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Allow me to rephrase my earlier choice Chromium: Entirely dependent on Google, a $3T company who's entire business model relies upon invading your privacy an
by godelski 1y ago
Allow me to rephrase my earlier choice
Chromium: Entirely dependent on Google, a $3T company who's entire business model relies upon invading your privacy and currently has a >70% global share of browsers
WebKit: A closed source browser with ~18% of browser share and run by a nearly $4T company who forces all browsers on their mobile devices to be reskinned versions of their browser and probably wants to do the same on their other devices
Gecko: An open source browser with ~4% of the browser share, run by a non-profit with a mission of to preserve privacy but is struggling to find funding.
All three choices suck. I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. But there's only one option on here that isn't trying to royally fuck everyone over and actually cares about the very service we're arguing over.
So what... we're going to let the internet get screwed because a bunch of dudes making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year can't toss some beer money over to the little guy?
You paint this as a hopeless picture, but seriously, have you considered donating? Every time I see these types of threads I see comments like
> I would happily pay a small monthly subscription fee for a browser if it has strong legally protected privacy guarantees.[0]
Seriously, are we all that greedy and myopic? They're a non-profit. You know tons of companies, such as Google and every other big tech company, have some donation matching system. Google pays the Mozilla Foundation about half a billion a year to make Google the default search engine. How is the fact that they are throwing such massive amounts of money not a concerning thing? Yet FF has enough users that we could give them an extra 40% revenue if we tossed them $5 PER YEAR. That's it.
Do you really think your browser provides to you less value than your Netflix (160%/360%/500% more expensive) or Spotify (240% more expensive) account? Seriously? If literally 30% of FF users gave to Mozilla what they are willing to give to Spotify, then the problem is solved. Or 15% of users did it through their company's matching program. If instead of discouraging people, you got more people to convert then the percentage of necessary contributors decreases!
It's even tax fucking deductible so it isn't even that <$5/yr...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369141
- john01dav 1y agoYou can't donate to Firefox. You can donate to Mozilla, but that money doesn't go to Firefox.
- httpsoverdns 1y agoI recently purchased Firefox relay because I thought it was a nifty service to start using to prevent spam and preserve my privacy, but also a driving factor in my purchase was giving money to Mozilla. I didn't really look into it beyond that internal thought process. Your comment made me wonder, are things so segmented at Mozilla that supporting something like relay doesn't actually help Firefox in general?
- jamienicol 1y agoI’m a Mozilla employee who works on Firefox, so I’ll try to answer this to the best of my knowledge but as a disclaimer I can’t guarantee I’m 100% correct Paying for relay will give money to Mozilla Corporation, the same pot the google money goes into, which will predominantly pay for Firefox development but also other products. The corporation’s profits also fund the non-profit Foundation’s activities. People often raise this argument regarding donating to the Foundation, as that money will be spent by the foundation, therefore not on Firefox. But a dollar raised by the foundation is a dollar less the corporation has to give the foundation, leaving it with more money to spend on Firefox and other things. You can also donate directly to “MZLA” which makes thunderbird, and that money will be spent on thunderbird.
- Hendrikto 1y agoThe problem many people have with donating to the Mozilla Foundation us them squandering enormous amounts of it. Mostly on things nobody asked for and executive pay. Personally, I don’t feel like firing Firefox devs and starting controversial and expensive diversity campaigns while raising executive pay when Firefox is losing market share every year is being a great steward.
- godelski 1y agoPeople have a lot of weird excuses for disliking Mozilla. There are definitely legitimate ones, but the point really is "what's the alternative"? Are the faults of Mozilla really so much worse that we'll turn to Google instead? Honestly, that seems silly to me. Can we just for once not blindly hate something for not being perfect and consequently strengthening an even worse option?
- user432678 1y agoMy problem with donating to Mozilla is the donation goes into a pocket of their greedy CEO and only a small fraction to those who do the browser development. And that’s mostly why I donate to Ladybird.
- dotancohen 1y agoWell said. Though I use Firefox, I have not donated after a Mozilla CEO quadrupled CEO pay after taking the helm.
- swiftcoder 1y ago> WebKit: A closed source browser You seem to be confusing Safari (a closed source Apple product), and WebKit (an open source browser engine used by multiple browsers).
- typpilol 1y agoYou beat me to this comment. Webkit is not an apple only thing
- rpdillon 1y agoWebKit has always been open source. https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]