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Firefox + Mozilla are awesome. I still have a Mozilla 1.0 t-shirt from the first release party! I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they

Firefox + Mozilla are awesome. I still have a Mozilla 1.0 t-shirt from the first release party! I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy. However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome). They make 94% of their revenue via bundling and distribution deals with companies like Google. So to say that Firefox doesn't really have ads I think it is a bit disingenuous. They don't have ads directly but they benefit directly from the ecosystem. Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist. Not saying this to be rude or call you guys out. I think we need an honest discussion on this issue. Across the industry, we see users just outright refusing to pay for products because they're accustomed to 'free' being the norm. News, social media, browsers, etc. If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else. If Facebook tried to charge users they would revolt. Same thing for browsers. Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold. I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product).

samtimalsina 7y ago
> However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome). Can you elaborate on this? What kind of bundling and distribution deals?
- chubot 7y ago
  Some background: https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/mozilla-partners-with-yahoo-which-will-become-the-default-search-engine-in-firefox-next-month/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/mozilla-partners-with-yaho... https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-deal-with-yahoo-and-makes-google-the-default-in-firefox-again/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea... https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  I believe Mozilla made a ton of money just by making Google the default search engine.
- troydavis 7y ago
  Here's how Mozilla's 2017 annual report (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/) describes it: > Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath which required ongoing payments to Mozilla that remain the subject of litigation. > In CY 2017 Mozilla Corporation generated $542 Million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $506 Million in CY 2016. Financial statement (2016 & 2017): https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201... Announcement (2017): https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-google-as-default-search-provider-in-the-u-s-canada-hong-kong-and-taiwan/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-go...
otachack 7y ago
Agree with your points, but piggybacking to post Mozilla's donation page. We can be preemptive and give to them in order to help the cause. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
- gpm 7y ago
  My understanding of the donations is that they don't go towards supporting firefox development because of how the company/non-profit is structured... is this wrong?
  - afiori 7y ago
    You have to donate directly to firefox apparently
  - eitland 7y ago
    Last time it was brought up, this was the conclusion. And it is not necessarily wrong but if I just want to donate more to good causes then I already have two very good candidates ready that I would be happy to donate more to. The reason I want to donate to Mozilla would be to make sure it can continue development even of Google should stop paying them. I have a small hope that their VPN project might be able to funnel money back to developments, and I also think there's some kind of deal with scroll. If anyone from Mozilla reads this: I'm all for donations (as long as they go towards the product we depend on) or paid products that can work as cash cows. Just make sure it is optional and don't lie or be sneaky about it and I should be happy
rusk 7y ago
> Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist Really? My recollection of events 15 years ago is a little hazy, but wasnt FF a browser-only release of Mozilla, itself Netscape which has been around as long as time itself (~25 years?) What are we talking about here? There was very definitely a push around 2003 to get FF adopted en masse, and I guess Google probably were a big factor in this ... Bit of a stretch to say FF wouldn’t have existed otherwise though. There was very definitely some dissatisfaction across the board with IE dominance and its not hard to imagine something like FF being inevitable.
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  Most of Mozilla's funding came from Google in exchange for making Google the default search page.
  - rusk 7y ago
    Right ... It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.
    - Majestic121 7y ago
      The triple negative in your sentence makes it confusing. I expected that you wanted to say : It is conceivable that they would have got funding from somewhere else
      - frogpelt 7y ago
        I don't disagree. You're not wrong.
      - rusk 7y ago
        it's not inconceivable is a common enough phrase. You could say this might be more parsimoniously expressed as "it is conceivable", but the colloquial phrasing intones that the premise proceeds specifically from the supposition that it may be inconceivable.
staticassertion 7y ago
> I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy. > However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome). These are unrelated issues, though. A connection, financial or otherwise, to Google, does not mean that users aren't getting a browser that prioritizes privacy.
johnchristopher 7y ago
