11 ms·

For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used

For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox. The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".

fresh_geezer 2y ago
I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts. Why do I think this? Three reasons: - It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds. - Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes. - Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being. Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_. I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
  - osener 2y ago
    Zen browser is exactly this. It has a growing ecosystem of “Zen mods” and has a great Arc-like out-of-box experience. https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/
    - eikenberry 2y ago
      Does Zen plan on taking payments at some point? Key part of the idea is paid development.
      - keerthiko 2y ago
        they have a ko-fi and a patreon, with about a 1000 "subscribers" across both at <unknown> amounts at the moment. it's not exactly enough to promise indefinite support, but tbh i don't really much reason to have that faith from products i've paid for but are closed-source either.
        InsideOutSanta 2y ago
        The project's main owner said that the income from the project is enough for him to make it his main job after he finishes university.
    - Semaphor 2y ago
      After a short time with it, I find it kinda funny. Back then, power users were up in arms about things like the omnibar, and chrome removing more and more parts of the actual URL. And here is a browser marketed at power users that goes beyond that, showing only a small fraction. There doesn’t even seem to be a Zen mod that restores a real usable URL bar. For me, I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage. Zen disqualified itself for my type of power usage very quickly, giving me a feeling of being on a small mobile device instead of a desktop PC.
      - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
        There’s an option under Settings > Look and Feel for a full length URL bar.
- 0x457 2y ago
  I think in todays world, when everything is a subscription, payment for a browser doesn't look so far-fetched.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    Getting people to pay for something that has always been free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a browser is. They just think it’s part of the OS.
    - bmacho 2y ago
      People pay for youtube and random youtubers now. They are fine paying for things.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - hnlmorg 2y ago
        Sure, for those things. However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.
        lolinder 2y ago
        This is what people said about Search before Kagi. And, incidentally, those folks are also working on a paid browser that real people do buy. Times change. Subscriptions are normalized, and tech people are increasingly aware of the hazards of "free".
      - TylerE 2y ago
        Content is something that is traditionally paid.
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  then why not modzilla themselves offering their pro version
  - lolinder 2y ago
    That is the question I ask myself every time this comes up, and the only answer I've been able to come up with is "because Google pays them not to".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support the devs but also fund other people accessing the same features that draw me to firefox in the first place.
gausswho 2y ago
Please someone make a Firefox that makes profile portability readable and with sensible defaults.
- maccard 2y ago
  That’s not what OP is suggesting - that’s a Firefox fork.
glenstein 2y ago
I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea. Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent. As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox. I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser. I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.
- WD-42 2y ago
  Thunderbird received close to $10 million in donations in 2023. And I’m willing to bet far more people use Firefox. If funding development directly, that’s not too shabby.
kiicia 2y ago
Web browser is something I would pay subscription in a heartbeat, and I mean it, it is my actual OS now
matheist 2y ago
> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted. I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities. They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
- dblohm7 2y ago
  > This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities. I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole... > They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution. I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered. However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    When you left, do you have a sense for how many developers were actually working on Firefox full-time? I'm curious because people always say that Firefox would be impossible to fund, pointing to Mozilla's expenses, but I've never seen someone actually put forward the math for what portion of those expenses are actually Firefox.
    - dblohm7 2y ago
      Oh geez, it's been long enough that I don't really remember the specifics. In the hundreds, for sure.
MrAlex94 2y ago
FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.
dev1ycan 2y ago
The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big % of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and then to justify their job as the company crashes down from bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried to do. Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
It could be interesting to do this and raise money in the same way that Mozilla does -- by selling the default search engine. The difference being that all of the money would go to improving Firefox instead of all the random not-Firefox things Mozilla currently does with it.
jeffparsons 2y ago
If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people here — myself included — would contribute. Being able to help out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time seems to have a magical effect on some people — again, myself included.
- maccard 2y ago
  Herein lies the problem. Multiply this by 10 countries, add in accountant fees and legal fees, HCOL adjustments, and you’ve spent $20k very very quickly before you’ve written a line of code. You might suggest “only do this if there are more than X donations from a country”, but now I need to bookkerp this which again takes away from the core goal of writing code for Firefox. Maybe I hire a fractional accountant to manage it? Now there’s an annual overhead to cover. How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things
guy234 2y ago
why wouldn't those people just donate to Mozilla?
- rwmj 2y ago
  Because historically that money has been squandered on C-suite salaries, irrelevant acquisitions (Pocket), and development that has nothing to do with the browser (like failing to make a phone OS).
- Narishma 2y ago
  AFAICT donations to Mozilla aren't used to fund Firefox development.
hilbert42 2y ago
"The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox." For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work. As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner. Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc. Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible. Here at ardour.org, we use this: > either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. (technically, name your own price for the binaries) and retain the GPL. It works fine for us.
  - IAmLiterallyAB 2y ago
    Firefox is under the MPL, not the GPL
ta8645 2y ago
The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?
- lolinder 2y ago
  You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation. So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.
  - prox 2y ago
    This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse, but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?
    - lolinder 2y ago
      The Foundation owns the Corporation, so technically the Corporation answers to the Foundation, but because the Foundation is a non-profit it can't actually transfer resources to its for-profit arm, only the other way around. Usually the theory with this kind of setup is that the Corporation is profitable and forwards funds to the Foundation so that the foundation can accomplish its work. But putting Firefox in the Foundation implies that someone somewhere thought that Firefox would be profitable rather than being the core mission that needs subsidization. I believe this was someone related to the Google deal, but it's definitely been a major problem ever since.
      - infinitifall 2y ago
        Let me get this straight, NOT A SINGLE DOLLAR of donations are used to fund development for Firefox!? How many are under the false impression of "helping Firefox" when in reality their donations are used to fund advocacy campaigns [0] and managerial bloat [1]? [0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-asked-questions https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-as... [1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
intelVISA 2y ago
Surely to avoid the org dysfunction that sunk Firefox the person 'creating' this fork would also be actively building it?
wruza 2y ago
Idk about others, I’d pay one time for specific features done once and never touched again. Cause I can measure my suffering and workarounds costs, and I have a sense of efforts and ownership. I’d even pay for forks of software that simply allow to modify their basic internals without providing any specific features, so I could augment them with programming without hard reveng (which often fails with no result). Like setting custom shortcuts in firefox. But software doesn’t offer that. It wants me to pay monthly money for features I don’t really like on average, and they may take away anything in the next update, irreversibly. Just because someone felt like doing so, cause users can’t take away paid money in return. I guess I wanted to say that “willing to pay” depends on what you are selling. And what “they” are selling is usually some no-guarantees always mutating fad rather than features you need. There’s another nuance in supporting existing software even without new features. These costs are already way above all limits and must be forced down by re-designing text and image scrolling to where it should be, complexity-wise.

