Not to defend Mozilla (they have lots of issues), but it feels they're in an impossible position:
* their revenue comes mostly from Google, they need to diversify
* but nobody will pay for a browser, so they need to offer other services
* then everyone criticises that they shill their other services and should instead focus on the browser
Realistically, what should they do to stop relying on money from their competitor and be continue their mission?
rollcat · 18h ago
My take:
- The Mozilla Foundation should be publicly funded, with Firefox being considered a reference implementation for all web standards; Google should be considered a "gatekeeper", and fined for introducing de facto "standards" into mainline Chrome without going thru the W3C. Perhaps the W3C should be regulated as well.
- Efforts like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive should be considered public libraries, and publicly funded.
- Privately-owned platforms with vast libraries of knowledge - like Youtube - should be required to allow easy and on-demand export to the Internet Archive (subject to the copyright owner's chosen license).
The question is, who is the "public" in "publicly funded". The EU and the US could cover the majority, but considering that the entire world's population is reliant on those products/services, perhaps that's a matter worth raising with the UN.
Am I exaggerating here? Heck no, livelihoods of billions of people depend on these things. It takes one of the "top 5" corps to pull the rug and cause worldwide chaos.
IAmBroom · 16h ago
Whole lotta "shoulds" there.
Who is the worldwide authority that has the power to declare Firefox a web standard?
Google being "fined for introducing de facto "standards" into mainline Chrome without going thru the W3C" is... wow, a leap of legal imagination. That is not how anything works.
None of this is realistic. We need attainable goals, using concrete steps. Getting Google declared a monopoly: one step. Keeping that ruling intact through the following years: another step (Hello, Microsoft in the 1990's). Establish web standards, beyond the current skeletal concepts: a BIG step.
rollcat · 13h ago
I didn't say it should happen overnight, or that this should be the final state of affairs.
It isn't about politics, or even corporations simply having control over our daily lives. At some point, it has to be recognised as a necessity, not just for the sake of our culture and legacy, but for our survival as a species. There's no other piece of digital infrastructure as important as the web, and there's hardly anything we do nowadays that doesn't depend on something digital.
Y_Y · 16h ago
> None of this is realistic. We need attainable goals, using concrete steps.
Well you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.[0]
Surely it makes sense to have overarching goals, that you can then divide up into little concrete stepping stones.
Whether or not your big goal is possible or worthwhile is something you can keep examining along the way.
Incremental change is the only kind that you can make happen, but without big-picture direction you'll just skitter around local maxima.
I’ve said the same things elsewhere (see my profile), but we need to differentiate between centralized publicly-funded and decentralized publicly-funded approaches.
A lot of libertarian types’ arguments against publicly-funded infrastructure is mostly against that public funding being centralized.
I don’t think Mozilla becoming publicly funded, with money taken in from the EU, US, Russia, India, and China, would end up being good for users.
However, I do think that each of these entities having their own branch of Firefox/Iceweasel/whatever, with their own teams focusing on their users’ needs, contributing upstream, with a small team to handle the “mainline” version, would be pretty ideal.
The same should probably also be happening for at least one Chrome/Webkit browser, too (though, the mega-corps do seem to have its support system much more reinforced).
timmg · 19h ago
> their revenue comes mostly from Google, they need to diversify
Arguably, they get more revenue than what they need to fund browser development. So they could be banking a fair amount. That would allow them to build an endowment that might keep them funded in perpetuity.
I think there’s an option where they don’t diversify and don’t act like a tech startup and do fine. Maybe Wikipedia is a model for them.
Tl;dr -- They do make more money than they spend on software development. They save a bunch of it and have a decently sized account (not near endowment levels though: they'd need to 3x+ it). They also spend a lot on other random shit, and compensate their executives well for how poorly they're doing.
maccard · 17h ago
> Maybe Wikipedia is a model for them
People who have a problem with Mozilla the org tend to have a problem with Wikipedia the organisation too in my experience.