Oh, please. You make it sound like Mozilla is equivalent to Facebook. Is that a smear campaign ? You can donate to the Mozilla foundation. Have you ? Have you convinced your company or your friends to do so ? Because that's a better alternative than outright singling Mozilla out for their ties to Google. Which last time I checked didn't make the user the product of Google like Chrome or Android does.
- FreeFull 7y ago
  Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation (a subsidiary of the Foundation). Money donated towards the Foundation doesn't go towards Firefox development. The Corporation has it's own income sources (including money from Google), and actually a lot of money from the Corporation ends up going to the Foundation, to further the mission of "Making web free".
  - johnchristopher 7y ago
    Thank you for reminding us. Every time I somehow forget how the corporation was set up so that money could still be made from SE deals.
  - TheKarateKid 7y ago
    Didn't this change in recent years? Hence why Firefox is not distributed via the Mozilla.org domain instead of the .com?
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  Mozilla fired their CEO, the founder of JS, Brendan Eich, because he made a donation 10 years before to a Christian charity. Many SV people are missing the scope and scale of the impact of having OSS charities engaging in the political campaign – it is renouncing all donations from the other side. It is not their role. Every year I have thousands of dollars that I try to affect to OSS charities, but I’m yet to find a single one that is tolerant of everyone, _including the supposedly dominant group_ . But tolerance is too much to ask, even from Mozilla.
rusk 7y ago
> we see users just outright refusing to pay I’m not convinced this is true. Surveillance/Market insight/whatever is just too lucrative. There’s plenty of examples of company’s that make a living by charging for a service but for a company like facebook, for example, excluding users runs counter to their whole business model. “Charging” customers is hassle. If you can find a way to monetise without all that icky hassle, you will.
- fouric 7y ago
  > Surveillance/Market insight/whatever is just too lucrative. Citation needed. Individual users' data is, last time I checked, relatively low-value - isn't the Facebook ARPU less than $10?
  - rusk 7y ago
    How many users?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      In case this wasn't a rhetorical question: billions. "1.59 billion daily active users on Facebook on average for June 2019; 2.41 billion monthly active users on Facebook as of June 30, 2019" Source: https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/.
      - rusk 7y ago
        It was :) They’re not hard sums to do.
make3 7y ago
What is actually disingenuous is equating the search deals to anything Google, like making adblocking harder and downright impossible on mobile
- burtonator 7y ago
  Could you clarify? I don't follow your point.
bad_user 7y ago
> I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of HN users are still using a @gmail.com email address. And I'm actually in that super small minority that pays for services such as FastMail, Dropbox, Newsblur, 1Password, or YouTube (premium). I also donated to Mozilla among others. --- The problem is that browsers should be part of the "commons", just like roads, since browsers are indespensible platforms in this day and age. Are your taxes funding browsers? If no, then are you suggesting that only the privileged should have access to a good, modern browser? --- Also products like Firefox are very unlike other products, because it's open source, both by license and by how it is developed. If Mozilla dies due to Google pulling the plug on their deal, Firefox is still open source and with enough resources somebody else can pick up its development. To wit Thunderbird may still live under the Mozilla Foundation, but it is community driven, with donations from individuals being its primary source of funding. And it is moving along. Not as fast and it isn't as polished as its users would want, but it lives. --- I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models that just piggyback on top of Chromium and are thus in no way a threat to Chrome's monopoly.
- burtonator 7y ago
  > Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? To be fair you're asking the wrong person. I pay for a ton of products. I pay for IntelliJ which I think is $150 per year. HubSpot which will probably get $1k from me... I pay for Gmail... I think it's $4 per user per month? TeamCity, CircleCI ... NYTimes (yeah, I actually pay). ... but I do think you're right here. I'm actually legitimately curious to understand this issue. I want to focus my product, Polar, on being a premium document management platform for people VERY serious about research: https://getpolarized.io https://getpolarized.io ... I want to understand more about this mindset though. I think you can make a go at things if you have a VERY premium product focused on a tight niche (at least initially). > both by license and by how it is developed. I'd like to argue that this is false. The argument behind Open Source is that it's developed by the community and that by being open there is some sort of community development behind it. However, that's not what we see from Open Source outside of enterpise. 99% of Mozilla's development comes from paid Mozilla engineers. > I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models I mean this is sort of a logical fallacy. Just because something is based on a company doesn't mean they are trying to do something inherently wrong.
jorvi 7y ago
