Be vocal about it that you do this to support Firefox (e.g. reply in the discourse thread). I personally recommend leveraging MDN for this as it's right now the closest to Firefox, as in it's part of the Firefox organization within Mozilla. I would hope down the road we could just directly for Firefox, but we need to put money where our mouth is.

The "paid Firefox" the author wants already exists, as LibreWolf ships almost the exact same code minus the telemetry, ads, and Google defaults for free. If people wanted that, they'd already be using it. The real problem isn't the business model, it's Mozilla's leadership, which has been compromised to hell and back at this point. No pricing experiment like this will fix the exodus.

I already pay for my email and for my search engine. I would gladly pay for my browser if it came with an ad-free, privacy preserving model. Good software is worth paying for.

I'm so exhausted by these threads. Hacker News is, if it's anything, a site built by tech entrepreneurs for tech entrepreneurs. If you really think you can do better, fork Firefox, hire some engineers, and have at it. Brendan Eich did exactly that! Go work there! Or skip some steps and look at the other browser startups to see if they already had all the ideas you do.

Do you have every right to whinge here, roughly ever few months? Absolutely! Do I have a right to call you a bunch of wingers? Also absolutely!

Perhaps we should stop calling open-source software "free" due to the stigma that comes with it. It's no longer a selling point, nor should it have been.

The risk with paid Forefox will be privacy loss, because the app will need to verify somehow the paid status. So there will be some unique, personal licence on the device and Mozilla can identify users using payment info.

The licence will be likely checked via remote API on app start.

Yes!

Telegram is a good example of a public app that was free, and bleeding, they introduced paid features and are profitable.

Never they forced you to pay for existing stuff, nor sold your soul on the way to profitability.

We need more paid stuff. Making everything advertising funded has given advertisers too much power over society. We don't see real human opinion anymore, we see advertising friendly opinions.

There are so many privacy improving Firefox forks out there. These people should unite and start a non profit to handle further development that's in line with the least common denominators of what they all try to achieve and abandon Mozilla for good. Giving more money to this compromised entity won't help anyone. Mozilla should just die.

Some people say that the hate for Mozilla Corp is not deserved. But the thing to understand is that ten of thousands of people have rooted for Firefox. Even if not contributing to the code or money, supported it, pushed for it, like telling everyone to use it, ensuring that what they do works well with Firefox despite corporate interest regarding the market share and all. Lots of people have proudly distributed Firefox/Mozilla marketing stuff to help with that. People have accepted what was forced to be done to accept the money from Google to support the project.

And there, in parallel, there are greedy executive in Mozilla that took a big cut of the money, and wasted shitload of it in stupid and useless things that went to trash In the end, achieving really little.

Yes firefox is a little bit better than in the past, but like just a single digit percent better compared to what it should have been if the money wasted was really used to develop the project. Interesting other projects that could have changed the world were underfunded, like thunderbird (that never thrived as much as now since the Corp is not charge anymore) and market shares are still as low as ever...

I have a Firefox account. I will gladly pay a yearly fee for it! It provides significant value to me.

For example I pay Bitwarden $10/year for both myself and my wife. We will be moving to a Bitwarden family plan soon as our kids are getting old enough to have online accounts. Similar pricing structures for Firefox accounts would be totally reasonable!

Clearly some people would prefer a free way to use Firefox and that’s ok, too. In the same vein Bitwarden have a free plan. This kind of pricing structure already works in the market. Please copy it.

Mozilla, please stop screwing up and just make a great Firefox!

After 30 years of Firefox, because of their wasting money and not improving Firefox, switched to Zen, very happy Zen user - hope they will switch to Ladybird engine if that ever becomes a thing.

I don't think paying for Firefox is going to lead to Mozilla making decisions that benefit Firefox.

Probably would take that money and immediately spent it more on https://mozilla.vc/

I'll happily pay when what happened to Netscape, happens to Mozilla.

