[ta_9390]

This is itself a bold claim.

Firefox is in fact better in terms of privacy than rivals with higher market share, the home page of firefox addons store has uBlock Origin with "Recommended" label placed by Mozilla team.

It is important to recognize that the web is also used by grandma and grandpa who won't master any tech more recent than fax and installing uBlock origin by default will harm FF market share even more as usability will be impacted.

[Nextgrid]

> the web is also used by grandma and grandpa

Safari works around that nicely - if you refresh a page it prompts you whether you want to reduce privacy protections (assuming you are refreshing because of something broken). Either way, the functionality can always be optional so people who are impacted can disable blocking.

> will harm FF market share even more as usability will be impacted.

The only people who currently use FF are those who also use uBlock Origin - if you don't there is really no point using it compared to Chrome.

Firefox marketshare will improve because there will finally be an actual selling point for it.

[pseudalopex]

> The only people who currently use FF are those who also use uBlock Origin

Mozilla's statistics say under 4%.[1][2]

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

[2] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

[Nextgrid]

These numbers may not be representative as anyone who installs uBlock Origin is unlikely to leave telemetry enabled.

Either way my point stands - what's the selling point of using Firefox over Chrome for a non-technical user (who doesn't know what add-ons are and this won't install any)? uBlock Origin bundled by default would be an instant selling point.

Say "install this browser for instant ad-free browsing" and you've sold it to all non-technical users. Say "install this browser, dismiss 5 nag screens, navigate to the add-on store, find ublock origin, install it, tick 'enable in private browsing'" and your non-technical users would've ran away before you even finished that sentence.

[altairprime]

What non-advertising revenue model would pay for both Firefox development, and timely repairs and improvements to advertising blocks? It’d have to be a recurring or subscription model — one-time payments aren’t viable for recurring updates — with no free option (like there is today), as otherwise no one would pay for it (just like today). Solve this and perhaps they’ll make you the next CEO.

[Nextgrid]

> What non-advertising revenue model would pay for both Firefox development

The Enterprise pays a fortune for often dubious security products - the browser, being at the forefront of many security threats would be a great place to put some security features alongside things like centralized management, DLP, etc. Use that to subsidize the free version of the browser.

> timely repairs and improvements to advertising blocks

Volunteers that maintain uBlock Origin lists do that just fine already, but if they really wanted to fund it, they could just redirect the donations they currently piss away to the maintainers of filter lists and use that money for something useful.

> Solve this and perhaps they’ll make you the next CEO.

The reason this isn't "solved" isn't because it's some hard problem, it's because converting into a company making an actual paid product requires taking on risk, responsibility and actually doing something. Freeloading off the Google money while puffing hot air every so often about how much they care about privacy requires much less risk and effort, so why change anything?

[altairprime]

> Use that to subsidize the free version of the browser.

Google and Microsoft, and to some extent Apple, already offer an enterprise-capable browser for $0; so I don’t agree that enterprise support is a viable funding model here. I can’t find any traces remaining of the Enterprise paid support plan that the Firefox team launched in 2019, so I suspect they reached the same conclusion and shut it down.

> use that money for something useful.

Such as?

> converting into a company making an actual paid product

To clarify, do you mean converting the Firefox browser into shareware/IAP, or free-trial/paywalled, or do you mean another product in the style of Pocket or Relay; or..?