Hence why I like Brave. Their model is very solid and seems a lot more sustainable than depending on Google as their overlord. Ads are voluntary, displayed as a system notification and vetted by Brave. Watch ads, you get tokens which pay publishers. If you don't want ads, you can buy tokens. If you don't want to buy tokens, you still won't see ads. And except for the first offer there is no nag screen either. I think Firefox is awesome and it is really bad if we continue the Chrome/blink hegemony, but I can't stand for their decision to not block all ads instead of just trackers, especially on phones. The modern web without a 'real' adblocker is borderline unusable and Firefox prioritizing publishers over users doesn't sit well with me.
- roca 7y ago
  Blocking ads by default would require a judgement that ads and ad-supported Web sites are bad by default. That is a much more extreme and less supportable position than Mozilla's position that tracking is bad by default. People who want to block all ads can opt into that with a Firefox ad-blocking extension (including on Android, unlike Chrome). Brave's fine, but if you're worried about Google/Chrome hegemony you'd better not use it, because as a Chromium browser it's a part of that hegemony.
  - jorvi 7y ago
    > People who want to block all ads can opt into that with a Firefox ad-blocking extension Except on iOS, where you have to finagle with VPN-based blockers > because as a Chromium browser it's a part of that hegemony I'm well aware. I'd rather use (and recommend to less techy people) Firefox, but I can't with their current stance. People want/need adblocking but they also want sync. If Firefox had an ad-blocking toggle that was off by default that'd be fine by me.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      Just to clarify, Brave blocks tracking not ads, and so does what @roca advocates — but we have always done it by default, and we block more tracking than Firefox belatedly does. What’s more, we include an optional way to support your favorite sites and channels. See https://batgrowth.com/ https://batgrowth.com/ for results so far. I’m curious what ads you want to block that effective tracking protection does not block as an effect of blocking scripts that both track and (via generated scripts) place ads. Thanks.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Vinnl 7y ago
> If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else. (...) Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold. I'd contest that these are largely the same users. In any case, I support the overall message: it'd be good if Mozilla found additional ways to finance their work, and I'm happy they're actively looking for them.
Santosh83 7y ago
> I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). There is a very simple way to achieve this. Sell your product for money, and provide no other option. The customer gives you money and you give them use of your product. Win-win.
deogeo 7y ago
> I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). You don't have that choice - what happens is you pay and become the product. Cable TV used to be ad-free, since you paid for it, then they figured out they can make more money selling ads. There are ads on the buses and subways, even though you have to pay for tickets. Windows 10 shows you ads and spies on you, yet you have to pay for it. You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads. You pay for a movie ticket, yet have to sit through 20 minutes of ads before the movie starts.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads. I've heard about this, but what exactly does this mean? I have a smart TV, but I never see ads. Supposedly it's spying on me, but how is it spying on me any more than the Netflix and Hulu subscriptions I already pay for? This is not meant to sound defensive - I do believe it's too good to be true that my TV is as wonderful as I think it is. I'm just trying to understand what is so bad about it?
  - ryanianian 7y ago
    Many new "smart" TVs have "ACR" that sends info about what you're watching (regardless of whether on netflix or hulu or a set-top-box) to the TV manufacturer. [1] Pro-Tip: At least for Samsung TVs you can un-accept the privacy-policy to disable this. This will also disable Netflix and all "smart" features but that's..exactly what I want in a TV. Alternatively just don't give the TV network access, but you may want to do a yearly software-update. [1]: https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features/ https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      Thank you for this. Now I look forward to seeing all the ways my TV behaves differently now (no voice search, for instance).
neilobremski 7y ago
I wonder how my younger self from twenty years ago would have responded to me now: I'd prefer to PAY money for software once rather than being suckled by subscriptions, annoyed by ads, frazzled by fingerprinting, or prickled by privacy problems. Give me a nice over-sized box to stick on my desk for fifty bucks and some clean, well-developed software. Of course in the meantime Firefox and Brave are doing well enough. I still feel as though I'm being towed along and probably the browser makers feel similarly.
- pault 7y ago
  I actually prefer to rent software, since I don't have to pay a huge amount for software that I will only use occasionally (hello Photoshop), and I know the developers will have the resources to improve their products.
bdcravens 7y ago
Google also pays Apple a significant sum ($12B in 2019: https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-engine/ https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en...) to be the search engine default.