fresh_geezer 2y ago

I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.

cosmic_cheese 2y ago

I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts. Why do I think this? Three reasons: - It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds. - Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes. - Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.

bastawhiz 2y ago
If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being. Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_. I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
- osener 2y ago
  Zen browser is exactly this. It has a growing ecosystem of “Zen mods” and has a great Arc-like out-of-box experience. https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/
  - eikenberry 2y ago
    Does Zen plan on taking payments at some point? Key part of the idea is paid development.
    - keerthiko 2y ago
      they have a ko-fi and a patreon, with about a 1000 "subscribers" across both at <unknown> amounts at the moment. it's not exactly enough to promise indefinite support, but tbh i don't really much reason to have that faith from products i've paid for but are closed-source either.
      - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
        The project's main owner said that the income from the project is enough for him to make it his main job after he finishes university.
  - Semaphor 2y ago
    After a short time with it, I find it kinda funny. Back then, power users were up in arms about things like the omnibar, and chrome removing more and more parts of the actual URL. And here is a browser marketed at power users that goes beyond that, showing only a small fraction. There doesn’t even seem to be a Zen mod that restores a real usable URL bar. For me, I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage. Zen disqualified itself for my type of power usage very quickly, giving me a feeling of being on a small mobile device instead of a desktop PC.
    - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
      There’s an option under Settings > Look and Feel for a full length URL bar.
0x457 2y ago
I think in todays world, when everything is a subscription, payment for a browser doesn't look so far-fetched.
- TylerE 2y ago
  Getting people to pay for something that has always been free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a browser is. They just think it’s part of the OS.
  - bmacho 2y ago
    People pay for youtube and random youtubers now. They are fine paying for things.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      Sure, for those things. However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        This is what people said about Search before Kagi. And, incidentally, those folks are also working on a paid browser that real people do buy. Times change. Subscriptions are normalized, and tech people are increasingly aware of the hazards of "free".
    - TylerE 2y ago
      Content is something that is traditionally paid.
tonyhart7 2y ago
then why not modzilla themselves offering their pro version
- lolinder 2y ago
  That is the question I ask myself every time this comes up, and the only answer I've been able to come up with is "because Google pays them not to".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ForTheKidz 2y ago
Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support the devs but also fund other people accessing the same features that draw me to firefox in the first place.

gausswho 2y ago

Please someone make a Firefox that makes profile portability readable and with sensible defaults.

maccard 2y ago
That’s not what OP is suggesting - that’s a Firefox fork.

glenstein 2y ago

I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea. Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent. As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox. I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser. I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.