Gud · 17h ago
Maybe there is an overlap but my main concern with Mozilla is their funding model.
I'd pay for browser. I send money to KiCad, Blender and others. I see no reason not to support Firefox. They'd have to lay off all the leeches, though.
dale_glass · 18h ago
The problem for me is that Mozilla's side projects seemed unfitting, like their whole AI venture.
The thing is that I fully believe that Mozilla has a lot of experts in web-related software development, and have no reason to believe they have any particular competence in AI tech. So all the AI stuff seemed immediately off to me, like they were just jumping on the latest bandwagon.
I also don't believe their AI projects are particularly valuable.
* Summarizing pages -- okay, this might be rarely useful. But I don't personally have much need for it, and I believe that the competition is probably better. I understand the privacy angle, but I don't think it works for my case. If I was summarizing all the things, then yeah, probably I'd be concerned about the privacy implications of feeding a good chunk of my web traffic to ChatGPT. But I don't. My needs to summarize are rare and mostly things like lengthy public news articles. And in such cases I don't want to sacrifice quality, so if ChatGPT does a better job there, that's the tool I'll go with.
* Fakespot and Deep Fake Detector to me are fundamentally fishy in that I don't believe they can possibly work properly. I have very little trust in such services and have a feeling they may be doing more harm than good.
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 5h ago
"but nobody will pay for a browser, so they need to offer other services"
Why will no one pay for a browser
Why are web browsers available for free
I'm submitting this comment using software I downloaded for free, like a web browser
But it is not a web browser like Mozilla's
The software I'm using is not supported by advertising
No developers were paid to write it
What makes Mozilla's software different
Is it really better than software that is not supported by advertising
Better for www users, better for software developers, better for advertisers
What if it is better for one group but worse for another
I'm in the www user group
JohnFen · 15h ago
> but nobody will pay for a browser
I'm not so sure this is true. There are a few successful for-pay browsers. What's crazy, though, is that even though I'd be happy to give Mozilla money for Firefox, they don't provide a way to do that.
beej71 · 15h ago
Seconded. I've often wondered what the development cost is and how many ways we'd have to split that at $10/mo.
0xTJ · 18h ago
I wish it was normalized and easier to contribute to open-source projects that you use. I have recurring donations for Thunderbird and KiCad, and I make occasional one-time donations to the likes of KDE. I don't see a clear way to donate specifically to the development of Firefox, and I also think that it would feel like it's just funding a machine to drive more Google traffic.
I also have a monthly donation to Internet Archive, which I highly recommend everyone do. It's a very important service; if you use it occasionally I'd recommend at least a one-time donation, and if you use it regularly, a recurring one is even better!
Ladybird should be interesting once it's ready; I'm happy to see a fully-new browser entering the space. That gene pool has gotten far too shallow.
cassianoleal · 18h ago
I'd also love to see an actual browser based on Servo.
KaiMagnus · 18h ago
At this point only the power users are left anyways, so I wonder if a paid, or at least freemium, browser for power users might actually work.
Kind of sounds like Arc. But nowadays we rarely get new features and when they do come out, they’re often unpolished, so I wonder if the browser has much of a future. They’d have to step up their investment in FF to be competitive for sure.
All I can say is that spite plays a big part in why I’m using FF, not good if you want to gain users and make money.
WhyNotHugo · 18h ago
> nobody will pay for a browser, so they need to offer other services
A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly, but not to a browser which includes proprietary components, first-party ads and first part-spyware.
Also, such a huge proportion of their income goes to fund their C-suite, it’s ridiculous.
maccard · 17h ago
I’ve been writing c++ and working in web adjacent space for 15 years. I’ve regularly thought about setting up a kickstarter for 6 months of my salary that if I reached it, I would start a patreon and work full time on Firefox, in public.
