8 ms·

A browser is expensive. Currently Firefox is funded (though not controlled) by Google's Ad business. I am all for them reducing their reliance on Google's Ad b

A browser is expensive. Currently Firefox is funded (though not controlled) by Google's Ad business. I am all for them reducing their reliance on Google's Ad business. In this sense this is a step _towards_ what you want. I really really dislike them double speaking about this though.

AegirLeet 5y ago
Reducing reliance on Google by partnering up with a different ad company instead. What good does that do? I don't want ads anywhere near my browser. Here's what I'd really like them to do: * Stop paying out millions to execs * Focus more on Firefox instead of other side projects * Let me pay for Firefox development directly
- pizza234 5y ago
  The Opera browser used to do this, from v5. It lasted a few years (it seem 5, based on Wikipedia), and they ultimately ended up switching to the default engine business model.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Opera was / is cool and advanced in many regards. But Firefox is open source. This is very important for many reasons.
  - Certhas 5y ago
    There is so much wishful thinking around this... "me and five other people want to pay, if you just cater to my specific tastes, than the me and these 5 people will happily bankroll your massive engineering effort!" Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??
    - nine_k 5y ago
      (1) Too many ad networks involved; who do you pay for not seeing their ads? (2) You would be unpleasantly surprised by the amount to pay.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        (2) is in big part because people who're willing to spend money to get rid of ads are exactly the people advertisers are trying to get to - people with plenty of disposable income.
    - y4mi 5y ago
      It's not as clear cut as you seem to think. A lot of people just think that Mozilla should be a nonprofit and not aim to primarily enrich it's CEO and leadership. This isn't the case at the moment, which is clear if you paid any attention to what they've been doing for the last few years. Little of the money that's going to be raised by this will end up paying for engineers to improve or maintain the Firefox code base and the vast majority of it will end in the pockets of said leadership, and this is kinda displeasing.
      - Hnrobert42 5y ago
        Do you have a source showing the vast majority of revenue goes to leadership? In 2018, the CEO’s salary equaled 0.64% of revenue. Before we discuss whether that is right or wrong, we should at least agree on a set of facts. https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-execs-salary-up-400/2050/ https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
        y4mi 5y ago
        they generally get more then 400 million yearly revenue, though there was one outlier with over 800 million. this is money they generally don't have to pay taxes on because of their status as a non-profit. mozilla employs at the moment around 800 people. according to their FAQ > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/faq/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/f... > More than 75% of Mozilla spending is on people-related investments to produce the products and programs that support our mission: keeping the web open, free, and accessible. this would mean they had around 300 million to spend on these 800 employees, averaging around 375 000 per employee. Sr. Software Engineers get <$200 000, so IF all of their 800 employees were senior software engineers (extremely unlikely), their salary would be around 160 million, which is slightly more then 50% of what was available. a more realistic calculation would be around 20-30%, because not everyone will be getting SV wages. They've got global presence after all with offices SF, Toronto, Berlin, Beijin etc. you'd have to verify in which unrelated projects by third parties mozilla invests and generally follow the money to figure out anything more, but that is simply out of scope of a hn comment.
    - Swenrekcah 5y ago
      If you get 5000 people paying $5/month for every person working on a truly private browser, you have $25,000/month per teammate. I'm sure you could find 50,000 people in the world willing to pay this. I'm one of them. The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        > The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible. In case of Mozilla/Firefox: do this while you still have some reputation left. It's literally the one party on the Internet that would have a chance of pulling it off.
        denton-scratch 5y ago
        I approve of this traditional usage of the term "literally". It's literally correct, but possibly too late - they've been burning bridges for five years.
      - samhw 5y ago
        There's some remarkable sleight of hand in "for every person working on [it]". That's a lot of people required to build a browser. Are you suggesting each of those 5000 users pays $5 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS, or that you'll need [5000 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS] users?
        Swenrekcah 5y ago
        The latter. The numbers are not precise, it's just to show that you really don't need a lot of paying people and they really don't need to pay a lot each.
    - whoisthemachine 5y ago
      I agree. I think they would find use in having a "Firefox Enterprise" that catered to businesses directly - basically a version of Firefox that they will tailor to an organization's crazy security requirements. Basically anywhere I've worked has wanted to lock down internet browsing in some way or other, and they now pay for expensive products to do so externally. I think it would be very appealing to just pay for a product that did so out of the box...
- GeckoEidechse 5y ago
  > Let me pay for Firefox development directly Same. I already donate to the Mozilla Foundation but I'd love to fund Firefox more directly.
skywal_l 5y ago
Is there a way to know how the Mozilla Foundation spend its money? They've stopped updating this page[0] in 2019. Maybe a way to rely less on Google and "trusted partners" money is just to spend less. [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- callahad 5y ago
  They've not stopped updating that page; it just takes longer than you would otherwise expect to get final numbers, prepare the reports, run them past auditors, etc. The 2019 statements were published in October of 2020, so I'd expect the 2020 numbers some time this month. It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.
  - skywal_l 5y ago
