[slindsey]

For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox.

The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".

[cosmic_cheese]

I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts.

Why do I think this? Three reasons:

- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.

- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.

- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.

[bastawhiz]

If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being.

Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.

I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.

[cosmic_cheese]

Totally agree. Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades. All the emphasis has been on skin-deep UI refreshes, gimmicks, ways to monetize the user, and ways for developers to control the user’s experience.

I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things like per-page user CSS years before userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.

It was paid however, and at least in that point in time there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now it’s a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally tinker on and hasn’t been actively maintained in some time.

[unavoidable]

100%. I would say, even on the UI/UX side - Microsoft(!) has done a way better job on Edge (even though it's Chromium), with lots of new features on tab grouping, split screen browsing, note taking, syncing, and app integrations. Love it or hate it, at least they are doing some new features.

[jhoechtl]

> . Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades.

I agree. In the same time firefox' bookmarks are still better than what chrome or edge offer.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

Bookmarks and tabs are a good example of how easily you could accidentally step on the core userbases' toes. There are absolutely stellar tab and bookmark addons that essentially completely change how those systems work. They are also vastly more complex (but in a way that serves powerusers).

If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.

The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.

Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.

[cosmic_cheese]

The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.

Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that several highly specialized forks are developed on top of. Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use the “vanilla” version of the browser, while everybody else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs very closely.

Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play. They’re very opinionated and not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s fine, because there’s literally every other browser if something more conducive to general audiences is what you’re looking for. Browsers don’t need to be one size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by trying to be that way.

[johnny22]

> The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.

Now that firefox has native vertical tabs it's possible that the the integration can get better in the nearer future since I doubt the vertical tabs feature (which i haven't used yet) has tabs on the top AND side.

[mixmastamyk]

> skin-deep UI refresh

Colorways anyone? How about tabs that now look like buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?

I would pay for an exploer-like sidebar with folders and containers as the top-level folders. Almost have that now with "tree tabs" extension and containers, but the interface is kludgy.

This plus a privacy guarantee would be worth paying for.

[sudahtigabulan]

> How about tabs that now look like buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?

I use this to bring the normal tabs back:

https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

[osener]

Zen browser is exactly this. It has a growing ecosystem of “Zen mods” and has a great Arc-like out-of-box experience.

https://zen-browser.app/

[Semaphor]

After a short time with it, I find it kinda funny. Back then, power users were up in arms about things like the omnibar, and chrome removing more and more parts of the actual URL. And here is a browser marketed at power users that goes beyond that, showing only a small fraction. There doesn’t even seem to be a Zen mod that restores a real usable URL bar.

For me, I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage. Zen disqualified itself for my type of power usage very quickly, giving me a feeling of being on a small mobile device instead of a desktop PC.

[cosmic_cheese]

There’s an option under Settings > Look and Feel for a full length URL bar.

[Semaphor]

I had checked there before, just checked again, and I still only see an option for a smallish bar with the two floating options. Where there exactly?

[cevn]

Perfect.. the real hacks always in the comments!

[curun1r]

> I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage

Zen/Arc are actually much better for this use case, albeit after an adjustment period for people who’ve become accustomed to the way Firefox/Chrome do it.

The idea is that URLs are out of your way when you don’t need them and front-and-center when you do. Instead of simply focusing on the URL bar when you CMD+L or CMD+T, it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen where you’re free to do everything you can do in a normal location bar and more. It’s modeled after the command palette design in code editors or application launchers. So, for example, not only can you edit URLs, but you can search for commands instead of hunting for them in the browser’s menus. As an example, I’d never memorize the keyboard shortcut to take a whole-page screenshot because I don’t use it enough. But the other day I needed it, so I typed “CMD+L, screen” and it was the second result. Task completed in under 2 sec.

It took a few days to get used to, but now I never want to go back to the sort of location bar that Chrome and Firefox use. It just takes up space that I’d rather devote to the sites I’m visiting. Even the tab pane is easily toggled to get out of my way when I don’t care about it, which is especially useful when I’m tiling websites. I’ve developed a fondness for keeping documentation open in one panel alongside the website I’m developing, which means recapturing the width I lose from the tab pane is valuable.

I highly recommend pushing through the awkward phase where you’re sure you’re going to hate this browser design. Because once you get past it, you’ll wonder how you ever thought the old way could be better.

[Semaphor]

> it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen

Incredibly tiny modal dialog. I just tried checked one, and it fit 65 characters. Compared to firefox right now, after 112 characters the URL bar is slightly over halfway filled.

