[sfink]

> Freemium wouldn't work. There will be unofficial builds available with this kind of stuff removed available for free within hours of the official release.

Why? Anyone who would go to the bother of downloading a separate build (and worrying about whether it'll update itself properly) can surely click on the gear in the top right corner of the new tab page and uncheck a checkbox? (Or be like me and keep the new tab page blissfully blank. Far less distracting.)

I highly doubt the revenue from the ads will be significant compared to what Mozilla gets from Yahoo, at least not for a long time. This isn't about revenue; it's more like the old Firefox sync thing where it avoided sending unencrypted data anywhere. You could only decrypt client-side. Similarly, this is about trying out an ad model where the privacy-sensitive data stays client-side.

Perhaps it'll do better than old Sync did?

(full disclosure: I work for Mozilla on the JS engine. Sadly, though, I'm not one of those world-class JIT geniuses mentioned elsewhere in this thread. In fact, I'm a complete idiot. Please don't tell them.)

(And no, we can't survive on donations alone.)