The developer of the ladybird browser has a pattern page where he makes £760/month [0]. That wouldn’t even pay rent for a 1 bed flat where I live.
If 200 people donated £10/mo, it still wouldn’t be minimum wage for me in the UK. So realistically, how much would you donate and how often?
einsteinx2 · 10h ago
I assume you mean Patreon when you wrote pattern? You’re ignoring their main source of donations from users which is Donorbox (I donate $50/mo there for example which is not counted in your number) and significant money from larger sponsors which pays multiple dev salaries on Ladybird, including the main developer I would imagine since he works on it full time.
Meanwhile Mozilla makes it literally impossible for me to donate to Firefox development as they only accept donations to their foundation which they don’t use to fund Firefox, and have Firefox under their for profit corporation which I can’t donate to.
maccard · 9h ago
Sorry, I did mean patreon.
> I donate $50/mo there for example which is not counted in your number
Great, we just need 149 more people to commit to that for a year for it to be viable.
> You’re ignoring their main source of donations from users which is Donorbox
Which I don't have numbers for.
> and significant money from larger sponsors which pays multiple dev salaries on Ladybird
I'm not ignoring them. I'm specifically responding to the comment of "A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly". Based on their sponsors page, there's (at least) $400k of sponsors there. That's what paying for 7 full time developers.
> Meanwhile Mozilla makes it literally impossible for me to donate to Firefox development as they only accept donations to their foundation which they don’t use to fund Firefox, and have Firefox under their for profit corporation which I can’t donate to.
I never said otherwise. You're the person who who decided to bring Mozilla into a thread of privately funding donations to work specifically on Firefox and _not_ mozilla.
einsteinx2 · 9h ago
> Great, we just need 149 more people to commit to that for a year for it to be viable.
Except that it is viable because they’re literally working on it full time right now with multiple devs.
> Based on their sponsors page, there's (at least) $400k of sponsors there. That's what paying for 7 full time developers.
Exactly, and they’re making great progress with just that. Imagine what Mozilla should be able to do with the money they have, or with the money they could have if they allowed donations to fund Firefox development.
> You're the person who who decided to bring Mozilla into a thread of privately funding donations to work specifically on Firefox and _not_ mozilla.
Firefox is part of Mozilla, and this is a post/comment thread about Mozilla and Firefox. I’m not sure why it’s strange I mentioned them. It’s in context with the discussion.
maccard · 9h ago
> Except that it is viable because they’re literally working on it full time right now with multiple devs.
Paid for by the corporate sponsors.
> Firefox is part of Mozilla, and this is a post/comment thread about Mozilla and Firefox. I’m not sure why it’s strange I mentioned them. It’s in context with the discussion.
I replied to a comment saying: "A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly, but not to a browser which includes proprietary components, first-party ads and first part-spyware" with "I’ve been writing c++ and working in web adjacent space for 15 years. I’ve regularly thought about setting up a kickstarter for 6 months of my salary that if I reached it, I would start a patreon and work full time on Firefox, in public." and your response is "but I can't donate to mozilla to fund Firefox". I'm not talking about that, I replied to someone who wasn't talking about it. Mozilla has nothing to do with what either of us said, until you brought it up again.
const_cast · 7h ago
IME it's always a moving goalpost. Of course people will say they'll donate if you just do this one thing, but it's not true. They'll find some reason not to donate because there's always reasons and that's that. So you can't rely on donations.
Doesn't matter the project. Mozilla, KDE, anything Canonical does, Gnome, Debian... someone will say "this isn't ideologically pure enough" and then not donate. But they're bullshitting you - they never would've donated.
