5 ms·

A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a b

A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current users, no? 10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue as 200M users monetized with a Google deal. Now, would 5% Firefox users convert to paid users is a different question. If not, then perhaps Firefox as a product (or as an idea) may not be as good. But I think they would, and even if the percentage is lower, it would at least set Firefox free. And that is a good position to be in for any company.

scratcheee 5y ago
Mozilla have been losing market share when the barrier to entry is "install this free alternative to your existing browser" the chance that they could succeed with "buy this paid alternative to your existing browser" is approaching zero. Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives. Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would. In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process. If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee. Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole. That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla. The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.
dralley 5y ago
>10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue The only way that works is if they abandoned the entire Firefox codebase and made another Chrome clone. Even in their diminished state they still have 220 million monthly-active-users. With only 10 million, they'd have no leverage in the web standards groups, and no leverage with web developers. The Blink monoculture would be well and truly complete. Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million.
- freediver 5y ago
  > Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million. I disagree. 50M people (including myself) already pay $12/mo ($144/year) for YouTube Premium [1], basically so they do not see the ads even though a completely free alternative is available. (this also tells us you need just one 'killer' feature) And a browser, executed right, is arguably a much more valuable product. It is where we spend most of our day in. It is what we use to work and create value for companies we work at. So 10M people at $5/mo should not require such a stretch of imagination. The only question is is Firefox that good as a browser right now, and what would need to change? Besides what is the alternative for Firefox? What good does its leverage in web standards group bring it? Even at the price of free, it is losing tens of millions of users every year and the death spiral of user attrition will drive its market share to the ground eventually. It clearly signals a need for a radical turn. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-million-premium-music-subscribers-streaming-services https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-millio...
  - sfink 5y ago
    You are arguing that people "should" pay based on value. This is a competitive market. There are reasonable alternatives. Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0. (It's actually not, you're paying with slightly less personal data for Firefox than the alternatives, and there are substantial externalities like the effects of monoculture, but none of that is going to change the big picture.) Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay, but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled, and will abandon your product when it changes in any way they don't like. The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors, in order to add switching costs and reduce the fidelity of alternatives. And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web. Good luck with that.
no_wizard 5y ago
Here's the one I have always touted: They could build themselves to be the independent alternative to conglomerates. They could be the alternative, offering services above and beyond the browser. I think their VPN service has been a modest success for them. I'd love for them to have moved into the same space as say, 1Password and other cloud based services of that nature. They are the independent 3rd party that works on all platforms. That is what I think their position could be. They're a trusted entity with known good track record of caring about privacy and their users, why wouldn't they move into markets where its a natural extension of this is a win?
soundnote 5y ago
I think Brave is a good model for developing alternative, independent revenue streams. They're helped in large part by having a community that understands the need for it, a lot of the vocal Firefox fanbase seems to want an independent browser engine and service backend run and distributed as donationware.
- dralley 5y ago
  Brave does ad-hijacking and has been caught hijacking referral links in the past. I'm not sure I would call their model "good". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027
  - soundnote 5y ago
    Ad-hijacking? The referral code thing was a bug that got fixed - the intended function was Firefox Suggest-esque sponsored links from a local directory when you typed a word but not a complete url, eg. "binance". The bug was that it gave you a suggestion for complete, legit urls too (eg. "binance.us") and put the suggestion at the top. The bug was fixed to make the feature work as intended, and the feature is turned off by default.
    - didibus 5y ago
      Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads. I don't totally understand how people think Brave is against ad-tech, when it is very much an ad-tech company making money primarily from ads, and secondly from its crypto ownership in BAT. Brave does a lot of user tracking, but it says it anonymizes it, which hopefully it does, but it still tracks all your behavior. It is still a cool model, but very much ad-tech and ad-based.
      - soundnote 5y ago
        Of course they're not against ad tech, they are an ad agency. They just think there's a market for a privacy-respecting setup, is all. And I think they're right in that. As far as web ads go, a lot of people's objection to them is not seeing ads (though the ads themselves can obviously be very invasive and bothersome), but to things like tracking and fingerprinting, which the company is adamantly against. The attempt is to have ads, but also have privacy, which IMO is the correct move. It's not like we can run everything on subscriptions. > Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads. This is not exactly true. They have separate functions for an adblocker, an ad delivery system that's entirely separate from the websites you visit, and a tipping system for sending BAT to creators. I'm not terribly fond of crypto, so I use Brave as essentially a degoogled Chromium with a built-in adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since it's not an extension) and is available on mobile, and who run an independent end to end encrypted sync service. It's pretty nice.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company An even better "funding model" would be a non-profit entity with no additional agenda beyond providing an anti-adtech browser to the world. I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who would donate their time and money to thwarting the overreach of adtech.
- didibus 5y ago
  Isn't Firefox the proof that this isn't the case?

