8 ms·

I'd be happy to pay for Firefox, but I have a few points that are important to me. They are probably not very realistic but here they are anyway: 1. I would li

I'd be happy to pay for Firefox, but I have a few points that are important to me. They are probably not very realistic but here they are anyway: 1. I would like my money to go into Firefox development and nowhere else. I certainly don't want my money spent on their content business, even if it is used as a leverage to generate more money for Firefox development. I'm torn about Rust development because I certainly would love to see Rust flourish, but if we allow the money go into personally preferred projects it becomes hard to draw the line. 2. I would like a Firefox with absolutely no strings attached. - No Pocket, not even a trace of it. The proper place for Pocket is a plugin. - No experiments, labs or whatever they call it (see Mr. Robot for an example) - No network connections to third party hosts as long I haven't explicitly opted in. - Safe search off by default - No predefined search engines - No predefined start page 3. I would like Mozilla (as a whole and not only the Firefox branch) to be more careful with the selection of their businesses partners. I'm am not aiming at their co-operations with Google, Yandex and the like, which are OK for me. At least as long as my points from above are respected. Specifically I'm OK if the free version of Firefox continues to be sponsored mainly by Google. I'm not OK with business deals of the kind they had with Cliqz for example. 4. I would like to be able to pay without having to be logged into a Firefox account. This is actually davidhyde's idea from another thread [1] but I added it here because I fully agree. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20144726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20144726