samtimalsina 7y ago

> However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome). Can you elaborate on this? What kind of bundling and distribution deals?

chubot 7y ago
Some background: https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/mozilla-partners-with-yahoo-which-will-become-the-default-search-engine-in-firefox-next-month/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/mozilla-partners-with-yaho... https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-deal-with-yahoo-and-makes-google-the-default-in-firefox-again/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea... https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...
fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
I believe Mozilla made a ton of money just by making Google the default search engine.
troydavis 7y ago
Here's how Mozilla's 2017 annual report (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/) describes it: > Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath which required ongoing payments to Mozilla that remain the subject of litigation. > In CY 2017 Mozilla Corporation generated $542 Million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $506 Million in CY 2016. Financial statement (2016 & 2017): https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201... Announcement (2017): https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-google-as-default-search-provider-in-the-u-s-canada-hong-kong-and-taiwan/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-go...

otachack 7y ago

Agree with your points, but piggybacking to post Mozilla's donation page. We can be preemptive and give to them in order to help the cause. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

gpm 7y ago
My understanding of the donations is that they don't go towards supporting firefox development because of how the company/non-profit is structured... is this wrong?
- afiori 7y ago
  You have to donate directly to firefox apparently
- eitland 7y ago
  Last time it was brought up, this was the conclusion. And it is not necessarily wrong but if I just want to donate more to good causes then I already have two very good candidates ready that I would be happy to donate more to. The reason I want to donate to Mozilla would be to make sure it can continue development even of Google should stop paying them. I have a small hope that their VPN project might be able to funnel money back to developments, and I also think there's some kind of deal with scroll. If anyone from Mozilla reads this: I'm all for donations (as long as they go towards the product we depend on) or paid products that can work as cash cows. Just make sure it is optional and don't lie or be sneaky about it and I should be happy

rusk 7y ago

> Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist Really? My recollection of events 15 years ago is a little hazy, but wasnt FF a browser-only release of Mozilla, itself Netscape which has been around as long as time itself (~25 years?) What are we talking about here? There was very definitely a push around 2003 to get FF adopted en masse, and I guess Google probably were a big factor in this ... Bit of a stretch to say FF wouldn’t have existed otherwise though. There was very definitely some dissatisfaction across the board with IE dominance and its not hard to imagine something like FF being inevitable.

metalliqaz 7y ago
Most of Mozilla's funding came from Google in exchange for making Google the default search page.
- rusk 7y ago
  Right ... It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.
  - Majestic121 7y ago
    The triple negative in your sentence makes it confusing. I expected that you wanted to say : It is conceivable that they would have got funding from somewhere else
    - frogpelt 7y ago
      I don't disagree. You're not wrong.
    - rusk 7y ago
      it's not inconceivable is a common enough phrase. You could say this might be more parsimoniously expressed as "it is conceivable", but the colloquial phrasing intones that the premise proceeds specifically from the supposition that it may be inconceivable.

staticassertion 7y ago

> I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy. > However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome). These are unrelated issues, though. A connection, financial or otherwise, to Google, does not mean that users aren't getting a browser that prioritizes privacy.

johnchristopher 7y ago

Oh, please. You make it sound like Mozilla is equivalent to Facebook. Is that a smear campaign ? You can donate to the Mozilla foundation. Have you ? Have you convinced your company or your friends to do so ? Because that's a better alternative than outright singling Mozilla out for their ties to Google. Which last time I checked didn't make the user the product of Google like Chrome or Android does.