[wintermutestwin]

Manual URL editing is unbelievably painful on mobile and all the kids only use their phones these days - I guess this includes all the cool kid engineers making browsers.

[progmetaldev]

This is extremely true, especially when holding backspace and when you hold it a bit too long, the speed increases! Trying to remove query parameters, such as used for Google Analytics tracking, can be extremely frustrating.

[eikenberry]

Does Zen plan on taking payments at some point? Key part of the idea is paid development.

[keerthiko]

they have a ko-fi and a patreon, with about a 1000 "subscribers" across both at <unknown> amounts at the moment. it's not exactly enough to promise indefinite support, but tbh i don't really much reason to have that faith from products i've paid for but are closed-source either.

[InsideOutSanta]

The project's main owner said that the income from the project is enough for him to make it his main job after he finishes university.

[emaro]

TBF, I like the browser doesn't change that much. I install it for / recommend it to friends/family/etc and big changes would only increase the support I have to do. I think forks are much better suited to try out new concepts, which eventually might end up in the browser (I enabled the vertical tabs in 136 and I love them).

[rewgs]

“Arc but for Firefox” is called Zen and it’s been my daily driver for months. Fantastic browser.

[evo_9]

That’s exactly what Zen Browser is - Arc but off a fork of FF.

https://zen-browser.app/

[valunord]

I would rather see Orion on Firefox.

[Apocryphon]

What would that entail?

[hyperbrainer]

isn't Zen exactly that? Arc, but firefox

[Izkata]

> They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart.

> and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6.

Firefox 36 and 3.6 were pre-Quantum/Electrolysis. In those days, the XUL addons had an insane amount of control and could do so many things simply not possible nowadays, that if you took advantage of made a browser that looks nothing like modern Firefox.

[ForTheKidz]

Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support the devs but also fund other people accessing the same features that draw me to firefox in the first place.

[0x457]

I think in todays world, when everything is a subscription, payment for a browser doesn't look so far-fetched.

[TylerE]

Getting people to pay for something that has always been free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a browser is. They just think it’s part of the OS.

[lolinder]

Enough people pay for Nebula and Kagi and Fastmail to make them profitable, even though YouTube and Google and Gmail are free. You don't need to get everyone in the world who uses the free service to be willing to pay, just enough of them to fund your project.

There's actually an advantage to the paid business model vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them into fans rather than just users, while also saving time on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).

(I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox fork like OP suggests.)

[n42]

it's true. I never in a million years could have imagined that I would be paying for a search engine. now you can pry Kagi out of my cold dead hands.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

gmail is only free for a subset of its users, as are other google services.

[bmacho]

People pay for youtube and random youtubers now. They are fine paying for things.

[hnlmorg]

Sure, for those things.

However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.

[lolinder]

This is what people said about Search before Kagi. And, incidentally, those folks are also working on a paid browser that real people do buy.

Times change. Subscriptions are normalized, and tech people are increasingly aware of the hazards of "free".

[TylerE]

Content is something that is traditionally paid.

[immibis]

Not on YouTube.

[tonyhart7]

then why not modzilla themselves offering their pro version

[lolinder]

That is the question I ask myself every time this comes up, and the only answer I've been able to come up with is "because Google pays them not to".

[ta8645]

The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?

[lolinder]

You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation.

So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.

[culi]

To be fair, Mozilla has come out with a lot of new services that have dramatically decreased their dependency on Google. They went from over 95% of their revenue being google royalties to less than 70% just in the past half decade

[lolinder]

That's progress, but also: why is this the structure? It makes no sense to not send donations to the thing they think they're donating to, and I really can't believe that there's no way they could have structured it to make that work.

[taftster]

Still though. 70% is a lot to be dependent on Google for. And the way Google operates these days, I'm honestly surprised that their interest in Firefox remains.

[Olreich]

Google wants Firefox to remain viable (or at least one other browser) so that they can avoid monopoly issues with Chrome. If they pay Firefox to keep Google as default search engine, they keep 80% of the money they’d get by having those users use Chrome, and they keep the other browser alive, but not enough to really keep up with Chrome’s feature set.

That’s the most likely bet they are making, similar to Apple/Android or Safari/Chrome. Spending a minor fraction of your revenue to avoid anti-trust probably makes sense for them.

[prox]

This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse, but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?

[lolinder]

The Foundation owns the Corporation, so technically the Corporation answers to the Foundation, but because the Foundation is a non-profit it can't actually transfer resources to its for-profit arm, only the other way around.