I, too, have been saying this on occasion. In my observation, Mozilla has been in an increasingly suboptimal position with Firefox, for a while now, as Google and Microsoft have largely settled on splitting the market in between themselves where the core of Chrome is developed by the former and Microsoft spends their effort on what they are [better] at -- integration with Windows in the form of UX-level features and whatever else that they do with it to build Edge. Firefox is increasingly seen as a "fair" nuisance that is slower, and by comparison can afford less effort development-wise. Look at some of the practically critical issues in their Bugzilla database -- there are features there that have been waiting almost a decade for implementation, and the discussions point to a combination of code complexity that requires acute insight into the browser that is your typical bell curve distributed over developers familiar with it -- the number of developers who are able to actually deliver on those features, can probably be counted on two hands. And that is in part because most of these people are getting paid to do other things. In the very least Mozilla directs their effort in a manner that speaks for itself -- why are some of these features, like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360870 that would be considered critical in today's Web development environment, not implemented after nearly a decade? -- If Mozilla _is_ paying the developers?

This is why I too think we ought to migrate to Patreon-like direct sponsoring of individual (or vetted group) effort to generate some development steam for Firefox. It might make Mozilla deny these developers write-access to Firefox repositories for all I know, but a fork cannot be prevented.

I've been using Firefox since its "Phoenix" days (good memories!), but it's lagging behind the competition more and more, and while I'd be first to admit we don't need half the features Google is busy putting into Chrome which then "magically" appear in Edge (what a devious alliance, that), some of them are sound design but are absent in Firefox, to the detriment of developers. In short: Firefox is losing more ground faster than ever before, at some point the boundary conditions will cause it to no longer be a viable alternative for the average user, I am afraid. Which will cause a "cascading failure" where no developer will test for it, and you know what happens then (because we've been there before).

I realize it's far from a perfect solution to finance the creators of the only browser I consider usable today - but I subscribed to Mozilla's VPN service some two years ago, even though I virtually never use it, and mostly to help them make a bit of a buck through me. (And still, it is nice to have the option of geoblocking circumvention at the ready, although I'd wish for them to just support "ordinary" wireguard/wq-quick as a client option).

> Today, I happily pay for software (including free and open-source software!) that puts users first, including Proton, Standard Notes, Kagi, and others.

Uhh two of those are primarily services with dedicated clients not just software.

I totally agree with the article otherwise. I don't want to donate to the foundation to support Firefox. They'll just use it for side projects and it does nothing to reduce their dependency on Google. Just let me pay for a version of firefox that has a nice contributor badge, and doesn't have Google as a search engine installed. It doesn't have to be something that's worth the money.

Also they could make the sync service paid. And reduce the free version. I'd gladly pay for it. They've said they'll never make us pay for it but I don't understand why not. It's a service that costs money on an ongoing basis.

IMO they should also go back to a more community driven approach. Not treat themselves as a mega corp with an overpaid CEO. But more like a startup. Because really, size-wise they're only startup sized. The only reason they pretend to be a big tech is because they have so much Google money to throw strong. A project like KDE (Which I sponsor monthly) provides a lot more software without all this overhead, and works much better along with the community. This is how I would love to see Mozilla.

But maybe ladybird will be what I'm looking for.

The real idea here should be that if Mozilla is accountable to its paying users, a bunch of incentives are fixed.

Firefox is supposed to be committed to serving the user before itself yet I see that as a sham. They put ads on their new tab page and phones home when starting and exiting. It’s the least bad alternative but I’m not stoked about helping Mozilla which I feel betrayed by.

Their revenue in 2023 was $653 million. They would need 5.4 million subscribers willing to pay $10/mo, which is about 4% of their total userbase. Clearly that's a steep hill to climb, and couldn't be done all at once. The transition would be tricky.

People want to support software that respects them

Since 85% of Mozilla's current revenue comes from Google paying to have their search engine set as the default on Mozilla, and given that this is at risk due to last year's antitrust ruling against Google, they will need to diversify regardless.

There should be a donation box solely for Firefox. If that exists, that is no different than paying for Firefox. We will see how many people would actually "pay" for Firefox.

The post seems to present a false dichotomy:

    FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices.

    Paid software ensures quality assurance.

I believe counter-examples exist for both models. Many FOSS projects have avoided becoming tools for user exploitation, while numerous paid software products have deteriorated due to corporate greed.