AndrewDucker · 18h ago
I'd pay for a browser. I pay for a search engine, and for an email client (Thunderbird).
dbdoskey · 18h ago
There is nothing to defend there. They could have easily:
* Made the donations go directly to funding the browser development. Right now I don't know if it even possible to donate purely just to browser development
* They could have easily opened a services/consultancy arm, similar to igalia. A great and easy way to fund browser development. (How igalia has funded servo development in the past)
* Create a for-pay enterprise support. In the past a lot of government organizations wouldn't use Chrome due to how the Chrome updates worked. They could have made a killing in government contracts just around that
And these are just a few simple income directions that are pretty common in other OSS projects. Instead they did braindead ideas like being a VPN reseller, giving away Pocket, and other things no one wanted or asked for.
cge · 18h ago
> * Made the donations go directly to funding the browser development. Right now I don't know if it even possible to donate purely just to browser development
The problem goes beyond them making it impossible to donate purely to browser development: they have arranged their structure such that you cannot donate to browser development at all. The Mozilla Corporation develops Firefox; it is a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, and donations to the foundation can't be used for the for-profit browser development subsidiary at all.
They've built their entire legal structure around reliance on Google's payments.
einsteinx2 · 10h ago
Yeah it’s super frustrating. I donate $50/mo to Ladybird development and would do the same for Firefox tomorrow if they gave me any way to actually do it. I have no interest in funding their foundation initiatives.
MzHN · 18h ago
Thunderbird is fully funded by donations[1]
Of course Thunderbird's budget is in a different magnitude than Firefox but I'd guess the amount of users is also in a different magnitude.
As far as I know there has never been an attempt to fund Firefox by donations. You can _only_ donate to Mozilla, which does not go to Firefox development.
People keep saying it wouldn't work but it has also never been attempted so we do not know for sure.
People paid $7B through Google for a browser. The money did not come from the private bank account of Google executives, it was payment for people going to Google with their search.
"then everyone criticises that they shill their other services and should instead focus on the browser"
I agree it's way too late now, but had they put $7B into the foundation to pay for browser development, they could develop the browser for the next hundred years with no other income.
IAmBroom · 16h ago
> People paid $7B through Google for a browser.
Advertisers paid $7B, for access to captive eyeballs. Users paid $0, directly.
joelthelion · 19h ago
Very hard decision, but I wonder if they could reduce costs by going to lower cost countries. Aren't they still mostly based in the silicon Valley?
kgwxd · 18h ago
i'm in for $50 a year if they just keep up with web standards, security patches, ensure ublock origin can continue to run as-is, and leave the UI alone forever.
drcongo · 18h ago
I pay for a browser. I pay for Orion even though it's my tertiary browser.
nialv7 · 18h ago
Ladybird is building a browser with a couple million dollars, why can't Mozilla do the same? The total amount of donation Ladybird got so far probably isn't enough to pay half of a year's salary of Mozilla's management, this is absurd.
We don't need strategy, we don't need vision, or any of that kind of bullshit. We just need a team of good developers sitting down and write a browser.
const_cast · 7h ago
> Ladybird is building a browser with a couple million dollars, why can't Mozilla do the same?
1. Ladybird isn't currently competing with Mozilla or anyone, so this is hypothetical.
2. It's a different problem space, because Mozilla is maintaining a decades old browser.
3. Mozilla is developing a very good browser considering how much money they have. They're competitive with Chrome on features and performance, while Google is dedicating much more money towards Chrome.
IAmBroom · 16h ago
"The symphony doesn't need a conductor; they just need to play good music." Leonard Bernstein was a fraud who added no value...
"The sailors on board a ship don't need a captain; they just need to sail." Admiral Nelson could have been replaced by democratic voting and focus groups.
Reality: Anarchy only works in very small settings.
nialv7 · 12h ago
"a group of developers" =/= no leadership. Do you think the current Mozilla CEO helps with Firefox development in any way?
bachmeier · 18h ago
> nobody will pay for a browser
Not as long as it's illegal to do so. You'd literally have to hack their bank account to pay for their browser.
bradley13 · 19h ago
Mozilla-the-company is, in the end, mainly about Firefox. These other projects sound more like hobby-projects, at best something to do in someone's spare time.