Usually the theory with this kind of setup is that the Corporation is profitable and forwards funds to the Foundation so that the foundation can accomplish its work. But putting Firefox in the Foundation implies that someone somewhere thought that Firefox would be profitable rather than being the core mission that needs subsidization. I believe this was someone related to the Google deal, but it's definitely been a major problem ever since.

[infinitifall]

Let me get this straight, NOT A SINGLE DOLLAR of donations are used to fund development for Firefox!?

How many are under the false impression of "helping Firefox" when in reality their donations are used to fund advocacy campaigns [0] and managerial bloat [1]?

[0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-as...

[1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

[lolinder]

To the best of my knowledge that is correct, yes. The way that they've structured it they can't legally do otherwise.

[stefan_]

Wait until you hear how many Wikipedia editors and servers are paid from the many millions of donations they aggressively beg for every year..

[JumpCrisscross]

> fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was

Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].

(I’ve donated to Mozilla before and recently brought in friends who gave 6+ figures. I’ve been encouraging them to, and they’ve been successful so far in, charging back for those donations.)

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023

[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7

[st3fan]

Donation go to the foundation, not to Mozilla Corporation which does all the browser engineering work. If you donate you give money to the team that does open web advocacy and related programs.

[matheist]

> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox

This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.

I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

[dblohm7]

> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole...

> They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.

However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.

[lolinder]

When you left, do you have a sense for how many developers were actually working on Firefox full-time? I'm curious because people always say that Firefox would be impossible to fund, pointing to Mozilla's expenses, but I've never seen someone actually put forward the math for what portion of those expenses are actually Firefox.

[dblohm7]

Oh geez, it's been long enough that I don't really remember the specifics. In the hundreds, for sure.

[flas9sd]

had a positive experience recently on an issue and getting it fixed, people were helpful and instructive. For drive-by newbies there's an initial penalty to dig into Mozilla tooling. Lowering the threshold there will attract more contributors.

[prox]

This is really telling of the current vibe I get from Firefox, and why I feel resistant to support them beyond “It’s a bit more private than default Chrome”

Companies gonna company and expand in the wrong direction if they forget were they come frome.

[maccard]

That doesn’t seem unreasonable for a drive by PR to an enormous project. I contributed go an open source rust project a few years back and my first PR took weeks of back and forth. My second and following ones were merged in days.

[glenstein]

I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea.

Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.

As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.

I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.

I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.

[WD-42]

Thunderbird received close to $10 million in donations in 2023. And I’m willing to bet far more people use Firefox. If funding development directly, that’s not too shabby.

[glenstein]

Wow, I honestly had no idea about that and you're exactly right, and everything I can see suggests that those were small donors to Thunderbird. It's hard to extrapolate, but it certainly seems like 10 to 20 million per year could be in play.

[maccard]

I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary. Call it a million a year, and that’s enough to comfortably employ 4-5 programmers to work on something full time, with enough left over to cover the lulls in income. Make it 1.2 and there’s enough for an admin person to prioritise, liaise with Mozilla, and do the financials. That’s 150x less than Wikipedia.

I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve this, whether it’s 100k or 100M

[glenstein]

>I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary.

Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. So it sounds like you're saying an additional 1 million is a difference between 3% market share and 30% market share.

We seem to be on the same page about what plausibly could come in from revenue, but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting. I feel like the psychological comfort from pointing to that as an underutilized option is intended to make the point that there's not enough resources for software development. But if you compare it to what they're already spending, they're spending more than would ever be generated from such revenue. Which admittedly is a little bit off-track from the point you're making. It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.

[maccard]

> Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million.

Lots of peoples "supposed" problem is giving money to Mozilla, not Firefox. If the goal is to give people a way to support FF development, then this does achieve that. But FF doesn't need _that_ (which I think you and I both agree on).

> but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting

Agreed. I think if it was 1M, it wouldn't have any impact, but and if it was 100M then people would complain that it's not being used on $INSERT_THING_THEY_WANT_HERE.

> It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.

What Firefox is doing isn't growing their market share, so hitching another $1/10/100M isn't going to do anything to that without a strategy to actually make it happen. I think, honestly, there's a decent chance for a new project to survive in here. It could even be a Firefox fork, but it needs to be free of the baggage and strategy of Mozilla, and Firefox IMO - just as Edge has somehow made a resurgance as a chromium browser. I think Ladybird could work out too, if they can find a way to break through.

Spoken as a die hard FF user for almost 20 years!