I feel like we would pay and it would get worse somehow

I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.

Discussions like this are exercises in true futility. Developers are a practically impossible customer base to monetize

I paid for Mozillla Pocket Premium and they canceled their product within a few months, did not properly open-source the server, did not export my "permanent library" and refunded 6$. As the websites in the "permanent library" are partially offline, that data is now lost. No thanks, not buying again.

Browser is the most intimate piece of software we have on our computer. Paying for it (vs someone else paying for your browsing) is a no brainer.

From day one Orion browser [1] has been designed with this business model in mind.

Napkin math also shows that if only 5% Firefox users decided to pay for it, Mozilla would not only replace Google search deal revenue but also align incentives with its users, leading to a better product down the road.

[1] https://kagi.com/orion

I don't understand what these comments are actually criticizing in terms of side projects. They got rid of stuff like Rust, Firefox OS, Pocket, etc. Mozilla has streamlined to make web browsers and web browser accessories. VPN/Relay are both profitable projects that inhibit surveillance, so clearly that's not the issue. Do you want, not just these projects gone but the CEO gone? That happened already too, https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-cha...

I think it’s fascinating how languages shape our society. In this case, the ambiguity between free as in “at no cost” and free as in “freedom” is probably hurting the FOSS landscape. In French, there are two very distinct terms for this: “gratuit” vs “libre”. And it doesn’t sound as an oxymoron to pay for a “logiciel libre”.

Mozilla has already millions of dollars than can be put into Firefox's development instead of the business they're getting into. It doesn't need even more money, it just needs to put part of it into engineers who would make Firefox what we need.

Tbh firefox is excellent.

Having an £1/month subscription that you could take any number of (including zero), would be easy and generate some income.

There have been some mis-steps to be sure, but also some cool stuff. People often focus on the negative.

"How to drop the Firefox market share to 0%?"

1.Waste the budget on irrelevant side projects.

2.Neglect user expirience and cut features.

3.Add a price tag to alienate users.

4.Perhaps a humiliation ritual like mandatory 2FA and "Login to Firefox"

How could anyone consider tossing money at an organisation that wastes as much as it does pretending it's a publicly traded company?

The executive pay is disgusting and reflects in no way the performance of the products. This money should be going into engineering and outreach.

I entirely agree, if there was a browser that let me be a costumer instead of a product I would 100% pay and use it everywhere.

I'm going with a hot take: these kinds of products should be supported by tax dollars, not with individual donators/payers. The market doesn't solve the problem of public goods, it just makes it worse.

I have no intention to pay just for Firefox, the browser. A browser is not that special anymore and there are plenty of alternatives.

However, I do want to pay for additional features and services, like a solid ad-blocker, integrated VPN-networking, privacy features like email relays or anti-fingerprinting, a safe and reliable cryptocurrency wallet, a smart cross-platform password manager, a privacy focused gmail alternative, integrated detection of fake reviews, bot messages and sloppy AI content, AI summaries, …

Add value to Firefox, in a coherent, meaningful and effective way to make using the internet secure, enjoyable and interesting again. Do that and take my money.

Why not fund LibreWolf instead? Or maybe even ladybird?

I would pay for the development of a decent free browser. I'm sure a lot of people would.

The problem is that Mozilla is so badly mismanaged that we don't feel paying for the current state of Mozilla. Mitchell Baker's tenure as CEO was disasterous, and the new CEO Laura Chambers had a bad start.

More millions for the CEO!

Mozilla pushed out Brendan Eich because of his poltical ideals. Because of that I am unwilling to support them.

This all sounds counter-productive.

Free software of such magnitude could and should live only by source code contributions, not money.

Who's going to tell him about Mozilla's situation?

> Charging for open-source software may sound hypocritical, but even the Free Software Foundation believes software fees and software freedom are completely compatible.

Paid support always has been allowed in free software. The issue here is two-fold:

1. When most people hear 'free software' they immediately think it is 'free' as in gratis (for nothing) and expect free support.

2. Especially for funding browsers it has always been an issue around who is going to pay for the long-term support without ads, tracking or VCs.

Let me donate, at least...

By the way, how do you prove that a paid for version has no tracking?

