[ForHackernews]

Maybe if users were willing to pay for a browser, they wouldn't be so desperately scrambling around for non-Google revenue sources.

They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

[Wowfunhappy]

> They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment! (I feel I need to add that caveat nowadays, since subscriptions are all the rage.)

[tivert]

> I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment!

The problem is that web browsers require some of the most intensive software maintenance of any software, ever. They're one of the most exposed attack surfaces to external security threats; and piles of new features are unfortunately getting continuously added to web standards, which need to be supported for compatibility reasons.

I think a one time tip-jar payment makes sense for a lot of software, but not for web browsers. I think a subscription-type contribution makes the most sense for them.

[Wowfunhappy]

Put the money into a trust fund? I suppose I could do that on my end, but that's a little extreme from an effort point of view.

Subscriptions are just difficult to manage, I can't deal with individual recurring costs for so many pieces of software.

[ekianjo]

Have they ever tried crowdfunding campaigns? I don't think so. Wikipedia seems to be doing fine with it. At least they should experiment with some ideas in that line and see what works.

[zaarn]

And then people will complain that Mozilla is nagging them for money. I doubt anyone likes the nag screen that Wikipedia pops down about 15 seconds into reading a page and it covering almost half the screen.

Wikipedia has sufficient marketshare to survive despite that.

The ads that mozilla shows are fairly privacy-friendly, much more than any other ads you'd find on most websites. That's an improvement.

If you don't like them you can easily disable them.

[bscphil]

>And then people will complain that Mozilla is nagging them for money. I doubt anyone likes the nag screen that Wikipedia pops down about 15 seconds into reading a page and it covering almost half the screen.

Users may not like nag screens, but I doubt they like the shitty ads Mozilla shows on the new tab page by default either. As long as the screen is easy to dismiss I don't see the problem.

[zaarn]

Even easy to dismiss screens can disrupt the users flow similarly to how I mentioned that it interrupts my reading of the wikipedia page.

Wikipedia has, as mentioned, the market monopoly advantage so they can do as please, Firefox doesn't and can't afford to annoy users.

I would doubt users are more annoyed by ads, especially the type of ads that Mozilla uses, than nag screens.

[aljones]

I can't say that I like the wikipedia reminders, but I don't dislike them. They remind me to pay for a service I use daily. So I do and they don't remind for a while. It is fine.

[smileypete]

Maybe crowdfund API development for some of the 'power user' features, like live bookmarks or tree style tabs?

[CorpusCalcium]

Why can't the community do this for themselves, without having to make Mozilla do everything?