Governance is the job of the foundation. Thunderbird has been spun off. So why does Mozilla need 750 employees? Correct me if I'm being naive, but that seems like 10 or even 20 times the number of employees they ought to have.
theandrewbailey · 18h ago
> "Mozilla isn’t your typical tech brand; it’s a trailblazing, activist organization in both its mission and its approach"
If you take a look at everything Mozilla does, it feels like Firefox itself is a side project that they do. In their most recent rebrand, Firefox was mentioned exactly once.[0] It's like they want to do anything else other than make a browser. But the problem is that I only expected them to do one thing: make Firefox. I can't be the only one.
> Mozilla-the-company is, in the end, mainly about Firefox
I'd be shocked if the executives spent more than 30 minutes a month thinking about Firefox instead of shilling VPN subs.
> So why does Mozilla need 750 employees?
Because it's not a browser company, it's a "non-profit" that happens to also own the codebase of a browser.
bradley13 · 18h ago
Exactly not. The non-profit is the foundation. Mozilla-the-company is owned by the foundation, and has the job of making products. Specifically Firefox.
All of the activism, all of the politics belong in the foundation, not in the company. Which is the reason for my question: WTF is the company doing with 750 employees? They need to run a website, they need to coordinate with Google, they need to maintain their code (and coordinate pull-requests). That sounds like 30-40 people to me, not 750.
irvinfly · 12h ago
Google could have much more than 750 on their whole chrome team. That’s why all other browser company is doing things on top of webkit/blink/chromium. Browser, layout engine, js engine, the standard, is just that complicated.
chneu · 12h ago
Like the Wikipedia foundation.
Wikipedia itself is easily funded for perpetuity.
The foundation needs millions every year to continue their philanthropy.
jalapeno_a · 15h ago
Every non-profit wants to be culture activists so they don’t have to actually deliver anything but press releases and blog posts.
oblio · 15h ago
A browser is big, let's not underestimate that. Chrome probably has hundreds of developers. But Chrome has to integrate with a million things.
A top notch browser looks like it would need just a few low hundreds of developers.
mort96 · 19h ago
Do you think Google has fewer than 750 people dedicated to their browser? Not just developers but supporting positions like managers, HR, product managers, designers, etc etc. I mean Google has almost 200 000 employees, if even 0.5% of Google's employees are involved with Chrome in some way they have more manpower dedicated to Chrome than the foundation's 750 employees.
Or does the Foundation not employ Firefox developers? The relationship between the Corporation and the Foundation isn't entirely clear to me.
ta1243 · 19h ago
For 750 people I would expect something like 600 developers (qa etc) and 150 support staff, maybe as low as 500 developers, 100 for tech support, and 150 support (lawyers, accountants etc)
I don't know how many people who have say "commented on a pull request in the last 12 months" that mozilla employs. Maybe it is hundereds.
rightbyte · 9h ago
According to the Github mirror 63 users made at least one commit to main in the last 30 days. Dunno if they squash patches though.
mort96 · 19h ago
I agree, I would hope that most of those 750 people are developers or development-adjacent people. And I'm guessing it's not. But if most of those 750 people are non-developers, the problem isn't that there are 750 people, but that the ratio is off.
trhway · 19h ago
>mainly about Firefox.
just couple hours ago loaded new Rasp Pi 5, and between Chromium and FF I of course chose FF (first time i built it, ie. Mozilla, back then in 99, and i really don't like Chrome and the ilk). The FF didn't took a bunch of keyboard keys while for every other application i used there the keyboard works just fine. Didn't have time or intention to troubleshoot, just switched to Chromium. Pity. Just another illustrative FF loss vs. Chrome in that downhill ride of FF losses under the stewardship of Mozilla, whether it is the company or foundation, doesn't seem to matter.
wobfan · 19h ago
What does this have to do with anything here?
