[Fnoord]

A paid version needs to offer something on top of it, which is usually in one way or another proprietary (such as a proprietary service).

Something like this is regarded as the enshitification process, so what typically happens is they (e.g. VC) want to do such after they lured in their users. Which Firefox has (or arguably: had), but Waterfox and Librewolf have not.

Good thought experiment.

It ain't the first drama or controversy with regards to Mozilla, who have had a long tendency which didn't occur recently (and included the time Eich was there). Nostalgia just makes people forget the bad.

[kiba]

It doesn't need to be proprietary or have an advantage. It just need someone willing to pay for it and a mechanism for doing so.

However, the default assumption is that all open source software is free to download and use.

Of course, there's the matter of revenue. If you get 100 dollars or 1000 dollars a month, is that significant to do anything useful for the project?

[nottorp]

It doesn't even need to be an extra service.

I'd donate to Firefox for no additional service if they would guarantee my money only goes to the browser and not crypto or AI initiatives.

Note donate. As in one time payments at a time of my choice. They also try to push towards subscriptions when you hit that donate button.

[kiba]

I wasn't thinking about subscription but one time payment for a download.

[bee_rider]

It does actually seem pretty difficult to sell a browser; I don’t really see how anybody in their right mind would trust a closed source browser. So, it will be hard to make any parts of it proprietary. It isn’t impossible to sell open source software of course, but it does seem to be pretty difficult.

Rather, I wish we would stop accepting web standards that don’t come with reference implementations. Then, we could have a reference browser, and just run that. I don’t expect it to be performant, but I also don’t think browser performance matters much at all. Web pages are not HPC applications.

Currently we’re accepting the anti-competitive behavior of Google, just DDoSing the community with new standards to implement. This is the root problem. The fact that Mozilla is being killed by funding problems is downstream of the fact that maintaining a web browser requires multiple full time engineers.