boudin 7y ago
Yes, I couldn't agree more. I'm a Firefox user, never switched to chrome because I always had concerned with it. If this an attempt to switch the business model and become independent from search engines, it needs to do it properly. If it's the case, I would be a happily paying as, as much as I'm not fond of some of the decisions made by Mozilla like pocket or labs as you mentioned, it's the only browser I feel I can use without spitting on my beliefs.
sametmax 7y ago
I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them, just as a condition for maybe giving them something day. See, that's one of the weirdest problem in FOSS: the fans hold them to a way too high standard, making it twice as hard to thrive. Once because it's hard to make money as an open source, benevolent product in a world of free for all. And another time because the very people that should be supporting you will always say you don't do enough.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them, just as a condition for maybe giving them something day. No, right now I'm not paying a dime to companies that don't provide me with the products I want. Parent is talking about being a customer, not a charity.
  - moonlit 7y ago
    Parent is confusing product owner or a developer with being a customer. Most of stuff he requested is already there.
  - zeendo 7y ago
    The parent is not only talking about the products they receive but how that money is spent. Those assurances are pretty impractical and I doubt any company can reasonably be held to that kind of standard.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Well, a company where what you buy is "how the money is spent" (since browsers are free anyway), better provide it...
      - zeendo 7y ago
        What would it even mean, though? It would just let them free up other, unencumbered funds, for things that aren't browser related when they would have otherwise been spent on the browser. Surely the influence of "wow look at all this money coming in from browser development" is going to influence them to invest it there? If you don't think that then you don't trust them enough to give them money. And that's fine. But this idea that it makes sense to try to put strings on the very small amount of money we're talking about here...seems to imply some naive notion that you one could operate without trusting Mozilla...
- maxsilver 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
heinrichhartman 7y ago
It's very unlikely that this will happen. Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free. When you have demonstrated you are willing to pay money for a service, you are likely to also spent money on other goods. This only makes you more attractive as an advertising target. Most likely we will see premium features like: - premium color themes - more cloud storage for settings and extensions - analytics on your browsing data (after you hand the data over to them) (??) - more customer support (???)
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  To me what you're saying is Mozilla is no longer about FLOSS, they're now just a company whose only purpose is to make money selling their users downstream for as much as they can get? That may be true but it's extremely sad.
  - diegoperini 7y ago
    Where is the proof that it is true?
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      I'm reacting the the GP, they said (paraphrasing) that Mozilla won't create an advertising and tracking free paid version because if you'll pay to buy such a version then Mozilla will be to eager to exploit your worth as an advertising target.
- inapis 7y ago
  >Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free. I have only seen major US news outlets do this - namely NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ etc. I have subs to different publications - Ars, Ken, Nautilus - and they definitely are ad-free and a lot of others also claim to be ad-free for subscribers.
- magduf 7y ago
  >Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free. All I ever hear about in regards to news websites is that they're dying out because no one wants to pay for subscriptions, and the arms race is getting worse as many of them have strengthened their paywalls so that non-paying viewers can't see the articles (while others develop workarounds for the paywalls). Magazines, like newspapers, also seem to be dying out, though not as fast as the print newspapers. Maybe companies should rethink this business model.
pixelrevision 7y ago
Just donate instead and let them know you want all your money to go straight into Firefox if possible: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
- sjwright 7y ago
  Insert standard response here that donations to Mozilla Foundation do not go towards software development. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations. — https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq#item_8 https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq#item_8
m-p-3 7y ago
I'd add builtin Tor support too, as the form of another mode (below Private Window mode)
- canada_dry 7y ago
  Even better, would be to have install options that offer: TOR and/or a built-in VPN service (like Opera). I'd also add that Mozilla fluff (pocket, etc.) be an install option (default off). Finally, I'd like to be able to build stable macros again (ala greasemonkey). GM functionality in FF has been an annoyingly moving target - dropping and radically changing functionality - to the point where I now just keep an old version of FF w/ GM around so that I don't have to keep trying to re-write my macros.
sjwright 7y ago
Your list of "strings attached" to Firefox are fairly weak because most represent a trivial few clicks in settings. Insisting that a piece of software must ship preconfigured exactly to your liking seems a bit selfish to me. Really though, how onerous is it to configure a fresh Firefox profile to suit your preferences? (And how often do you reset your Firefox profile anyway?) Complaints about Pocket are largely emotional. It's a service run by Mozilla just like Firefox Sync and others. I agree it would be neater for Pocket to be implemented as a plug-in, but you could say that about a dozen or more Firefox features besides Pocket, so why single that one out? And really, why do you give a shit how Pocket is implemented if you don't use it anyway? Just switch it off. Firefox Studies is a mechanism that is in principle no different to automatic updates. Studies is functionally less invasive than automatic updates and exists only because Studies allows for progressive roll-outs, rapid roll-outs and rapid roll-backs. Don't like it? Just switch it off.
- vcavallo 7y ago
  i think it’s a principle thing. for 90% of people, they’ll use it with default settings. seems like OP doesn’t want to support the usage of those default services in general (say, google search default?), so supporting a product that implicitly advances their usage is unattractive.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    It's a principle thing? No, it's a train wreck. It's a sure-fire recipe for cutting the installed base of Firefox in half overnight. Using your example and estimate, the 90% of people who use default settings will install Firefox and then immediately conclude it's broken because it can't search the internet. So they'll just switch back to Chrome and never try Firefox again. Remember, these are the "default settings" people. They're not going to change the default settings. And with the OP's prescription for "no predefined search engines," there won't be a "Google" setting anyway even if they did try. Train wreck.
