4 ms·

At some point this is Mozilla’s own fault for not finding an alternative revenue scheme after all these decades. Addicted to an easy money spigot.

LightHugger 2y ago
They appear to actively scorn the idea of making a good browser as a method of funding as well, they seem to prioritize everything but firefox, and want to blow what's left of the budget on company events at fancy hotels. There's a reason firefox forks get so much more goodwill than mozilla itself for the past several years...
- dralley 2y ago
  Making the browser itself paid would instantly doom them to irrelevance. It's already bad enough trying to make developers care about a browser with 2% marketshare, it will be impossible to do so if their marketshare drops to 0.1%, which it will if you make it paid. That strategy only works for browsers that are basically just thin wrappers around Chrome or Webkit, with basically no development cost for the core browser tech and low divergence from those platforms. It's not going to sustain a fully independent browser stack.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - LightHugger 2y ago
    I was not suggesting a paid browser, that's a bit of a leap. But right now mozilla has burned all their goodwill. If they wanted to, for example, focus on making firefox really good and solicit donations specifically to support continued firefox development, it wouldn't work anymore. They could have followed the model of other large open source projects that do the same. But now i would never want to support them. The goodwill is just gone and if you give money to mozilla right now it gets wasted on nonsense, they have so little interest in firefox. I'd rather support any of the forks.
zoezoezoezoe 2y ago
if only there was some project that had a great donation scheme and works really well, that is a poster child of good donation models, probably not real though.
dralley 2y ago
They do in fact have "alternative revenue streams" and HN complains about the existence of every single one of them. Every threat about Pocket or Mozilla VPN or Lockwise etc. etc. is full of the refrain "Why don't they just focus on Firefox" There's no "alternative revenue stream" that would bring in that quantity of money without requiring significant investment that would detract from Firefox engineering, which people would then also whine about endlessly.
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  What if they found a way to monetize Firefox It’s not like those alternative streams have been very successful. Feels like they’ve been floundering from project to project for a decade now.
  - dralley 2y ago
    Making the browser itself paid would instantly doom them to irrelevance. It's already bad enough trying to make developers care about a browser with 2% marketshare, it will be impossible to do so if their marketshare drops to 0.1%, which it will if you make it paid. That strategy only works for browsers that are basically just thin wrappers around Chrome or Webkit, with basically no development cost for the core browser tech and low divergence from those platforms. It's not going to sustain a fully independent browser stack.
    - Apocryphon 2y ago
      What if they pursued a freemium model, other browsers like Orion do that. What if they monetize an aspect of the browser that people will actually pay good money for (something more than Pocket). Heck even Brave is trying something with its model.
      - dralley 2y ago
        Brave replaces third party ads with their own, I don't see that as being particularly ethical. Personally I'd like to see them try to recreate what Scroll were doing a few years ago before the Twitter acquisition destroyed them. They'd have to make it cross-browser though.

LightHugger 2y ago

They appear to actively scorn the idea of making a good browser as a method of funding as well, they seem to prioritize everything but firefox, and want to blow what's left of the budget on company events at fancy hotels. There's a reason firefox forks get so much more goodwill than mozilla itself for the past several years...

dralley 2y ago
Making the browser itself paid would instantly doom them to irrelevance. It's already bad enough trying to make developers care about a browser with 2% marketshare, it will be impossible to do so if their marketshare drops to 0.1%, which it will if you make it paid. That strategy only works for browsers that are basically just thin wrappers around Chrome or Webkit, with basically no development cost for the core browser tech and low divergence from those platforms. It's not going to sustain a fully independent browser stack.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- LightHugger 2y ago
  I was not suggesting a paid browser, that's a bit of a leap. But right now mozilla has burned all their goodwill. If they wanted to, for example, focus on making firefox really good and solicit donations specifically to support continued firefox development, it wouldn't work anymore. They could have followed the model of other large open source projects that do the same. But now i would never want to support them. The goodwill is just gone and if you give money to mozilla right now it gets wasted on nonsense, they have so little interest in firefox. I'd rather support any of the forks.

zoezoezoezoe 2y ago

if only there was some project that had a great donation scheme and works really well, that is a poster child of good donation models, probably not real though.

dralley 2y ago

They do in fact have "alternative revenue streams" and HN complains about the existence of every single one of them. Every threat about Pocket or Mozilla VPN or Lockwise etc. etc. is full of the refrain "Why don't they just focus on Firefox" There's no "alternative revenue stream" that would bring in that quantity of money without requiring significant investment that would detract from Firefox engineering, which people would then also whine about endlessly.

Apocryphon 2y ago
What if they found a way to monetize Firefox It’s not like those alternative streams have been very successful. Feels like they’ve been floundering from project to project for a decade now.
- dralley 2y ago
  Making the browser itself paid would instantly doom them to irrelevance. It's already bad enough trying to make developers care about a browser with 2% marketshare, it will be impossible to do so if their marketshare drops to 0.1%, which it will if you make it paid. That strategy only works for browsers that are basically just thin wrappers around Chrome or Webkit, with basically no development cost for the core browser tech and low divergence from those platforms. It's not going to sustain a fully independent browser stack.
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    What if they pursued a freemium model, other browsers like Orion do that. What if they monetize an aspect of the browser that people will actually pay good money for (something more than Pocket). Heck even Brave is trying something with its model.
    - dralley 2y ago
      Brave replaces third party ads with their own, I don't see that as being particularly ethical. Personally I'd like to see them try to recreate what Scroll were doing a few years ago before the Twitter acquisition destroyed them. They'd have to make it cross-browser though.