    > It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox. Wow I didn't know that. I always assumed Firefox was developed by a non-profit. So it basically means that Firefox is a commercial product (the purpose of which is to make money). Thanks for that bit of information which was not at all obvious if you don't pay close attention...
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      All of the Mozilla Corporation's profits are reinvested in Mozilla, being a nonprofit charity caused tax issues that caused them to spin off the Mozilla Corporation.
    - 5y ago
yawaworht1978 5y ago
But what if that idea is coming from Google? How many relevant partners does FF have?
datenarsch 5y ago
Why is a browser expensive? There are many great and big open source projects out there that are maintained and developed mainly by volunteers. Why can't Firefox be like this?
- roca 5y ago
  Building a shell around Chromium or Webkit isn't very expensive. Maintaining an independent, high-quality browser engine so that the design and implementation of the Web isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly is incredibly expensive: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent-browser-is.html https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent... (4 years old, but the situation I describe hasn't changed, except that Microsoft has switched to Chromium so Mozilla's engine is more important than ever.)
  - zaphirplane 5y ago
    700 people from wiki is more than I would have guessed even after accounting for the Multiplatform and mobile versions
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "Microsoft has switched to Chromium" Feels like a massive missed opportunity - microsoft is the only big player not funded by ads. Also having their own Engine was cool, i liked it, although it did sometimes have failures. Looks like they got tired if different issues and thew in the towel
    - dageshi 5y ago
      They would never overcome the reputation damage from IE. I think they accepted that and switched to Chromium because it just makes maintaining the userbase they do have a lot easier.
  - hyproxia 5y ago
    >isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly Remember the W3C DRM standard and how Firefox implemented it?
Winsaucerer 5y ago
I'd love to be able to pay some monthly subscription to support Firefox. But every time this comes up, someone tells me that there's no way to directly support Firefox itself. I wish they'd do something like Wikipedia does, to ask their users to donate or contribute.
- maccard 5y ago
  Unless I'm mistaken, Wikipedia doesn't ringfence their donations either, so by donating to the Wikimedia foundation [0] you're not just paying for wikipedia either. [0] https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php
  - labawi 5y ago
    If you donate to Mozilla, you don't pay for Firefox at all. Conversely, AFAIK, Wikimedia doesn't accept money for merchandising their users. At least not in any official, straightforward way.
- ploum 5y ago
  While I philosophically agree with you, I can’t help but think: - Developing Firefox looks way more expensive than running Wikipedia servers. - It looks like there’s at least 10x less Firefox users than Wikipedia users. It might still be possible (Firefox users might me more willing to pay and to pay more than Wikipedia users). It still looks really hard. I wish they didn’t try to match the startup/VC/pivot/diversify frenzy but, in the end, I’m really happy that they exist.
- throw63738 5y ago
  I bet some mozilla devs have their own Github Sponsors or Patreon.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  From what I understand doing donations and stipulating that it’s for a specific purpose can hurt a nonprofit more than help, because then vital logistics get underfunded and fuck up the competency of the organization. (Eg. Everyone wants to fund nonprofits cancer research or whatever, but what if they actually desperately need to fund remote work infrastructure because a global pandemic has forced them all to work remotely on short notice?) Of course if you don’t like what an organization broadly does with the money given to it, don’t give it money. Maybe issue some feedback that you think the organization should do x or y, and the fact it’s doing p and q makes you hesitant to donate.
strken 5y ago
Mozilla takes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. For decades it hired its engineers from the single most expensive place on earth to hire an engineer, the Bay Area. It boosted CEO pay into the millions shortly before laying off a big chunk of its engineering team. If they had taken the cash they spent on "diversifying their revenue streams" (i.e. getting distracted by side projects while their moneymaker Firefox got slower and lost all its users) over the last decade and a half and stuck it into a trust, they'd be sitting on a war chest of billions of dollars right now. I also don't understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.
- toyg 5y ago
  I'm one of those five, and I'm not switching. Chromium is tainted, Brave is outright corrupt, and IceCat is seriously unpractical (they don't even build Windows binaries, because ideology beats practicality for them). Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or later, draw a line and find a better way forward (i.e. a new exec team). Either that, or the project will die and hopefully someone else will pick up the baton.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    > Brave is outright corrupt I am sure I will regret asking... but why do you think that?
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      For me at least, all the language Brave uses seems to indicate something similar to a pyramid scheme to me. I dunno, something about the whole thing sets me on edge.
      - rglullis 5y ago
        Really? That is quite odd. Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be. What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?
RNCTX 5y ago
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to have a funding model that isn't a derivative of a newspaper from 1927.
denton-scratch 5y ago
A browser is not "expensive". A modern marketing tool is expensive. Take out all the crap, and strip it back to a plain browser. Freeze all new features. The only maintenance that is needed is security patches. That shouldn't need more than a handful of full-time devs. They could be paid using just one exec's salary. I'll maintain my contribution to Thunderbird; if Mozilla doesn't feel like helping financially with that more-or-less unique product, fair enough. But I'm not OK with having to drill into about:config to disable Firefox Pocket's hijacking of high-profile screen real-estate - why hasn't it gone yet?