[glenstein]

I wholeheartedly agree with most or all of this and it's refreshing to see thoughtful commentary amidst a tidal wave of crazy speculation. I actually think it would be much more fair, in the event that FF raised $100MM from donations, to have to be accountable to user perceptions of where those resources are going. Although my experience from hn commentary is that people are extremely confused about this and vocal minorities create an illusion of consensus, and express their concerns in drive-by fashion that isn't super amenable to a focused conversation that could be tied to a credible strategy.

The best version of the argument I think one can make relates to Firefox OS. There, at long last, in contrast to spurious complaints about the VPN, Pocket, etc. etc., it seems like Mozilla really did invest serious resources in it at the expense of browser development, and it did happen during the critical period of time where they collapsed from 35ish percent to 3 percent. But it was on behalf of a major bet of the kind that I would like to think everyone welcomed, so, a real risk, but for a respectable strategy. And, they did produce Quantum, a rewrite from the ground up with spectacular improvements in speed and stability (which makes the present day arguments feel like they are at least vestigal echoes of an old argument that was, in its time, legitimate). But you never hear critics talk in a measured way like that.

I do agree that the vocal minority would claim the donations are not being used on $INSERT_THING, which is always a different thing every time you ask (I recently heard that it was all the VC fund's fault which was a new one), and they're already talking like that right now. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt to be open to that revenue. I think it's plausible they could pull something on the order of $10MM or multiple tens of millions which I have to imagine is as good as what they're getting from Pocket and the VPN etc.

I suppose the only disagreement, or frustration I have here is with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections, every bit as detached from a strategy to grow market share as Mozilla's actual strategy.

[maccard]

I actually agree with you fully.

> with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections

To bring this back full circle, the same group are the ones who want to fund Firefox-not-Mozilla. And if every comment in this thread cost $200 to post and went straight to Firefox development, it wouldn’t fund a single developer for a year.

[devit]

The use for donations could be for a single person whose job is to check the upstream code for any antifeatures (telemetry, ads, product placements, online service defaults, Google as paid default search engine, etc.) not in the user's interest and revert them, as well as bundling any useful extension like uBlock Origin and verifying them.

That needs minimal effort compared to building a browser, because it doesn't involve doing any of the hard work, but just removing code that serves to line the pockets of those doing most of the work at the expense of the user.

[glenstein]

Do I understand correctly that you believe Mozilla doesn't currently have the resources necessary to do that from their $500MM in annual revenue? It sounds like you are talking about an ombudsman or something, which highlights my point here, which is that these are philosophical criticisms disguised as commentary on raising revenue.

Also the mission you are describing sounds like something that you might expect from a Chromium browser that has to regularly revert Google-driven changes. At Mozilla, they already own the browser and they could account for this in their ground-level philosophy.

[devit]

They could, but they don't want to do that because they get paid by Google to not do it or because those actions get them money in some other way (from advertisers or whatever), or because they think only power users like some features.

[glenstein]

Firefox publishes their 990 form which discloses all their sources of revenue and Google does not pay Firefox for any of the things you described. Also, it feels kind of nonsensical to suggest that it would have a development strategy of building out their ad tech and simultaneously reverting it, and I don't see how explanations about them wanting or not wanting to do it make that proposed approach for any more sense.

[devit]

They pay them for making Google the default search engine, and it is hypothesized that the payment may also influence them to not provide ad-blocking by default and possibly other things that are not beneficial for Google's business.

[fresh_geezer]

I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.

[hilbert42]

"The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox."

For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.

As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.

Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc.

Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited).

Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible.

Here at ardour.org, we use this:

> either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code.

(technically, name your own price for the binaries)

and retain the GPL. It works fine for us.

[IAmLiterallyAB]

Firefox is under the MPL, not the GPL

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Oops, thanks for the correction.

[hilbert42]

"Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible."

I understand that, and I accept it as a problem. I only used LibreOffice and Gimp as examples of large projects that have issues, I should have made it clear I wasn't suggesting they convert to a different licensing model. Clearly, under GPL-type licensing converting to another licensing structure would be nigh on impossible. Nevertheless, that they can't raises issues which I'll mention.

My suggestion arose out of what I perceive as a problem with some open-source projects. Let's take a look:

There are many open-source and commercial programs that are now effectively abandoned-ware but given the right incentive some could be resurrected and turned into useful products. View this another way: a lot of human effort has gone into making both commercial and open-source programs and letting all that effort go to waste doesn't make sense if there's a viable alternative. That said, we know that finding the right 'incentive' has proved difficult and elusive.

