[pluc]

It's real odd to be the only alternative to Chrome yet be almost entirely funded by it. Google allows Firefox to exist, and Google can decide it's tired of sponsoring competition tomorrow morning. I don't like that Mozilla allows that to be their (and ours, and the web's) reality and isn't more adventurous in monetization. Also that they pay their CEO an outrageous amount of money, but I guess you're free to pick what your kneepads are going to be made of.

[kibwen]

The last time that Mozilla parted ways with Google (in 2014), Yahoo snapped up that spot (if reports are to be believed, for actually more than Google was paying). Yahoo Search may be defunct, but as long as Bing exists, there's an out. Of course, it would be nicer if the existence of megacorp-funded search engines was not an existential prerequisite.

[rtepopbe]

I don't like the situation either, but I find it hard to blame Mozilla for not pushing monetization hard enough. I can't think of anything more I'd like Mozilla to actually do.

I'm rather against being sold out, and suspect most Firefox users feel similarly.

Offering services essentially entirely separate from Firefox could work, but comes with substantial risk. Mozilla will be more trusted than some fly-by-night startup, at least among the techie crowd, but also can't just burn investor money and start over until something sticks. (Ironically, the only thing that comes to mind here for me would be a privacy-oriented email provider.)

The only maybe, theoretically, kind-of, plausible route I see working would be more of an open-core-esque model, where their paid offerings essentially implemented extension-like capabilities that would benefit substantially from deep integration with the browser. Think things that would otherwise be impossible with the extension API, or have substantial performance improvements if only Firefox internals could be messed with.

But. So many buts.

I'm not even sure their organization is setup to allow this kind of thing. I'm sure their codebase isn't, especially if it might require special considerations to comply with their charter.

Mozilla would also gain a bunch of perverse incentives to restrict or cripple base Firefox, which would bite them every time they added a new paid offering. For example, just how much more flack would they have caught for the new extension API if their own offerings wouldn't have to abide by any of those new limitations?

And it seems inevitable that they'll have to spend some serious effort to minimize the amount of browser fragmentation issues that would now occur within Firefox itself.

After all of that, the extensions most likely to get me to buy in - literally and otherwise - to the whole concept, would be ones that would seriously strain Mozilla's relationship with Google and many other companies. Things like deeply integrated ad-blocking and other privacy-focused features would be most likely to get me to not only accept the practice but even spend my money. But step one of weening themselves off Google's money probably shouldn't be "Burn bridges with Google."

So... yeah.

What else is Mozilla supposed to do? I'm not overly enamored with Mozilla these days. Increasingly I feel I'm sticking with them less because of anything they've done, and more because of what Google's done. But still, I find it hard to blame them too much for treading water.

[pluc]

I agree with you - however one must remember that it was mostly Firefox (called Phoenix back then) who disrupted the web with tabbed browsing. It's that type of disruptive ideas that Mozilla must foster, not cheap transparent monetization techniques that its users are way too savvy to fall for. Not a VPN, not a bookmarking services or any of that crap it tries to peddle today.

[rtepopbe]

The VPN is a funny one. Aside from appearances and legal realities, it's a great fit for them. It doesn't require a bunch of risky investment, and the whole VPN thing relies on trust anyway. I can't think of an organization offhand that would be well situated to run a VPN service and that I'd trust more as a VPN provider.

Of course they're not such a great fit if you're hoping for a slightly shady company in a country with favorable laws to conveniently 'lose' various legal requests. But other than that, if you had to guess if $slightly-shady-company or Mozilla was actually upholding their promises...