AegirLeet 5y ago

Reducing reliance on Google by partnering up with a different ad company instead. What good does that do? I don't want ads anywhere near my browser. Here's what I'd really like them to do: * Stop paying out millions to execs * Focus more on Firefox instead of other side projects * Let me pay for Firefox development directly

pizza234 5y ago
The Opera browser used to do this, from v5. It lasted a few years (it seem 5, based on Wikipedia), and they ultimately ended up switching to the default engine business model.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Opera was / is cool and advanced in many regards. But Firefox is open source. This is very important for many reasons.
- Certhas 5y ago
  There is so much wishful thinking around this... "me and five other people want to pay, if you just cater to my specific tastes, than the me and these 5 people will happily bankroll your massive engineering effort!" Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??
  - nine_k 5y ago
    (1) Too many ad networks involved; who do you pay for not seeing their ads? (2) You would be unpleasantly surprised by the amount to pay.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      (2) is in big part because people who're willing to spend money to get rid of ads are exactly the people advertisers are trying to get to - people with plenty of disposable income.
  - y4mi 5y ago
    It's not as clear cut as you seem to think. A lot of people just think that Mozilla should be a nonprofit and not aim to primarily enrich it's CEO and leadership. This isn't the case at the moment, which is clear if you paid any attention to what they've been doing for the last few years. Little of the money that's going to be raised by this will end up paying for engineers to improve or maintain the Firefox code base and the vast majority of it will end in the pockets of said leadership, and this is kinda displeasing.
    - Hnrobert42 5y ago
      Do you have a source showing the vast majority of revenue goes to leadership? In 2018, the CEO’s salary equaled 0.64% of revenue. Before we discuss whether that is right or wrong, we should at least agree on a set of facts. https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-execs-salary-up-400/2050/ https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
      - y4mi 5y ago
        they generally get more then 400 million yearly revenue, though there was one outlier with over 800 million. this is money they generally don't have to pay taxes on because of their status as a non-profit. mozilla employs at the moment around 800 people. according to their FAQ > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/faq/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/f... > More than 75% of Mozilla spending is on people-related investments to produce the products and programs that support our mission: keeping the web open, free, and accessible. this would mean they had around 300 million to spend on these 800 employees, averaging around 375 000 per employee. Sr. Software Engineers get <$200 000, so IF all of their 800 employees were senior software engineers (extremely unlikely), their salary would be around 160 million, which is slightly more then 50% of what was available. a more realistic calculation would be around 20-30%, because not everyone will be getting SV wages. They've got global presence after all with offices SF, Toronto, Berlin, Beijin etc. you'd have to verify in which unrelated projects by third parties mozilla invests and generally follow the money to figure out anything more, but that is simply out of scope of a hn comment.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    If you get 5000 people paying $5/month for every person working on a truly private browser, you have $25,000/month per teammate. I'm sure you could find 50,000 people in the world willing to pay this. I'm one of them. The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible. In case of Mozilla/Firefox: do this while you still have some reputation left. It's literally the one party on the Internet that would have a chance of pulling it off.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        I approve of this traditional usage of the term "literally". It's literally correct, but possibly too late - they've been burning bridges for five years.
