[drpossum]

Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service or how to comply with Google's advertising decisions.

Then they would let people contribute money to the browser (instead of to Mozilla Foundation which goes to enabling aforementioned trash fires) and to the salary of a multi-million dollar CEO after laying off developer staff and hiring more C-suite assistants.

Mozilla is a bad organization in every sense, a bad steward of Firefox, and the best thing that could happen is they do have their funding cut, they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community.

[glenstein]

>Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service

It's pants-on-head level of crazy talk to suggest that the VPN service is compromising Mozilla's finances.

It's a re-wrapped Mullvad VPN that probably was not expensive to roll out (it being inexpensive to deploy is probably precisely the reason they moved forward with it). It's like people are just workshopping arguments where they randomly claim these things are expensive without any substantiation whatsoever.

Mozilla is sitting on 1.2 billion in assets and investments. They're not underwater. They are indeed in a position where they need to diversify revenue, but the idea that the side bets have created running deficits is a narrative completely manufactured in comment sections.

[wussboy]

This kind of thinking appears to be prevalent. "Firefox does one specific thing which I construe as evil. Therefore I use the competitor which also does this thing, plus dozens of others which are anti-competitive and generally destructive to the ecosystem."

"The coleslaw in the Jedi salad bar has raisins. Therefore I joined the Sith. Their coleslaw also has raisins."

[lolinder]

You misunderstand. The vast majority of people who complain about Mozilla on HN are Firefox users. We're the ones with the highest level of investment in the idea of an open web, so we're the ones who've stuck it out until Firefox's market share is all but gone. But because we care so much, you'll also frequently find us on here complaining that Mozilla is drunk driving their company and does not seem to realize that the only thing they do that actually matters is maintain the one independent browser engine.

[glenstein]

Nice speech, but the argument about VPN costs is just as spurious as it was a few comments ago. Why has this passionate concern drifted into nodding along to such ridiculous arguments?

I too am I Firefox user, I too am invested and concerned with, say, adtech. Somehow I've managed to avoid saying crazy things about VPNs.

= = =

Edit: replying here because it won't let me add a new comment. I'm not making the positive claim in the VPN argument. It's puzzling why "based on no information" would cut in favor of an argument asserting VPN has unprecedented costs without substantiation but not against it.

Also, as I've already pointed out and the other commenter has (as well as commenters in previous threads whenever this comes up), what we know of ordinary costs to run VPNs would not imply any expense on the order of magnitude necessary to make the argument work. Which is a legitimate challenge to speculation that would presume otherwise without substantiation.

And once again I have to emphasize that this is completely detached from any cause and effect argument about what missing browser feature would have otherwise been developed but for the resources spent on a VPN. The idea that there's a legitimate open question about whether a re-wrapped VPN is costing millions or tens of millions in losses is not the reasonable argument you seem to think it is. And it's not because reasons, like the ones mentioned here.

= = =

Edit 2: This was originally about whether the VPNs were a cost sink on the order of millions or tens of millions of dollars. But now it seems to have changed to whether the VPN generates enough revenue that it's a positive way to contribute. Not sure when that happened.

[lolinder]

Your VPN argument is based on, as far as I can tell, no information. Do you have numbers for what percentage of the VPN subscription goes to Mozilla? If not, you have no reason to believe that it's an effective way to contribute to Firefox dev.

I want a way to contribute to Firefox, not a VPN, and if 90% of the subscription goes to Mullvad that's a waste of money.

[glenstein]

Apparently it's letting me reply now although it wasn't previously.

I'm just going to note that for whatever reason the goalposts appear to have shifted here. Originally, I was replying to a commenter who was claiming without substantiation that the VPN was a massive financial sink that was part of the reason for Mozilla's loss of market share.

Meanwhile, the argument you seem to be making is that you want information that supports the contention that it's a significant revenue raiser for Mozilla which is not the claim that I was responding to. If you're also doubting that the VPN is a huge money losing bet, then we're probably in agreement.

[presentation]

The one thing that is both expensive to maintain and that its users don’t pay a dime to use

[lolinder]

Mozilla hasn't tried to get users to pay for or donate to Firefox. They can't complain users don't pay for it when they haven't once asked them to.