FreeFull 7y ago
Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation (a subsidiary of the Foundation). Money donated towards the Foundation doesn't go towards Firefox development. The Corporation has it's own income sources (including money from Google), and actually a lot of money from the Corporation ends up going to the Foundation, to further the mission of "Making web free".
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  Thank you for reminding us. Every time I somehow forget how the corporation was set up so that money could still be made from SE deals.
- TheKarateKid 7y ago
  Didn't this change in recent years? Hence why Firefox is not distributed via the Mozilla.org domain instead of the .com?
alexis_fr 7y ago
Mozilla fired their CEO, the founder of JS, Brendan Eich, because he made a donation 10 years before to a Christian charity. Many SV people are missing the scope and scale of the impact of having OSS charities engaging in the political campaign – it is renouncing all donations from the other side. It is not their role. Every year I have thousands of dollars that I try to affect to OSS charities, but I’m yet to find a single one that is tolerant of everyone, _including the supposedly dominant group_ . But tolerance is too much to ask, even from Mozilla.

rusk 7y ago

> we see users just outright refusing to pay I’m not convinced this is true. Surveillance/Market insight/whatever is just too lucrative. There’s plenty of examples of company’s that make a living by charging for a service but for a company like facebook, for example, excluding users runs counter to their whole business model. “Charging” customers is hassle. If you can find a way to monetise without all that icky hassle, you will.

fouric 7y ago
> Surveillance/Market insight/whatever is just too lucrative. Citation needed. Individual users' data is, last time I checked, relatively low-value - isn't the Facebook ARPU less than $10?
- rusk 7y ago
  How many users?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    In case this wasn't a rhetorical question: billions. "1.59 billion daily active users on Facebook on average for June 2019; 2.41 billion monthly active users on Facebook as of June 30, 2019" Source: https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/.
    - rusk 7y ago
      It was :) They’re not hard sums to do.

make3 7y ago

What is actually disingenuous is equating the search deals to anything Google, like making adblocking harder and downright impossible on mobile

burtonator 7y ago
Could you clarify? I don't follow your point.

bad_user 7y ago

> I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of HN users are still using a @gmail.com email address. And I'm actually in that super small minority that pays for services such as FastMail, Dropbox, Newsblur, 1Password, or YouTube (premium). I also donated to Mozilla among others. --- The problem is that browsers should be part of the "commons", just like roads, since browsers are indespensible platforms in this day and age. Are your taxes funding browsers? If no, then are you suggesting that only the privileged should have access to a good, modern browser? --- Also products like Firefox are very unlike other products, because it's open source, both by license and by how it is developed. If Mozilla dies due to Google pulling the plug on their deal, Firefox is still open source and with enough resources somebody else can pick up its development. To wit Thunderbird may still live under the Mozilla Foundation, but it is community driven, with donations from individuals being its primary source of funding. And it is moving along. Not as fast and it isn't as polished as its users would want, but it lives. --- I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models that just piggyback on top of Chromium and are thus in no way a threat to Chrome's monopoly.

burtonator 7y ago
> Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? To be fair you're asking the wrong person. I pay for a ton of products. I pay for IntelliJ which I think is $150 per year. HubSpot which will probably get $1k from me... I pay for Gmail... I think it's $4 per user per month? TeamCity, CircleCI ... NYTimes (yeah, I actually pay). ... but I do think you're right here. I'm actually legitimately curious to understand this issue. I want to focus my product, Polar, on being a premium document management platform for people VERY serious about research: https://getpolarized.io https://getpolarized.io ... I want to understand more about this mindset though. I think you can make a go at things if you have a VERY premium product focused on a tight niche (at least initially). > both by license and by how it is developed. I'd like to argue that this is false. The argument behind Open Source is that it's developed by the community and that by being open there is some sort of community development behind it. However, that's not what we see from Open Source outside of enterpise. 99% of Mozilla's development comes from paid Mozilla engineers. > I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models I mean this is sort of a logical fallacy. Just because something is based on a company doesn't mean they are trying to do something inherently wrong.