Both developers of open-source and commercial programs often have good reasons for stopping further development of their programs. For open-source developers often the incentive wains and having to continually maintain a program without financial reward turns into drudgery. Likewise, a developer of a small commercial program will stop further development for various reasons some of which are similar to those of open-source developers.

I'll give you an example, I still use a Windows file management utility produced by an individual developer which I purchased about 15 years ago and unfortunately he has ceased further development of the program. Trouble is that program is for my purposes the best-of-class for reasons I can't dwell upon here but it needs updating to a Unicode base (I still use it regularly but it throws errors with filenames containing non-ASCII characters).

I've exchanged emails with the developer and I fully understand why he's ceased development (he has good reasons). A very similar situation exists with some open-source developers, they've ceased development of their programs for similar reasons. Unfortunately, in both instance users are left with abandoned-ware.

With both open-source and proprietary software, many programmers still hold residual vested interests in their code even through they've ceased developing it. Often, this revolves around the fact that they don't want others to benefit financially at their expense even though for various reasons it's difficult for them to actually profit directly. (Let's face it, that's understandable—it's pretty much human nature.)

The result is an impasse: open-source code stagnates in the hope others will continue its development, which may or may not happen (and often it doesn't). Similarly, commercial code is neglected and or goes into limbo. And more often than not it ends up dead and abandoned.

Clearly, the gulf between open-source/GPL and proprietary software licensing is not only wide but also contentious. In respect of these problems I've no better solution than anyone else except to say that I believe there ought to be some better system or mechanism whereby open-source developers can at least receive some renumeration for their efforts. Providing an additional financial incentive to developers would also significantly benefit users.

Obviously—given current licensing arrangements—the halfway measure I've suggested would only be applicable to new projects, and that alone poses additional problems. The fact remains we need to find some way of providing better incentives to developers so as to ensure important open-source projects are developed in a timely and professional way as is so for the best commercial software. By that, I'm certainly not saying that all open-source projects aren't being developed in a professional manner as clearly many are. But then there are many that are struggling. How we best deal with them remains open.

[wruza]

Idk about others, I’d pay one time for specific features done once and never touched again. Cause I can measure my suffering and workarounds costs, and I have a sense of efforts and ownership.

I’d even pay for forks of software that simply allow to modify their basic internals without providing any specific features, so I could augment them with programming without hard reveng (which often fails with no result). Like setting custom shortcuts in firefox.

But software doesn’t offer that. It wants me to pay monthly money for features I don’t really like on average, and they may take away anything in the next update, irreversibly. Just because someone felt like doing so, cause users can’t take away paid money in return.

I guess I wanted to say that “willing to pay” depends on what you are selling. And what “they” are selling is usually some no-guarantees always mutating fad rather than features you need.

There’s another nuance in supporting existing software even without new features. These costs are already way above all limits and must be forced down by re-designing text and image scrolling to where it should be, complexity-wise.

[MrAlex94]

FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.

[jeffparsons]

If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people here — myself included — would contribute. Being able to help out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time seems to have a magical effect on some people — again, myself included.

[maccard]

Herein lies the problem. Multiply this by 10 countries, add in accountant fees and legal fees, HCOL adjustments, and you’ve spent $20k very very quickly before you’ve written a line of code. You might suggest “only do this if there are more than X donations from a country”, but now I need to bookkerp this which again takes away from the core goal of writing code for Firefox. Maybe I hire a fractional accountant to manage it? Now there’s an annual overhead to cover.

How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things

[AnthonyMouse]

It could be interesting to do this and raise money in the same way that Mozilla does -- by selling the default search engine. The difference being that all of the money would go to improving Firefox instead of all the random not-Firefox things Mozilla currently does with it.

[kiicia]

Web browser is something I would pay subscription in a heartbeat, and I mean it, it is my actual OS now

[dev1ycan]

The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big % of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and then to justify their job as the company crashes down from bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried to do.

Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).

[intelVISA]

Surely to avoid the org dysfunction that sunk Firefox the person 'creating' this fork would also be actively building it?

[gausswho]

Please someone make a Firefox that makes profile portability readable and with sensible defaults.

[maccard]

That’s not what OP is suggesting - that’s a Firefox fork.

[guy234]

why wouldn't those people just donate to Mozilla?

[rwmj]

Because historically that money has been squandered on C-suite salaries, irrelevant acquisitions (Pocket), and development that has nothing to do with the browser (like failing to make a phone OS).

[Narishma]

AFAICT donations to Mozilla aren't used to fund Firefox development.