[AlotOfReading]

The VPN service is probably the most sensible thing they could lean into. It's basically all margin and it works nicely with the privacy messaging.

[lolinder]

> It's basically all margin

Is it? Do you have a citation for this? From what I understand it's a white labeled Mullvad VPN, and I haven't been able to find numbers for what percentage of the revenue is taken by Mozilla and what percentage goes to Mullvad.

[AlotOfReading]

I don't know any details of the revenue split, but I'm talking about the act of running a VPN service itself as being low overhead compared to the costs. Paying mullvad obviously reduces the margins, but it doesn't have the kinds of organizational overhead that would come with say, running an advertising company on the side like Mozilla now does.

[glenstein]

Previously the argument was that the VPN was an example of "throwing money into open firepits", but now we're talking about the extent to which it generates revenue.

[bilalq]

Isn't Mozilla's VPN just a thin UI over Mullvad's servers? I don't think it costs them much and probably brings in some decent revenue.

[culi]

Do you have a source for this? I'm a big fan of Mullvad and trust their service more than any. I wouldn't mind supporting Mozilla's independence from Google while getting the same VPN service I'm currently getting

Hopefully Mozilla's MDN Plus offering can grow to bring them a big source of revenue. MDN is a treasure for any web developer and, should Mozilla go under, this public service would be sorely missed for the open web.

[nanderson_]

The privacy notice for Mozilla VPN [1] briefly mentions their partnership with Mullvad.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/subscription-services/

[ta1243]

The main problem with mozvpn is that they have a mozilla:mulvad account mapping. I'm unclear if my name goes to mulvad, but it does to mozilla.

Yes with mulvad you can pay anonymously via cash or bitcoin or whatever, but assuming you aren't doing that, using mozvpn seems potentially safer than mulvad - as you'd have to compromise both mulvad and mozilla to link my name/credit card with the vpn used.

[AstralSerenity]

I imagine their VPN service is financially viable if they've still stuck with it this long.

Aside from that, they've just about cut all other initiatives aside from "Firefox and AI". The latter gives me pause, but hopefully they really are more focused moving forward.

I think Mozilla has done alright, but I agree the folks is in charge of their business direction and especially PR are abysmal. Personally, I wish a company like Proton was at the helm.

[AceJohnny2]

> Then they would let people contribute money to the browser

People keep saying things like this, but the truth is that direct contributions to any ad-supported system contribute more like 1%-10% (at best) of their income.

You are not the majority you think you are.

[nine_k]

It does not have to be the majority. It would suffice to produce enough funds to continue developing Firefox, with full-time engineers, infrastructure, etc.

The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Let's assume that half of it was dedicated to Firefox; e.g. $60M/y. It would take 500k users paying $120/y (aka $10/mo) to support their favorite browser. The current audience of Firefox is approx. 170M users; it would take about 0.3 percent of the audience to be paying users; 0.6% if you lower the rate to $5/mo.

This is how any freemium works.

Even more funnily, someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors. Eventually the developers might stop needing the paycheck from Mozilla, and thus from Google.

[buzer]

> The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years.

Firefox is under corporation, not foundation. Mozilla Corporation expenses are $400M+, not $100M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

(I don't enough knowledge about freemium economics to figure out if the stated numbers would work out or not)

[nine_k]

Thank you for the correction!

If we adjust to these numbers, we need to quadruple the number of paying users, up to some 1.2% of the total user base. Let's add a safety margin, and bump it to 2%.

Still does not look impossible to attain.

[ac29]

> someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors

I had the same thought. I dont think such an org would be able to pull in nearly the same amount of money as Mozilla does, but even a few million dollars a year would fund a lot of development work.

[dropofwill]

Spotify makes over 80% of revenue off of paid subscribers, even though over 60% of users are on the free, ad-supported subscription.

Now that's not some optional donation scheme, there are real tangible benefits to being a paid subscriber, so idk how that could fit into something like Firefox.

[eviks]

Is Mozilla that rich that it can ignore a 10% bump in income?

[aucisson_masque]

> they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community.

who is going to support, maintain and develop Firefox in your scenario ?