scratcheee 5y ago

Mozilla have been losing market share when the barrier to entry is "install this free alternative to your existing browser" the chance that they could succeed with "buy this paid alternative to your existing browser" is approaching zero. Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives. Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would. In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process. If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee. Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole. That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla. The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.

dralley 5y ago

>10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue The only way that works is if they abandoned the entire Firefox codebase and made another Chrome clone. Even in their diminished state they still have 220 million monthly-active-users. With only 10 million, they'd have no leverage in the web standards groups, and no leverage with web developers. The Blink monoculture would be well and truly complete. Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million.

freediver 5y ago
> Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million. I disagree. 50M people (including myself) already pay $12/mo ($144/year) for YouTube Premium [1], basically so they do not see the ads even though a completely free alternative is available. (this also tells us you need just one 'killer' feature) And a browser, executed right, is arguably a much more valuable product. It is where we spend most of our day in. It is what we use to work and create value for companies we work at. So 10M people at $5/mo should not require such a stretch of imagination. The only question is is Firefox that good as a browser right now, and what would need to change? Besides what is the alternative for Firefox? What good does its leverage in web standards group bring it? Even at the price of free, it is losing tens of millions of users every year and the death spiral of user attrition will drive its market share to the ground eventually. It clearly signals a need for a radical turn. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-million-premium-music-subscribers-streaming-services https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-millio...
- sfink 5y ago
  You are arguing that people "should" pay based on value. This is a competitive market. There are reasonable alternatives. Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0. (It's actually not, you're paying with slightly less personal data for Firefox than the alternatives, and there are substantial externalities like the effects of monoculture, but none of that is going to change the big picture.) Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay, but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled, and will abandon your product when it changes in any way they don't like. The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors, in order to add switching costs and reduce the fidelity of alternatives. And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web. Good luck with that.

no_wizard 5y ago

Here's the one I have always touted: They could build themselves to be the independent alternative to conglomerates. They could be the alternative, offering services above and beyond the browser. I think their VPN service has been a modest success for them. I'd love for them to have moved into the same space as say, 1Password and other cloud based services of that nature. They are the independent 3rd party that works on all platforms. That is what I think their position could be. They're a trusted entity with known good track record of caring about privacy and their users, why wouldn't they move into markets where its a natural extension of this is a win?

soundnote 5y ago

I think Brave is a good model for developing alternative, independent revenue streams. They're helped in large part by having a community that understands the need for it, a lot of the vocal Firefox fanbase seems to want an independent browser engine and service backend run and distributed as donationware.

dralley 5y ago
Brave does ad-hijacking and has been caught hijacking referral links in the past. I'm not sure I would call their model "good". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027
- soundnote 5y ago
  Ad-hijacking? The referral code thing was a bug that got fixed - the intended function was Firefox Suggest-esque sponsored links from a local directory when you typed a word but not a complete url, eg. "binance". The bug was that it gave you a suggestion for complete, legit urls too (eg. "binance.us") and put the suggestion at the top. The bug was fixed to make the feature work as intended, and the feature is turned off by default.
  - didibus 5y ago
    Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads. I don't totally understand how people think Brave is against ad-tech, when it is very much an ad-tech company making money primarily from ads, and secondly from its crypto ownership in BAT. Brave does a lot of user tracking, but it says it anonymizes it, which hopefully it does, but it still tracks all your behavior. It is still a cool model, but very much ad-tech and ad-based.
    - soundnote 5y ago
      Of course they're not against ad tech, they are an ad agency. They just think there's a market for a privacy-respecting setup, is all. And I think they're right in that. As far as web ads go, a lot of people's objection to them is not seeing ads (though the ads themselves can obviously be very invasive and bothersome), but to things like tracking and fingerprinting, which the company is adamantly against. The attempt is to have ads, but also have privacy, which IMO is the correct move. It's not like we can run everything on subscriptions. > Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads. This is not exactly true. They have separate functions for an adblocker, an ad delivery system that's entirely separate from the websites you visit, and a tipping system for sending BAT to creators. I'm not terribly fond of crypto, so I use Brave as essentially a degoogled Chromium with a built-in adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since it's not an extension) and is available on mobile, and who run an independent end to end encrypted sync service. It's pretty nice.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company An even better "funding model" would be a non-profit entity with no additional agenda beyond providing an anti-adtech browser to the world. I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who would donate their time and money to thwarting the overreach of adtech.

didibus 5y ago
Isn't Firefox the proof that this isn't the case?