    - samhw 5y ago
      There's some remarkable sleight of hand in "for every person working on [it]". That's a lot of people required to build a browser. Are you suggesting each of those 5000 users pays $5 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS, or that you'll need [5000 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS] users?
      - Swenrekcah 5y ago
        The latter. The numbers are not precise, it's just to show that you really don't need a lot of paying people and they really don't need to pay a lot each.
  - whoisthemachine 5y ago
    I agree. I think they would find use in having a "Firefox Enterprise" that catered to businesses directly - basically a version of Firefox that they will tailor to an organization's crazy security requirements. Basically anywhere I've worked has wanted to lock down internet browsing in some way or other, and they now pay for expensive products to do so externally. I think it would be very appealing to just pay for a product that did so out of the box...
GeckoEidechse 5y ago
> Let me pay for Firefox development directly Same. I already donate to the Mozilla Foundation but I'd love to fund Firefox more directly.

skywal_l 5y ago

Is there a way to know how the Mozilla Foundation spend its money? They've stopped updating this page[0] in 2019. Maybe a way to rely less on Google and "trusted partners" money is just to spend less. [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
callahad 5y ago
They've not stopped updating that page; it just takes longer than you would otherwise expect to get final numbers, prepare the reports, run them past auditors, etc. The 2019 statements were published in October of 2020, so I'd expect the 2020 numbers some time this month. It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.
- skywal_l 5y ago
  > It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox. Wow I didn't know that. I always assumed Firefox was developed by a non-profit. So it basically means that Firefox is a commercial product (the purpose of which is to make money). Thanks for that bit of information which was not at all obvious if you don't pay close attention...
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    All of the Mozilla Corporation's profits are reinvested in Mozilla, being a nonprofit charity caused tax issues that caused them to spin off the Mozilla Corporation.
  - 5y ago

yawaworht1978 5y ago

But what if that idea is coming from Google? How many relevant partners does FF have?

datenarsch 5y ago

Why is a browser expensive? There are many great and big open source projects out there that are maintained and developed mainly by volunteers. Why can't Firefox be like this?

roca 5y ago
Building a shell around Chromium or Webkit isn't very expensive. Maintaining an independent, high-quality browser engine so that the design and implementation of the Web isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly is incredibly expensive: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent-browser-is.html https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent... (4 years old, but the situation I describe hasn't changed, except that Microsoft has switched to Chromium so Mozilla's engine is more important than ever.)
- zaphirplane 5y ago
  700 people from wiki is more than I would have guessed even after accounting for the Multiplatform and mobile versions
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Microsoft has switched to Chromium" Feels like a massive missed opportunity - microsoft is the only big player not funded by ads. Also having their own Engine was cool, i liked it, although it did sometimes have failures. Looks like they got tired if different issues and thew in the towel
  - dageshi 5y ago
    They would never overcome the reputation damage from IE. I think they accepted that and switched to Chromium because it just makes maintaining the userbase they do have a lot easier.
- hyproxia 5y ago
  >isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly Remember the W3C DRM standard and how Firefox implemented it?