    - prophesi 7y ago
      This is an oddly vehement response to a lot of sane defaults. One simple solution to this "train wreck" would be for Firefox to simply link users directly to the search engine settings if they try to search without one set.
whytaka 7y ago
Agreed on all counts. In addition, I hope this does not give license to Mozilla to make the free version of Firefox in to a télémétrie nightmare.
slezyr 7y ago
> 1. I would like my money to go into Firefox development and nowhere else. They donated to Godot[1]. Don't think this rule should be so broad. [1] https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-mozilla-open-source-support-program https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...
vcavallo 7y ago
i basically agree with you and would want the same if i were to be paying for it. but. usually when companies try to sell a thing they try to make it _less_ alienating, not more. loosening up wallets is hard enough; when you pry out all the “helpful” features it gets even harder (for a very large portion of the market. maybe opposite for you and me, but who will this be targeted with this product?) in general it’d be great to see the wider market start to see these “helpful” features as actually harmful, but that 180 degree reversal is slow going. we’re in the middle of it right now with security/privacy vs convenience. seems like half the companies are going one way and half are going the other.
bjz_ 7y ago
1. Rust _is_ helping Firefox development, and is a key part of why Firefox is remaining competitive. And they should have the flexibility to invest back into future R&D, and into supporting the open source projects that they depend on. That's part of what makes Mozilla so great as a company, and why many of us love it. 2. For the paid version that seems fine. But it seems fair that the free version of Firefox needs to be flexible in figuring out how to find sources of revenue. For example, if they pulled the plug on the predefined search engines then Mozilla would be dead pretty soon.
- jhasse 7y ago
  > Rust _is_ helping Firefox development, and is a key part of why Firefox is remaining competitive. You don't know that. What if all the money that went into Rust would have been spent on a new renderer in C++?
opencl 7y ago
Does Firefox actually have a safe search feature?
noelsusman 7y ago
You really want Firefox to release a paid web browser that can't search the Internet out of the box?
- ilikepi 7y ago
  It's a browser. Right out of the box, if I type in www.google.com, it will load the site and I'll be able to search.
  - dralley 7y ago
    Anything behind a CDN (which is a lot of things) will be broken
  - sergiomattei 7y ago
    You are not average. The average person loads up the browser and wants it to just work. We're software engineers, but we have to understand our users too - and they're vastly different to us. Anecdote incoming - most of the people who use Firefox in my immediate circle are family members, and they don't care about configuring a default search. They don't know about DDG, they don't know about Bing, and they don't care. They want to open their browser and search whatever they need to find. Configurability is the engineer's pipe dream, but it dismisses a lot of people - and what matters is the masses, not the HN minority. We are a minority.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
I would gladly pay for your #2 ("Firefox with no strings attached"), and not even as a charitable donation. I just want something like that for personal use.
Improvotter 7y ago
I would also like to add to this list the fact that I want a voice as a paying member. There are a few longstanding issues that still haven't been solved (e.g.: dark GTK themes causing problems) that I would like my money to go to somehow.
bscphil 7y ago
Can confirm, I would pay for a version of Firefox with just four "features": - No Pocket anywhere in the code - No telemetry / experiments / Normandy anywhere in the code - No network connections to third party hosts (other than websites I'm viewing) - No "discovery" feed / whatever they're calling the activity stream sponsored content thing now anywhere in the code Just let me monthly subscribe via Paypal or whatever, and give me a private build server link and tar.gz of the source. To be clear, I think there's quite a decent size market for something that could mostly be accomplished with a bash script that runs "rm -r" a few times. Support for detecting RSS in a page would be great, but that's probably not going to happen.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
> - Safe search off by default > - No predefined search engines > - No predefined start page These in particular are bad ideas. Default settings should always target the average user, not the power user. Having Google as the default search/start option doesn't harm you or me at all and takes only a few seconds to change, but not having it adds significant friction and frustration for the average user.
musicale 7y ago
I like the idea of a privacy-preserving Firefox that removes pocket/start page/mr. robot/etc..
tracker1 7y ago
1. Rust development is expressly used with Firefox development though. The point is more reasonable libraries with fewer security issues and tighter constraints that is more maintainable. 2. Would be happy with an install / first run option to speciry autocomplete and/or start page options. 3. Agreed, and definitely no such shenanigans in the paid version. 4. Not sure that would be possible, you'd probably at the very least need to log into something (like the VPN service included).
iamnothere 7y ago
Adding my comment from the other thread since it also applies here. I agree, I'd be interested in this as well. Based on the replies you're getting, I'd also like to point out that I'm tired of this trend in discussions: Person A states their preferences regarding a product and says that they wish that the company would offer certain options. Person A says that they would be more likely to buy (or would only buy) the product with those options available. Nowhere is it demanded that the company implement these options, but person A has very clearly indicated their preferences. Persons B, C, and D then immediately come out of the woodwork to shut down the discussion: * Person B explains why nobody else would be interested in the options that person A has asked for. Person A is a "niche" user and their opinions are unimportant. * Person C characterizes person A as "unreasonable" or "entitled" and explains why no company in their right mind would want person A as a customer. * Person D counters person A's statement by explaining that the company can produce any product they want to, and that they don't have to listen to person A's request. It's a private company, etc, etc. (Note that nowhere did person A imply that the company had to listen to their request.) For real-world examples of this phenomenon, see any thread regarding (in particular) Apple, Mozilla, or Tesla.
- bscphil 7y ago
  I would add to this that Person A's comment is almost always upvoted near the top of the post as it is in this case, which immediately disproves Person B's characterization of A's preferences as "niche".
kaffee 7y ago
I would pay about $250 a year for software with these features. I don't think I'm alone.