jorvi 7y ago

Hence why I like Brave. Their model is very solid and seems a lot more sustainable than depending on Google as their overlord. Ads are voluntary, displayed as a system notification and vetted by Brave. Watch ads, you get tokens which pay publishers. If you don't want ads, you can buy tokens. If you don't want to buy tokens, you still won't see ads. And except for the first offer there is no nag screen either. I think Firefox is awesome and it is really bad if we continue the Chrome/blink hegemony, but I can't stand for their decision to not block all ads instead of just trackers, especially on phones. The modern web without a 'real' adblocker is borderline unusable and Firefox prioritizing publishers over users doesn't sit well with me.

roca 7y ago
Blocking ads by default would require a judgement that ads and ad-supported Web sites are bad by default. That is a much more extreme and less supportable position than Mozilla's position that tracking is bad by default. People who want to block all ads can opt into that with a Firefox ad-blocking extension (including on Android, unlike Chrome). Brave's fine, but if you're worried about Google/Chrome hegemony you'd better not use it, because as a Chromium browser it's a part of that hegemony.
- jorvi 7y ago
  > People who want to block all ads can opt into that with a Firefox ad-blocking extension Except on iOS, where you have to finagle with VPN-based blockers > because as a Chromium browser it's a part of that hegemony I'm well aware. I'd rather use (and recommend to less techy people) Firefox, but I can't with their current stance. People want/need adblocking but they also want sync. If Firefox had an ad-blocking toggle that was off by default that'd be fine by me.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    Just to clarify, Brave blocks tracking not ads, and so does what @roca advocates — but we have always done it by default, and we block more tracking than Firefox belatedly does. What’s more, we include an optional way to support your favorite sites and channels. See https://batgrowth.com/ https://batgrowth.com/ for results so far. I’m curious what ads you want to block that effective tracking protection does not block as an effect of blocking scripts that both track and (via generated scripts) place ads. Thanks.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Vinnl 7y ago

> If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else. (...) Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold. I'd contest that these are largely the same users. In any case, I support the overall message: it'd be good if Mozilla found additional ways to finance their work, and I'm happy they're actively looking for them.

Santosh83 7y ago

> I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). There is a very simple way to achieve this. Sell your product for money, and provide no other option. The customer gives you money and you give them use of your product. Win-win.

deogeo 7y ago

> I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). You don't have that choice - what happens is you pay and become the product. Cable TV used to be ad-free, since you paid for it, then they figured out they can make more money selling ads. There are ads on the buses and subways, even though you have to pay for tickets. Windows 10 shows you ads and spies on you, yet you have to pay for it. You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads. You pay for a movie ticket, yet have to sit through 20 minutes of ads before the movie starts.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads. I've heard about this, but what exactly does this mean? I have a smart TV, but I never see ads. Supposedly it's spying on me, but how is it spying on me any more than the Netflix and Hulu subscriptions I already pay for? This is not meant to sound defensive - I do believe it's too good to be true that my TV is as wonderful as I think it is. I'm just trying to understand what is so bad about it?
- ryanianian 7y ago
  Many new "smart" TVs have "ACR" that sends info about what you're watching (regardless of whether on netflix or hulu or a set-top-box) to the TV manufacturer. [1] Pro-Tip: At least for Samsung TVs you can un-accept the privacy-policy to disable this. This will also disable Netflix and all "smart" features but that's..exactly what I want in a TV. Alternatively just don't give the TV network access, but you may want to do a yearly software-update. [1]: https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features/ https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    Thank you for this. Now I look forward to seeing all the ways my TV behaves differently now (no voice search, for instance).

neilobremski 7y ago

I wonder how my younger self from twenty years ago would have responded to me now: I'd prefer to PAY money for software once rather than being suckled by subscriptions, annoyed by ads, frazzled by fingerprinting, or prickled by privacy problems. Give me a nice over-sized box to stick on my desk for fifty bucks and some clean, well-developed software. Of course in the meantime Firefox and Brave are doing well enough. I still feel as though I'm being towed along and probably the browser makers feel similarly.

pault 7y ago
I actually prefer to rent software, since I don't have to pay a huge amount for software that I will only use occasionally (hello Photoshop), and I know the developers will have the resources to improve their products.

bdcravens 7y ago

Google also pays Apple a significant sum ($12B in 2019: https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-engine/ https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en...) to be the search engine default.