[DangerousPie]

How do you suggest they do that? As far as I can see, to make money from Firefox they need to either charge for the browser, start selling user data, or integrate 3rd party products. The first isn't commercially viable, the second fundamentally clashes with their principles and the third they have tried but gotten a lot of backlash and little success.

[marcinzm]

I mean, they currently make ~$450 million per year from Firefox due to their search deals (mainly Google but others in other countries). In the past I think they had Bing bidding for the deal as well. No reason for that to not continue if they maintain Firefox marketshare.

[olejorgenb]

Exactly. While it's not ideal to be dependent on a competitor like that it has been a very robust stream on income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio... $300M+ for 8 years (and now 3 more years)

[marcinzm]

Had Mozilla invested 75% of it rather than spending 75% they would have probably had a guaranteed $100 million/year from their investments alone for the next century.

[mrweasel]

I have no idea how that would work.

Two ideas:

* Let us pay for Firefox development. I'm not sure how much that would bring in.

* Partnerships with news sites. You pay Mozilla, they keep 30% and use the rest to pay the news sites to not paywall Firefox.

Currently Firefox is basically funded by Google, how does that not clash with their principles? It's okay for take money from a company that directly profit from collection user data, just don't collect the data yourself?