boudin 7y ago

Yes, I couldn't agree more. I'm a Firefox user, never switched to chrome because I always had concerned with it. If this an attempt to switch the business model and become independent from search engines, it needs to do it properly. If it's the case, I would be a happily paying as, as much as I'm not fond of some of the decisions made by Mozilla like pocket or labs as you mentioned, it's the only browser I feel I can use without spitting on my beliefs.

sametmax 7y ago

I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them, just as a condition for maybe giving them something day. See, that's one of the weirdest problem in FOSS: the fans hold them to a way too high standard, making it twice as hard to thrive. Once because it's hard to make money as an open source, benevolent product in a world of free for all. And another time because the very people that should be supporting you will always say you don't do enough.

coldtea 7y ago
>I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them, just as a condition for maybe giving them something day. No, right now I'm not paying a dime to companies that don't provide me with the products I want. Parent is talking about being a customer, not a charity.
- moonlit 7y ago
  Parent is confusing product owner or a developer with being a customer. Most of stuff he requested is already there.
- zeendo 7y ago
  The parent is not only talking about the products they receive but how that money is spent. Those assurances are pretty impractical and I doubt any company can reasonably be held to that kind of standard.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Well, a company where what you buy is "how the money is spent" (since browsers are free anyway), better provide it...
    - zeendo 7y ago
      What would it even mean, though? It would just let them free up other, unencumbered funds, for things that aren't browser related when they would have otherwise been spent on the browser. Surely the influence of "wow look at all this money coming in from browser development" is going to influence them to invest it there? If you don't think that then you don't trust them enough to give them money. And that's fine. But this idea that it makes sense to try to put strings on the very small amount of money we're talking about here...seems to imply some naive notion that you one could operate without trusting Mozilla...
maxsilver 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

heinrichhartman 7y ago

It's very unlikely that this will happen. Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free. When you have demonstrated you are willing to pay money for a service, you are likely to also spent money on other goods. This only makes you more attractive as an advertising target. Most likely we will see premium features like: - premium color themes - more cloud storage for settings and extensions - analytics on your browsing data (after you hand the data over to them) (??) - more customer support (???)

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
To me what you're saying is Mozilla is no longer about FLOSS, they're now just a company whose only purpose is to make money selling their users downstream for as much as they can get? That may be true but it's extremely sad.
- diegoperini 7y ago
  Where is the proof that it is true?
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I'm reacting the the GP, they said (paraphrasing) that Mozilla won't create an advertising and tracking free paid version because if you'll pay to buy such a version then Mozilla will be to eager to exploit your worth as an advertising target.
inapis 7y ago
>Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free. I have only seen major US news outlets do this - namely NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ etc. I have subs to different publications - Ars, Ken, Nautilus - and they definitely are ad-free and a lot of others also claim to be ad-free for subscribers.
magduf 7y ago
>Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free. All I ever hear about in regards to news websites is that they're dying out because no one wants to pay for subscriptions, and the arms race is getting worse as many of them have strengthened their paywalls so that non-paying viewers can't see the articles (while others develop workarounds for the paywalls). Magazines, like newspapers, also seem to be dying out, though not as fast as the print newspapers. Maybe companies should rethink this business model.

