[Certhas]

A browser is expensive. Currently Firefox is funded (though not controlled) by Google's Ad business. I am all for them reducing their reliance on Google's Ad business. In this sense this is a step _towards_ what you want. I really really dislike them double speaking about this though.

[strken]

Mozilla takes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. For decades it hired its engineers from the single most expensive place on earth to hire an engineer, the Bay Area. It boosted CEO pay into the millions shortly before laying off a big chunk of its engineering team. If they had taken the cash they spent on "diversifying their revenue streams" (i.e. getting distracted by side projects while their moneymaker Firefox got slower and lost all its users) over the last decade and a half and stuck it into a trust, they'd be sitting on a war chest of billions of dollars right now.

I also don't understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.

[toyg]

I'm one of those five, and I'm not switching. Chromium is tainted, Brave is outright corrupt, and IceCat is seriously unpractical (they don't even build Windows binaries, because ideology beats practicality for them).

Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or later, draw a line and find a better way forward (i.e. a new exec team). Either that, or the project will die and hopefully someone else will pick up the baton.

[babuskov]

> Do I have any serious alternative?

Vivaldi?

I'm using Firefox myself and have been using it almost exclusively since it was named Firebird back in the day, but I have considered Vivaldi as an alternative at one point.

[adar]

I like Vivaldi but the issue is that you're still locking yourself into Chromium's Blink rendering engine which just serves to strengthen Google's push to be the de-facto standards enforcer of the web.

[knob]

Exactly. Thanks for writing it out.

[jimbob21]

Anything wrong with Opera or Opera GX?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Personally, a proprietary browser really rubs me the wrong way

[rglullis]

> Brave is outright corrupt

I am sure I will regret asking... but why do you think that?

[toyg]

Their whole business model is predicated on effectively replacing ad networks with Brave's own system; I don't know about you, but I find that abhorrent from the perspective of site owners. If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.

[rglullis]

> I don't know about you, but I find that abhorrent from the perspective of site owners.

No, I find it amazing and I can probably write an essay about it.

The "ad-supported" economy is directly responsible for a lot of content, but the majority of it is not just bad, it is also actually damaging to society. Think of all the sites that "make a living" on clickbait, content farming, fake news, SEO manipulation and outright fraud. Also, think of all the big ad tech companies that have no incentive in ensuring any kind of quality on its users and just focusing on metrics like "engagement".

It is not too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.

"Ad-supported" sites have nothing to gain by working on quality content and can put all their efforts optimizing for controversy, shock value and eyeballs. When everything became "free", we lost our ability to vote with our wallet and lose any power in steering the market to produce the things that we value.

Given that we can not simply ban "free" sites, the next best thing is to find an alternative way to finance content creators, but where the users can have a say in how the resources are allocated. The Brave model does exactly that. Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality. They will have to be able to demonstrate that their work is not just worth of the people's time (for those that want to put up with ads), they will have to produce something of value to us.

> If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.

No, not at all.

There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model. In fact, they can even also base it on BAT and leverage all the work that Brave already did and avoid all the pitfalls that Brave had along the way when they were developing the system. Brave buys the token in the open market, Mozilla could do the same. They could use the same partner exchanges. They could probably even use the same codebase on the client side.

Honestly, if Mozilla did just that on Firefox, I'd switch back to it immediately. Like you, I also wish that Firefox continued to be a strong alternative to keep Google in check. But after the many years of poor management, blatant cash grabs and all the marketing spending that makes them more focused on "looking good" than "doing good", I've given up. I don't want wishy-washy feelings, I want to destroy Surveillance Capitalism.

Mozilla/Firefox are not working on anything to do that. Brave is.

[toyg]

> Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality.

That's a huge jump. Incentives are basically the same, at worst the same as subscription-supported services that are slowly becoming the standard for news websites that still care about their reputation. The Brave system simply moves some of the power from multiple ad networks to a single entity, Brave. No thanks, this is not the open web.

> There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model.

It doesn't matter who runs the network, you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.

I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap, thank you. If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror when Mozilla goes down in flames, so be it.

[Aeolun]

For me at least, all the language Brave uses seems to indicate something similar to a pyramid scheme to me. I dunno, something about the whole thing sets me on edge.

[rglullis]

Really? That is quite odd.

Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be.

What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?

[teddyh]

Any system which involves money and is not immediately obviously simple to understand is almost always created in order to steal people’s money.

[namlem]

What other browser has a tree style tabs extension?

Also, Firefox mobile lets me block YouTube ads with ublock origin.