File a bug report, or try to find out the problem yourself. Or ask in a Forum.
Or, as you did, switch browsers, if all of that is not worth the time for you.
mrks_hy · 20h ago
From TFA, the services:
* Pocket
* Fakespot
* Deep fake detector
* Orbit
I feel that this is a good thing. Have not used any of them, have been annoyed by Pocket integrations, just want a browser.
xandrius · 8h ago
They pushed Pocket in a weird way but otherwise it was a useful tool for article readers. I found it much better not to have to read on my phone/laptop but using an e-reader through stuff I saved on Pocket.
It felt very much going back to read a newspaper of interesting articles. I wonder what replacement will be available on Kobos.
notachatbot123 · 20h ago
A thing like Fakespot existed? And it was by Mozilla? I would have LOVED to use it.
Maybe if Firefox' new tabs would suggest useful ethic things like this instead of clickbait and spam, Mozilla would be more successful in its goals.
burnt-resistor · 19h ago
No, they acquired it. It was a service that worked with Amazon and other platforms to supposedly uncover inflated and/or spam reviews. This was perhaps the strategy all along. Their executives are ex-MBB consultants and corporate lawyers.
jxjdnendj · 20h ago
This is a win. Mozilla should focus on their core product, Firefox. Even though I'm a fan of Thunderbird, still Firefox is much more important
All the other services always seemed like somebody wanted to add a bullet point to their CV
elric · 19h ago
Bold of you to assume that that's what they'll use the freed resources on. From everything I've seen over the last couple of years, it seems more likely they'll spend more time on AI garbage no one wants, and will increase the CEO's bonus.
shakna · 19h ago
> This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way. We’ll continue to build a browser that works harder for you: more personal, more powerful and still proudly independent.
Vertical tabs? That's a trivial feature that's been implemented by plugins for decades. I've been using vertical tabs for as long as I've been using firefox, probably since it was still called Phoenix or Firebird.
Smart search: what even is that? Is that the default garbage in the address bar that I have to disable on every fresh install? I don't want my browser to search. I've got search engines for that. I might want a better in-page search, with regex support. Maybe even with fuzzy search support. But that's probably not considered "smart".
AI-powered features: such as what? Why would this be a compelling feature? A better editor on saved form data would be actually useful. Editable, per-website autocomplete in forms would be useful. But I guess that's not as flashy.
If these are their best ideas for "the next era of the internet", they might as well throw in the towel.
I'm trying my best not to be too negative, but yikes they make it hard.
shakna · 17h ago
Smart Search is adding a few dropdowns to let you search your history easier. [0] It's... Not exactly a killer feature.
What's the bet that AI is where they're spending all their effort?
Yeah, I hate it. I've mostly tweaked mine to be as close to an address bar as possible, but I still haven't found a way to fully revert it to an address bar. I don't mind it searching in my history or bookmarks. But automatically sending my keystrokes to a search engine by default is something that really pisses me off. I have an address bar and a search bar. One is for entering addresses, the other is for entering searches. I don't quite get why they insist on turning them into one big ball of mud.
JohnFen · 12h ago
Yeah, the "awesome bar" has long been one of my pet peeves about Firefox. It used to be possible to correct it by disabling stuff, but as time has gone on that has become less effective.
LtdJorge · 18h ago
Yeah, we’ll see about that
jfernandezr · 20h ago
I would love that Firefox focuses on the browser. I think I wouldn't oppose some monetizing strategy like DDG based on affiliate sales, or even a realistic affordable subscription model (10€/year?). They should put the efforts on privacy and good website usage, maybe include an ad blocker.
But we'll have to wait until Google finally stops paying them for the default search engine. Maybe diverting resources on the Firefox Focus brand will be a transition phase.
prox · 19h ago
I wouldn’t mind that, for 10 bucks. I do want a subscriber version that doesn’t have a google search or any telemetry beyond a crash log.