Winsaucerer 5y ago

I'd love to be able to pay some monthly subscription to support Firefox. But every time this comes up, someone tells me that there's no way to directly support Firefox itself. I wish they'd do something like Wikipedia does, to ask their users to donate or contribute.

maccard 5y ago
Unless I'm mistaken, Wikipedia doesn't ringfence their donations either, so by donating to the Wikimedia foundation [0] you're not just paying for wikipedia either. [0] https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php
- labawi 5y ago
  If you donate to Mozilla, you don't pay for Firefox at all. Conversely, AFAIK, Wikimedia doesn't accept money for merchandising their users. At least not in any official, straightforward way.
ploum 5y ago
While I philosophically agree with you, I can’t help but think: - Developing Firefox looks way more expensive than running Wikipedia servers. - It looks like there’s at least 10x less Firefox users than Wikipedia users. It might still be possible (Firefox users might me more willing to pay and to pay more than Wikipedia users). It still looks really hard. I wish they didn’t try to match the startup/VC/pivot/diversify frenzy but, in the end, I’m really happy that they exist.
throw63738 5y ago
I bet some mozilla devs have their own Github Sponsors or Patreon.
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
From what I understand doing donations and stipulating that it’s for a specific purpose can hurt a nonprofit more than help, because then vital logistics get underfunded and fuck up the competency of the organization. (Eg. Everyone wants to fund nonprofits cancer research or whatever, but what if they actually desperately need to fund remote work infrastructure because a global pandemic has forced them all to work remotely on short notice?) Of course if you don’t like what an organization broadly does with the money given to it, don’t give it money. Maybe issue some feedback that you think the organization should do x or y, and the fact it’s doing p and q makes you hesitant to donate.

strken 5y ago

Mozilla takes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. For decades it hired its engineers from the single most expensive place on earth to hire an engineer, the Bay Area. It boosted CEO pay into the millions shortly before laying off a big chunk of its engineering team. If they had taken the cash they spent on "diversifying their revenue streams" (i.e. getting distracted by side projects while their moneymaker Firefox got slower and lost all its users) over the last decade and a half and stuck it into a trust, they'd be sitting on a war chest of billions of dollars right now. I also don't understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.

toyg 5y ago
I'm one of those five, and I'm not switching. Chromium is tainted, Brave is outright corrupt, and IceCat is seriously unpractical (they don't even build Windows binaries, because ideology beats practicality for them). Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or later, draw a line and find a better way forward (i.e. a new exec team). Either that, or the project will die and hopefully someone else will pick up the baton.
- rglullis 5y ago
  > Brave is outright corrupt I am sure I will regret asking... but why do you think that?
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    For me at least, all the language Brave uses seems to indicate something similar to a pyramid scheme to me. I dunno, something about the whole thing sets me on edge.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      Really? That is quite odd. Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be. What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?

RNCTX 5y ago

Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to have a funding model that isn't a derivative of a newspaper from 1927.

denton-scratch 5y ago

A browser is not "expensive". A modern marketing tool is expensive. Take out all the crap, and strip it back to a plain browser. Freeze all new features. The only maintenance that is needed is security patches. That shouldn't need more than a handful of full-time devs. They could be paid using just one exec's salary. I'll maintain my contribution to Thunderbird; if Mozilla doesn't feel like helping financially with that more-or-less unique product, fair enough. But I'm not OK with having to drill into about:config to disable Firefox Pocket's hijacking of high-profile screen real-estate - why hasn't it gone yet?