pixelrevision 7y ago

Just donate instead and let them know you want all your money to go straight into Firefox if possible: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

sjwright 7y ago
Insert standard response here that donations to Mozilla Foundation do not go towards software development. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations. — https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq#item_8 https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq#item_8

m-p-3 7y ago

I'd add builtin Tor support too, as the form of another mode (below Private Window mode)

canada_dry 7y ago
Even better, would be to have install options that offer: TOR and/or a built-in VPN service (like Opera). I'd also add that Mozilla fluff (pocket, etc.) be an install option (default off). Finally, I'd like to be able to build stable macros again (ala greasemonkey). GM functionality in FF has been an annoyingly moving target - dropping and radically changing functionality - to the point where I now just keep an old version of FF w/ GM around so that I don't have to keep trying to re-write my macros.

sjwright 7y ago

Your list of "strings attached" to Firefox are fairly weak because most represent a trivial few clicks in settings. Insisting that a piece of software must ship preconfigured exactly to your liking seems a bit selfish to me. Really though, how onerous is it to configure a fresh Firefox profile to suit your preferences? (And how often do you reset your Firefox profile anyway?) Complaints about Pocket are largely emotional. It's a service run by Mozilla just like Firefox Sync and others. I agree it would be neater for Pocket to be implemented as a plug-in, but you could say that about a dozen or more Firefox features besides Pocket, so why single that one out? And really, why do you give a shit how Pocket is implemented if you don't use it anyway? Just switch it off. Firefox Studies is a mechanism that is in principle no different to automatic updates. Studies is functionally less invasive than automatic updates and exists only because Studies allows for progressive roll-outs, rapid roll-outs and rapid roll-backs. Don't like it? Just switch it off.

vcavallo 7y ago
i think it’s a principle thing. for 90% of people, they’ll use it with default settings. seems like OP doesn’t want to support the usage of those default services in general (say, google search default?), so supporting a product that implicitly advances their usage is unattractive.
- sjwright 7y ago
  It's a principle thing? No, it's a train wreck. It's a sure-fire recipe for cutting the installed base of Firefox in half overnight. Using your example and estimate, the 90% of people who use default settings will install Firefox and then immediately conclude it's broken because it can't search the internet. So they'll just switch back to Chrome and never try Firefox again. Remember, these are the "default settings" people. They're not going to change the default settings. And with the OP's prescription for "no predefined search engines," there won't be a "Google" setting anyway even if they did try. Train wreck.
  - prophesi 7y ago
    This is an oddly vehement response to a lot of sane defaults. One simple solution to this "train wreck" would be for Firefox to simply link users directly to the search engine settings if they try to search without one set.

whytaka 7y ago

Agreed on all counts. In addition, I hope this does not give license to Mozilla to make the free version of Firefox in to a télémétrie nightmare.

slezyr 7y ago

> 1. I would like my money to go into Firefox development and nowhere else. They donated to Godot[1]. Don't think this rule should be so broad. [1] https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-mozilla-open-source-support-program https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...

vcavallo 7y ago

i basically agree with you and would want the same if i were to be paying for it. but. usually when companies try to sell a thing they try to make it _less_ alienating, not more. loosening up wallets is hard enough; when you pry out all the “helpful” features it gets even harder (for a very large portion of the market. maybe opposite for you and me, but who will this be targeted with this product?) in general it’d be great to see the wider market start to see these “helpful” features as actually harmful, but that 180 degree reversal is slow going. we’re in the middle of it right now with security/privacy vs convenience. seems like half the companies are going one way and half are going the other.

bjz_ 7y ago

1. Rust _is_ helping Firefox development, and is a key part of why Firefox is remaining competitive. And they should have the flexibility to invest back into future R&D, and into supporting the open source projects that they depend on. That's part of what makes Mozilla so great as a company, and why many of us love it. 2. For the paid version that seems fine. But it seems fair that the free version of Firefox needs to be flexible in figuring out how to find sources of revenue. For example, if they pulled the plug on the predefined search engines then Mozilla would be dead pretty soon.