[Yizahi]

Chrome-Brave, Chrome-Chromium, Chrome-Vivaldi, Chrome-Edge and other Chrome clones are no go because it entrenches Google monopoly and bad practices. IceCat doesn't exist on Windows.

There is really close to no choice for browser alternatives.

[arid_eden]

Seamonkey (which I'm using to write this) is one option. Built for all platforms, no Mozilla tracking/ad/pocket-partnership nonsense. Unfortunately the team is small and Gecko has been changing a lot lately.

Long term the gemini protocol and browsers like lagrange might be the only option - its just too hard to build a modern standards supporting web browser these days (even Microsoft has thrown in the towel and adopted Chromium for Edge).

[AegirLeet]

Reducing reliance on Google by partnering up with a different ad company instead. What good does that do? I don't want ads anywhere near my browser.

Here's what I'd really like them to do:

* Stop paying out millions to execs

* Focus more on Firefox instead of other side projects

* Let me pay for Firefox development directly

[pizza234]

The Opera browser used to do this, from v5.

It lasted a few years (it seem 5, based on Wikipedia), and they ultimately ended up switching to the default engine business model.

[Certhas]

There is so much wishful thinking around this... "me and five other people want to pay, if you just cater to my specific tastes, than the me and these 5 people will happily bankroll your massive engineering effort!"

Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??

[y4mi]

It's not as clear cut as you seem to think.

A lot of people just think that Mozilla should be a nonprofit and not aim to primarily enrich it's CEO and leadership. This isn't the case at the moment, which is clear if you paid any attention to what they've been doing for the last few years.

Little of the money that's going to be raised by this will end up paying for engineers to improve or maintain the Firefox code base and the vast majority of it will end in the pockets of said leadership, and this is kinda displeasing.

[Hnrobert42]

Do you have a source showing the vast majority of revenue goes to leadership? In 2018, the CEO’s salary equaled 0.64% of revenue. Before we discuss whether that is right or wrong, we should at least agree on a set of facts.

https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

[y4mi]

they generally get more then 400 million yearly revenue, though there was one outlier with over 800 million. this is money they generally don't have to pay taxes on because of their status as a non-profit.

mozilla employs at the moment around 800 people.

according to their FAQ

> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/f...

> More than 75% of Mozilla spending is on people-related investments to produce the products and programs that support our mission: keeping the web open, free, and accessible.

this would mean they had around 300 million to spend on these 800 employees, averaging around 375 000 per employee.

Sr. Software Engineers get <$200 000, so IF all of their 800 employees were senior software engineers (extremely unlikely), their salary would be around 160 million, which is slightly more then 50% of what was available. a more realistic calculation would be around 20-30%, because not everyone will be getting SV wages. They've got global presence after all with offices SF, Toronto, Berlin, Beijin etc.

you'd have to verify in which unrelated projects by third parties mozilla invests and generally follow the money to figure out anything more, but that is simply out of scope of a hn comment.

[whoisthemachine]

I agree. I think they would find use in having a "Firefox Enterprise" that catered to businesses directly - basically a version of Firefox that they will tailor to an organization's crazy security requirements. Basically anywhere I've worked has wanted to lock down internet browsing in some way or other, and they now pay for expensive products to do so externally. I think it would be very appealing to just pay for a product that did so out of the box...

[Swenrekcah]

If you get 5000 people paying $5/month for every person working on a truly private browser, you have $25,000/month per teammate.

I'm sure you could find 50,000 people in the world willing to pay this. I'm one of them.

The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.

[TeMPOraL]

> The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.

In case of Mozilla/Firefox: do this while you still have some reputation left. It's literally the one party on the Internet that would have a chance of pulling it off.

[denton-scratch]

I approve of this traditional usage of the term "literally". It's literally correct, but possibly too late - they've been burning bridges for five years.

[samhw]

There's some remarkable sleight of hand in "for every person working on [it]". That's a lot of people required to build a browser. Are you suggesting each of those 5000 users pays $5 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS, or that you'll need [5000 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS] users?

[Swenrekcah]

The latter. The numbers are not precise, it's just to show that you really don't need a lot of paying people and they really don't need to pay a lot each.

[nine_k]

(1) Too many ad networks involved; who do you pay for not seeing their ads? (2) You would be unpleasantly surprised by the amount to pay.

[TeMPOraL]

(2) is in big part because people who're willing to spend money to get rid of ads are exactly the people advertisers are trying to get to - people with plenty of disposable income.

[nine_k]

Opera was / is cool and advanced in many regards.

But Firefox is open source. This is very important for many reasons.

