[BoysenberryPi]

There will be tons of people who will rightly rake Mozilla over the coals for this so I don't need to do it.

That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. They will get dragged through the mud no matter what they try. People still rag on them for accepting money from Google to be the default search engine.

[Pooge]

> Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure.

Then why can I not purchase Mozilla merch? They shutdown or abandoned some of their most interesting services (MDN and Send, for example), but kept developing unneeded products : (1) VPN, which is just a layer over Mullvad that makes it worse and (2) Lockwise which is much better replaced with almost any alternative password manager (like KeePassXC and the browser add-on if you really need it).

Of course, they weren't wrong for at least trying, but then why not make it part of a pool of products that only premium users can access? For example, make it so that only Premium users can upload to Send. But no, all we get is just a sh*t VPN.

Mozilla doesn't want your money, and they're going to die for it.

[lolinder]

The VPN is garbage, but they did end up killing Lockwise.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...

[gruez]

>killing Lockwise.

but the functionality is already built into the browser of the respective platforms?

[BoysenberryPi]

How is the VPN bad? If I recall, it's just Mullvad with Firefox branding.

[foxfluff]

I find it disappointing. For whatever reason, Mozilla VPN is not available in my country. And they don't support anonymous cash payments, like Mullvad does. It's more expensive than Mullvad, except at the 12 month plan. So what's the point? It's strictly inferior to Mullvad.

[wford7]

When I tried it, it flat out didn't work. Zero issues with Mullvad itself.

[BoysenberryPi]

I used it for a few months and I did have a few intermittent issues but it worked for the most part

[errantmind]

It would be plenty profitable without their organizational bloat, especially if they refocused on what their actual users want instead of other initiatives.

How? donations. Look how much money Wikipedia generates in donations every year without selling out their users. Even a small fraction of this amount should be plenty to pay competitive salaries to the Firefox dev team, but the Firefox development team is a small fraction of their org.

[account42]

Exactly, Firefox development should not be run like a for-profit corporation. Besides individual donations, they should try to get funding from pro-privacy governments.

[amatecha]

I mean, there are tons of massively successful free (beer and liberty) software that have been around for decades. Why does Mozilla need Meta's or Google's money? Why have other free software products (thinking of OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD here) had active, high-quality development for decades without resorting to harvesting user data for profit? Isn't Mozilla a non-profit corporation? Hell, their website's title is "Internet for people, not profit", so what's happening here? And like someone else raised, why isn't there Mozilla and Firefox official swag?!

[themacguffinman]

Mozilla can follow FreeBSD and OpenBSD's example and achieve a marketshare just as negligible as theirs. And just like FreeBSD and OpenBSD, Mozilla can wave goodbye to official support by any major consumer service or software.

Mozilla doesn't have normal swag but they sell Mozilla VPN. You can also donate directly to the foundation. The lack of gear is a little weird though because they used to have a gear store but they shut it down. I suspect not enough gear was being sold to be worth the trouble of selling official gear.

[dralley]

Those projects are funded by engineers from Netflix and Netapp who do make plenty of money off that software.

Nobody does the same with Firefox. Really the only prominent external contributor (that I know of at least) is Martin Stransky of Red Hat who does a lot of the Linux maintainence.

[account42]

> That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure.

Why does it need to be profitable? Firefox is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it. If the corp can't work without making the browser work then the foundation should reconsider if the corp is a good idea. Unfortunately, the leadership of the foundation and the corp are not separate enough so they cannot effectively push for the interests of the foundation.

[notyourday]

Rubbish. Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it. Of course it would mean that it will have to become a product company rather than another bored housewives club masquerading as a software company with some software engineers working for it.

[kmlx]

> Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it.

why would anyone pay for a browser when all the rest of them are free?

[lolinder]

If there were a way to directly fund Firefox (and only Firefox, not any other Mozilla stuff), I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I imagine I'm in the minority.

[younghag]

The fact that it’s not even an option really makes me scratch my head. There’s a decent amount of people who would like to throw some money their way to support Firefox specifically. Maybe not a ton, but certainly enough to warrant the option for people to do so.

[notyourday]

> why would anyone pay for a browser when all the rest of them are free?

The browser that does not track you, does not report to Google or facebook, etc? That's why.

[ModernMech]

I definitely would if it meant I wouldn't have to see a single ad ever again. I'm at the point in my life where trading money for not seeing ads is very appealing to me. Between Hulu, Youtube Premium, Spotify, etc. I pay an absurd amount of money every year to not see ads. I'd definitely do the same if a browser could hide any and all ads from me, and the sum I'd pay is a lot more than $100 year.

[sfink]

Sure, but you may as well save that money up as a down payment on a unicorn.

If it were possible to suppress all ads, then many people would happily sell you that solution. And the sites pushing those ads will see the money flowing to those people and not them, and so will grudgingly refuse to serve you any content.

As ad blockers get more popular and more effective, it's already happening more and more.

You can have a magical "don't show me ads" button only as long as it doesn't work very well. (And I have mine: Firefox + µBlock Origin.)

[arcatech]

If they added an optional "support Firefox by paying $100 per year" button, some people would do it because they want to support the browser.

[lawn]

Because it would be so much better than the alternatives?

[shishy]

> Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it

Call me a pessimist but I doubt this. Most people don't mind ads, and when you couple that with the vast number of free browser alternatives, I doubt so many people would pay (and even if they got some, I'd expect churn to be high too).

[notyourday]

Quite literally every single company with aspirations would immediately subscribe to it because absolutely no one wants their company information being leaked out to Google or Facebook or anyone else if they do not absolutely have to. Right now there is no such option.

[dralley]

OpenSSL begs to differ.

[notyourday]

OpenSSL is not a product.

[wayne-li2]

This is our bias seeping in. On HN, I’m willing to bet a substantial proportion of people are willing to pay for an anti-ad/tracking browser for privacy reasons. But there will be no value for the outside world.

I think us “nerds” dramatically overvalue how important privacy is to the general public right now. Even ignoring the developing world, most people will agree that tracking is bad, but most will continue to use legacy browsers because they don’t think it’s 100/year bad. And the growing population of young and tech savvy people who are one Google away from installing uBlock Origin will not pay for your product either.

Not to mention —- even the proportion of HN readers can take other measures to approximate anti tracking anyways. uBlock Origin + Pihole + a good VPN is enough for even most of us (personally, it is enough for me).

[notyourday]

Exactly the opposite. Companies would be lining up buying licenses for a competent and supported browser blocking ads for Suzi from accounting to use without needing to tinker around with a uBlock Origin and pihole and a good VPN.

uBlock Origin author specifically states he does not want donations or to sell licenses because he does not want to support the product at all - he wants to do what he wants and not what the "customers" or "donors" might want.

[sgift]

What exactly does "a product company" mean in your mind?

[notyourday]

It has a product that people pay for. It finds the market for its product and features for its product not based on "we are Chrome alternative don't pay attention to us sending all the stuff to Google and others who would give us money" but on what its paying customers want to see.