jhasse 7y ago
> Rust _is_ helping Firefox development, and is a key part of why Firefox is remaining competitive. You don't know that. What if all the money that went into Rust would have been spent on a new renderer in C++?

opencl 7y ago

Does Firefox actually have a safe search feature?

noelsusman 7y ago

You really want Firefox to release a paid web browser that can't search the Internet out of the box?

ilikepi 7y ago
It's a browser. Right out of the box, if I type in www.google.com, it will load the site and I'll be able to search.
- dralley 7y ago
  Anything behind a CDN (which is a lot of things) will be broken
- sergiomattei 7y ago
  You are not average. The average person loads up the browser and wants it to just work. We're software engineers, but we have to understand our users too - and they're vastly different to us. Anecdote incoming - most of the people who use Firefox in my immediate circle are family members, and they don't care about configuring a default search. They don't know about DDG, they don't know about Bing, and they don't care. They want to open their browser and search whatever they need to find. Configurability is the engineer's pipe dream, but it dismisses a lot of people - and what matters is the masses, not the HN minority. We are a minority.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

I would gladly pay for your #2 ("Firefox with no strings attached"), and not even as a charitable donation. I just want something like that for personal use.

Improvotter 7y ago

I would also like to add to this list the fact that I want a voice as a paying member. There are a few longstanding issues that still haven't been solved (e.g.: dark GTK themes causing problems) that I would like my money to go to somehow.

bscphil 7y ago

Can confirm, I would pay for a version of Firefox with just four "features": - No Pocket anywhere in the code - No telemetry / experiments / Normandy anywhere in the code - No network connections to third party hosts (other than websites I'm viewing) - No "discovery" feed / whatever they're calling the activity stream sponsored content thing now anywhere in the code Just let me monthly subscribe via Paypal or whatever, and give me a private build server link and tar.gz of the source. To be clear, I think there's quite a decent size market for something that could mostly be accomplished with a bash script that runs "rm -r" a few times. Support for detecting RSS in a page would be great, but that's probably not going to happen.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

> - Safe search off by default > - No predefined search engines > - No predefined start page These in particular are bad ideas. Default settings should always target the average user, not the power user. Having Google as the default search/start option doesn't harm you or me at all and takes only a few seconds to change, but not having it adds significant friction and frustration for the average user.

musicale 7y ago

I like the idea of a privacy-preserving Firefox that removes pocket/start page/mr. robot/etc..

tracker1 7y ago

1. Rust development is expressly used with Firefox development though. The point is more reasonable libraries with fewer security issues and tighter constraints that is more maintainable. 2. Would be happy with an install / first run option to speciry autocomplete and/or start page options. 3. Agreed, and definitely no such shenanigans in the paid version. 4. Not sure that would be possible, you'd probably at the very least need to log into something (like the VPN service included).

iamnothere 7y ago

Adding my comment from the other thread since it also applies here. I agree, I'd be interested in this as well. Based on the replies you're getting, I'd also like to point out that I'm tired of this trend in discussions: Person A states their preferences regarding a product and says that they wish that the company would offer certain options. Person A says that they would be more likely to buy (or would only buy) the product with those options available. Nowhere is it demanded that the company implement these options, but person A has very clearly indicated their preferences. Persons B, C, and D then immediately come out of the woodwork to shut down the discussion: * Person B explains why nobody else would be interested in the options that person A has asked for. Person A is a "niche" user and their opinions are unimportant. * Person C characterizes person A as "unreasonable" or "entitled" and explains why no company in their right mind would want person A as a customer. * Person D counters person A's statement by explaining that the company can produce any product they want to, and that they don't have to listen to person A's request. It's a private company, etc, etc. (Note that nowhere did person A imply that the company had to listen to their request.) For real-world examples of this phenomenon, see any thread regarding (in particular) Apple, Mozilla, or Tesla.

bscphil 7y ago
I would add to this that Person A's comment is almost always upvoted near the top of the post as it is in this case, which immediately disproves Person B's characterization of A's preferences as "niche".

kaffee 7y ago

I would pay about $250 a year for software with these features. I don't think I'm alone.