[GeckoEidechse]

> Let me pay for Firefox development directly

Same. I already donate to the Mozilla Foundation but I'd love to fund Firefox more directly.

[skywal_l]

Is there a way to know how the Mozilla Foundation spend its money? They've stopped updating this page[0] in 2019.

Maybe a way to rely less on Google and "trusted partners" money is just to spend less.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/

[callahad]

They've not stopped updating that page; it just takes longer than you would otherwise expect to get final numbers, prepare the reports, run them past auditors, etc. The 2019 statements were published in October of 2020, so I'd expect the 2020 numbers some time this month.

It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.

[skywal_l]

> It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.

Wow I didn't know that. I always assumed Firefox was developed by a non-profit. So it basically means that Firefox is a commercial product (the purpose of which is to make money). Thanks for that bit of information which was not at all obvious if you don't pay close attention...

[jlokier]

It's actually a common arrangement with charities and other non-profits, done that way to make a tax and administration boundary.

The subsidiary is a for-profit, but the profit all goes to the parent non-profit, which is then constrained in how it can use that income.

Think of a little charity shop that sells, say, second hand clothes in order that the profit from sales funds a charitable purpose like fighting cancer. The little shop is likely to be a for-profit company, wholly owned by its parent charity.

Charities have to follow strict rules about how they spend their money, care for their assets, make decisions, report on everything and be audited.

Everything they do is required to be demonstrably for the charity's purposes, which clashes with the on-the-ground flexilibilty required to make business-like decisions for something like a shop. For example when you decide to spruce up the lighting at the front of the shop to attract customers, which only indirectly serves the charity's goals.

That may be a poor example. The point is that the subsidiary business can be run more like a business, being managed, making decisions and spending its income in the freer way a business is allowed to do. The parent charity retains shareholder-like ultimate control, but that is indirect control; the subsidiary has its own directors and executives.

In the case of a shop that means it can spend on things that may attract customers, take gambles that may bring in more profit for the parent charity to use, and make day to day decisions that aren't subject to the same level of reporting, auditing and trustee oversight that the parent charity is. The shop's operating assets are outside the charity, giving it operational flexibility, but when it transfers some portion of assets as profits to the charity, those assets become inside and how they are spent becomes more tightly regulated.

[boomboomsubban]

All of the Mozilla Corporation's profits are reinvested in Mozilla, being a nonprofit charity caused tax issues that caused them to spin off the Mozilla Corporation.

[bugmen0t]

The pur is to further the mission of the nonprofit, i.e., an open interoperable web. All money earned stays within Mozilla.

In contrast to all other browser products, whose main purpose is increasing share holder value.

[denton-scratch]

The non-profit Foundation is wholly-owned by the profit-making Corporation.

I have no idea how that works.

[Edited, because I got it 180deg arse-over-tit]

[Winsaucerer]

I'd love to be able to pay some monthly subscription to support Firefox. But every time this comes up, someone tells me that there's no way to directly support Firefox itself. I wish they'd do something like Wikipedia does, to ask their users to donate or contribute.

[maccard]

Unless I'm mistaken, Wikipedia doesn't ringfence their donations either, so by donating to the Wikimedia foundation [0] you're not just paying for wikipedia either.

[0] https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php

[labawi]

If you donate to Mozilla, you don't pay for Firefox at all.

Conversely, AFAIK, Wikimedia doesn't accept money for merchandising their users. At least not in any official, straightforward way.

[ploum]

While I philosophically agree with you, I can’t help but think:

- Developing Firefox looks way more expensive than running Wikipedia servers. - It looks like there’s at least 10x less Firefox users than Wikipedia users.

It might still be possible (Firefox users might me more willing to pay and to pay more than Wikipedia users). It still looks really hard.

I wish they didn’t try to match the startup/VC/pivot/diversify frenzy but, in the end, I’m really happy that they exist.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

From what I understand doing donations and stipulating that it’s for a specific purpose can hurt a nonprofit more than help, because then vital logistics get underfunded and fuck up the competency of the organization. (Eg. Everyone wants to fund nonprofits cancer research or whatever, but what if they actually desperately need to fund remote work infrastructure because a global pandemic has forced them all to work remotely on short notice?)

Of course if you don’t like what an organization broadly does with the money given to it, don’t give it money. Maybe issue some feedback that you think the organization should do x or y, and the fact it’s doing p and q makes you hesitant to donate.

[throw63738]

I bet some mozilla devs have their own Github Sponsors or Patreon.

[RNCTX]

Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to have a funding model that isn't a derivative of a newspaper from 1927.

[denton-scratch]

A browser is not "expensive". A modern marketing tool is expensive.