WD-42 2y ago
Thunderbird received close to $10 million in donations in 2023. And I’m willing to bet far more people use Firefox. If funding development directly, that’s not too shabby.

kiicia 2y ago

Web browser is something I would pay subscription in a heartbeat, and I mean it, it is my actual OS now

matheist 2y ago

> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted. I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities. They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

dblohm7 2y ago
> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities. I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole... > They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution. I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered. However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.
- lolinder 2y ago
  When you left, do you have a sense for how many developers were actually working on Firefox full-time? I'm curious because people always say that Firefox would be impossible to fund, pointing to Mozilla's expenses, but I've never seen someone actually put forward the math for what portion of those expenses are actually Firefox.
  - dblohm7 2y ago
    Oh geez, it's been long enough that I don't really remember the specifics. In the hundreds, for sure.

MrAlex94 2y ago

FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.

dev1ycan 2y ago

The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big % of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and then to justify their job as the company crashes down from bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried to do. Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

It could be interesting to do this and raise money in the same way that Mozilla does -- by selling the default search engine. The difference being that all of the money would go to improving Firefox instead of all the random not-Firefox things Mozilla currently does with it.

jeffparsons 2y ago

If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people here — myself included — would contribute. Being able to help out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time seems to have a magical effect on some people — again, myself included.

maccard 2y ago
Herein lies the problem. Multiply this by 10 countries, add in accountant fees and legal fees, HCOL adjustments, and you’ve spent $20k very very quickly before you’ve written a line of code. You might suggest “only do this if there are more than X donations from a country”, but now I need to bookkerp this which again takes away from the core goal of writing code for Firefox. Maybe I hire a fractional accountant to manage it? Now there’s an annual overhead to cover. How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things

guy234 2y ago

why wouldn't those people just donate to Mozilla?

rwmj 2y ago
Because historically that money has been squandered on C-suite salaries, irrelevant acquisitions (Pocket), and development that has nothing to do with the browser (like failing to make a phone OS).
Narishma 2y ago
AFAICT donations to Mozilla aren't used to fund Firefox development.

hilbert42 2y ago

"The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox." For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work. As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner. Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc. Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible. Here at ardour.org, we use this: > either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. (technically, name your own price for the binaries) and retain the GPL. It works fine for us.
- IAmLiterallyAB 2y ago
  Firefox is under the MPL, not the GPL

ta8645 2y ago

The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?

lolinder 2y ago
You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation. So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.
- prox 2y ago
  This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse, but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    The Foundation owns the Corporation, so technically the Corporation answers to the Foundation, but because the Foundation is a non-profit it can't actually transfer resources to its for-profit arm, only the other way around. Usually the theory with this kind of setup is that the Corporation is profitable and forwards funds to the Foundation so that the foundation can accomplish its work. But putting Firefox in the Foundation implies that someone somewhere thought that Firefox would be profitable rather than being the core mission that needs subsidization. I believe this was someone related to the Google deal, but it's definitely been a major problem ever since.
    - infinitifall 2y ago
      Let me get this straight, NOT A SINGLE DOLLAR of donations are used to fund development for Firefox!? How many are under the false impression of "helping Firefox" when in reality their donations are used to fund advocacy campaigns [0] and managerial bloat [1]? [0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-asked-questions https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-as... [1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

intelVISA 2y ago

Surely to avoid the org dysfunction that sunk Firefox the person 'creating' this fork would also be actively building it?

wruza 2y ago

Idk about others, I’d pay one time for specific features done once and never touched again. Cause I can measure my suffering and workarounds costs, and I have a sense of efforts and ownership. I’d even pay for forks of software that simply allow to modify their basic internals without providing any specific features, so I could augment them with programming without hard reveng (which often fails with no result). Like setting custom shortcuts in firefox. But software doesn’t offer that. It wants me to pay monthly money for features I don’t really like on average, and they may take away anything in the next update, irreversibly. Just because someone felt like doing so, cause users can’t take away paid money in return. I guess I wanted to say that “willing to pay” depends on what you are selling. And what “they” are selling is usually some no-guarantees always mutating fad rather than features you need. There’s another nuance in supporting existing software even without new features. These costs are already way above all limits and must be forced down by re-designing text and image scrolling to where it should be, complexity-wise.