This thread is a perfect example of why the ad-driven model will win every time. Most people don’t actually want to pay for things (that’s just what gets parroted in anti-AdTech posts here).

It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).

I don’t feel optimistic for the future of Firefox given it seems they’re likely to lose their primary source of funding in the coming months.

What alternatives are there? The temporary benevolence of a mega-Corp with a vested interest in online advertising? Crypto mining in the browser? Replacing affiliate links?

I haven’t seen a solution that seems practical here but it seems clear to me that if privacy-motivated, anti-BigTech HN commenters won’t pay for it, no one will.

We already paid for Firefox through decades of donations in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars MoCo has received over the years from Google that was definitely not a bribe in exchange for sandbagging Firefox by firing most of the Firefox devs. That's what the community got in return for our decades of support because again, we've already paid for Firefox.

At this point we should just fork Firefox or focus on IceCat instead.

can someone explain what is happening to firefox for posts like this to exist?

I use firefox daily and while i'm aware of market share dropping, it's still a reasonable browser to use.

Is it just speculation now on the future of firefox?

I would rather pay for Kagi/Orion if they ever went cross platform. I like the idea of paying for my search and browser package with LLMs bundled in. I don't want to get locked into the Apple ecosystem even more than I am so I going to need Linux/Android support at least in Beta

Remove blockingWebRequest from Firefox, much like Chrome has done. Then charge $20/year for a version that allows you to use it across all of your devices.

I'd definitely pay that as its adding a lot of value.

Ideologically I am all for this. The usuals: if you don't pay for the product then you are the product, and what not.

But practically, this will likely just kill Firefox (and Mozilla).

I use Firefox but donate to Ladybird and Servo. Mozilla Corp is too far gone but hopefully the next generation of browsers will have less corporate baggage.

>"Some might worry that people would flock to alternatives if Firefox became a user-funded product. I disagree. In fact, I think the exact opposite is true. Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model"

Sorry but that's just... delusional. Yes the moment Firefox would charge money and become a paid product 90% of people would switch over to Brave et al. The average internet user or even Firefox user does not now what Mozilla's business model even is because they're not terminally online.

A browser like Firefox if it wants to compete with Chrome and wants to have an impact on the internet needs to be free because the average internet user is willing to spend exactly zero dollars on software. If anyone could make more money charging for their software than not they'd already be doing it, unless you think they hate money.

Same goes for all the tirades about Mozilla's management. Again the average person has no clue about it, they don't read news about software company management. Firefox has been losing ground because Google owns half of all major sites on the internet and Android and ships as a default on tons of devices, it's that simple.

I already posted a hot take [0], but this one is even hotter: there's no strategy that Mozilla could have employed to make any of their products popular.

I will substantiate that assertion with a simple argument in the form of a question: what were the most popular internet browsers in each period of history, for each platform, and why?

IE was popular because it came with Windows. Safari is popular because it is both Mac and iOS default browser. Chrome became popular because Google convinced you that IE was slow because it was IE, not because your PC was slow already.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549224

Let us donate directly to Firefox development. That is the solution. You don't have to look anywhere else. Thunderbird is a good example of what can be done when the donations reach the project. I just hope they don't screw it up as well. I have zero belief in Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla leadership. And every decision they did to screw MDN and Rust among other things puts their competition in a better position.

Unfortunately, I am done pretending otherwise. I haven't seen anything that is indicative of otherwise. Especially after acquiring a behavioural ads company. I will believe when they make decisions that aligns with it. Not with marketing materials saying otherwise or cos of whatever Firefox fans are left is saying. I stuck through the Firefox abandoned phase until Quantum release even for work. It's not cool that Mozilla is doing this.

I'd pay too for a version without sponsored shortcuts and suggestions.

I don't want Mozilla to sink so I see why they've done this kind of thing in the past, but I really don't like it.

> Am I suggesting Mozilla entirely pivot to this business model overnight? Of course not. [...] Run an experiment...

But Google can see it happening and pull support overnight.

Mozilla cornered itself into this situation, any official effort to make Firefox "more independent" has to happen really fast if they don't want to get almost entirely de-funded instantly.