Take out all the crap, and strip it back to a plain browser. Freeze all new features. The only maintenance that is needed is security patches. That shouldn't need more than a handful of full-time devs. They could be paid using just one exec's salary.

I'll maintain my contribution to Thunderbird; if Mozilla doesn't feel like helping financially with that more-or-less unique product, fair enough. But I'm not OK with having to drill into about:config to disable Firefox Pocket's hijacking of high-profile screen real-estate - why hasn't it gone yet?

[yawaworht1978]

But what if that idea is coming from Google? How many relevant partners does FF have?

[datenarsch]

Why is a browser expensive? There are many great and big open source projects out there that are maintained and developed mainly by volunteers. Why can't Firefox be like this?

[roca]

Building a shell around Chromium or Webkit isn't very expensive.

Maintaining an independent, high-quality browser engine so that the design and implementation of the Web isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly is incredibly expensive: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent... (4 years old, but the situation I describe hasn't changed, except that Microsoft has switched to Chromium so Mozilla's engine is more important than ever.)

[ClumsyPilot]

"Microsoft has switched to Chromium"

Feels like a massive missed opportunity - microsoft is the only big player not funded by ads.

Also having their own Engine was cool, i liked it, although it did sometimes have failures. Looks like they got tired if different issues and thew in the towel

[dageshi]

They would never overcome the reputation damage from IE. I think they accepted that and switched to Chromium because it just makes maintaining the userbase they do have a lot easier.

[hyproxia]

>isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly

Remember the W3C DRM standard and how Firefox implemented it?

[zaphirplane]

700 people from wiki is more than I would have guessed even after accounting for the Multiplatform and mobile versions

[dmitriid]

> Why is a browser expensive?

Read this: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

To quote,

--- start quote ---

The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing.

If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.

--- end quote ---

This is why. It's currently impossible to start a greenfield browser [1]. And even forking an existing engine and trying to keep up is almost impossible [2]

[1] There's Flow browser, https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ I don't know if it's truly from scratch

[2] Microsoft forked Chromium and is still almost 2000 APIs behind, https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence

[bserge]

It's very hard for designers and developers to come up with regular updates that stay on the fine line between still useable but somehow worse than the previous version. Firefox has been excelling at this.

[cxr]

Better answer than the just-so ones that you've gotten so far:

It actually used to be that way. For example, it used to be the case that the Firefox product owner was a Googler getting paid by Google to work on Firefox. Lots of other contributors hailed from other companies (or universities), too, whether they were specifically getting paid for it or not; there was a long-tail of completely unpaid contributors. Mozilla wasn't anything like the Bay Area company you see today so much as it was, loosely speaking, a co-op. Mozilla's various formal organizational incarnations were supposed to handle, in order of importance: A. keeping the infrastructure running, and B. paying the salaries of its own contributors to the mozilla.org commons.

Several things changed this:

1. Google, the biggest contributor to the project, pulled their people off Firefox to go build Chrome.

2. Mozilla-the-Corporation, having deceived themselves about the role that the commons-style development played in the project's success, went and Netscaped it.

On the latter point: basically, the Corporation abused its position. They tried (and unfortunately succeeded) at consolidating things under their corporate structure (particularly during the FirefoxOS era after hiring an Adobe exec to be their shepherd through that doomed project—convinced that what Mozilla really needed was good, business-minded leadership). This launched Mozilla on the descent we've seen over the last ten years, and burned all sorts of bridges including goodwill with external contributors and other parts of its base. They hollowed it out, and then had people on payroll to fill in the parts that were getting fucked up. As with the case of Netscape, not all of their hires were good hires.

The perverse thing is, if you know anything about Mozilla's early history, i.e. Firefox pre-history, you'll know that this was already tried once before. What's amazing is that it actually "worked" this time. You'll hear (from people like Mitchell, even) stories about how mozilla.org was an escape pod, and that it had to be rescued from Netscape, because Netscape thought they were the rightful rulers by fiat—this, even after mozilla.org had been set up! Unfortunately, Mozilla-the-Corporation (distinct from mozilla.org) succeeded at taking control where Netscape failed, mostly because everyone involved pretty much let them. A lot of the mechanisms that had been put in _specifically_ to keep Netscape hires in their place were rolled back as part of the post-Firefox-4.0, "we want to move fast and break things, too" era.

Lots of people who at one point once had @mozilla.com email addresses will dispute this, choosing to tell themselves—and others—a different story. And of course they do. It happens for exactly the same reasons that the "are we the baddies?" meme is a thing.