LtdJorge · 18h ago
I’d be ok with anonymous telemetry which allows them to uncover performance problems and fix bugs.
red_admiral · 20h ago
From 136 on it seems you need to about:config to turn off the integrated AI.
Just connects to gemini by default so some kind of funding deal?
This should be OPT IN, not out.
Also, long live udm14.
askl · 19h ago
What integrated AI? I'm on 141 alpha and haven't noticed anything. And just in case, how to turn it off in about:config?
duser1 · 19h ago
There are 'browser.ml...' settings in the config that are on by default.
graemep · 19h ago
The provider seems to be blank by default until you try to use the chatbot in the sidebar and choose which one to use.
baobun · 19h ago
Different experiences may come from their "remote settings", where they toggle rollout/enabling of features depending on results from API calls to Mozilla servers.
Defaults may differ by inferred country, for example.
I don't believe this remote-toggling can be disabled via config, even if you'd expect it covered by "experiments".
Klaster_1 · 19h ago
> This brings us to the AI tools. Following the pattern, the Orbit website was updated with a banner that announced the service would shut down by June 26 ... Orbit's private, self-contained setup can be replaced with the new sidebar built directly into Firefox, letting you connect to third-party chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Orbit served me well for summarizing pages and videos. I tried to ask the ChatGPT in the sidebar to do the same, but it seems to lack the browsing context. Any idea how to achieve similar one click experience Orbit used to provide?
braiamp · 18h ago
I am very disappointed by most comments here. Firefox is not a simple product. Mozilla funded Rust because it could help their other products (specifically Firefox). Mozilla has, depending how you count, 4 engines to support for all their target platforms.
They have a bunch of frameworks to deal with networking, layouts and JS. They maintain the second most used repository of Root CA. And all those projects all work towards the betterment of the browser, Firefox. If people think that MS with all their resources decided to use Chrome because it was cheaper, you will be missing the full picture: browsers are very complex beast that have to deal with swats of devices, platforms, interactive code, and all of that while being the biggest surface of attack for all your users. That's not easy, nor cheap.
oblio · 15h ago
I'm way past forgetting them. It's been 20 years. Gecko is still not truly embeddable. Stuff like Taurus tries to embed WebkitGTK, instead.
Servo should have been pushed more, if it's truly meant to be the replacement for Gecko.
jhosft · 18h ago
Mozilla stated that they sell user data, so I assume that many stopped using their products:
"We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example."
This is really bad. "Basic functionality" is typing something into a form, which Mozilla has no business spying on.
I'd pay for a browser that just follows the standards, does not change layout and menus in every release and does not spy on me. Also, I'd not finance an overpaid CEO.
In this instance though Mozilla is shutting down annoying services like Pocket, so maybe they'll recover.
KingOfCoders · 18h ago
That was the point where I left Mozilla for Zen after 30 years and I hope Zen switches to a Ladybird engine should that become possible - or take over together with other browsers engine development.
akimbostrawman · 18h ago
they have sold user data for decades or what do you think the google default search engine deal was....
OutOfHere · 10h ago
Mozilla seems to slowly be fading. Ladybird browser will hopefully come right in time.
Theodores · 19h ago
I wish Firefox existed in a world of 'perfect competition' where multiple independent browsers existed, with none of them able to out-compete the others, and with all of them implementing the HTML and CSS specs as quickly as possible, in order to escape 'perfect competition'.
But we went beyond 'perfect competition' and now have Chrome or Safari, with Firefox as this poor kid that we have to cater for too. The problem with Firefox is that they have just enough users to be a blocker on features such as scoped CSS, which we really should be implementing right now, as it is the way to go. However, Firefox are not planning to do scoped CSS urgently.
Without them then we could go back to the IE6 days of no innovation, and I think we have that with Safari, which is also slow to implement some cool things that have been in Chrome for a while.
I used to use Firefox but nowadays it is the IE6 of the browser world, it still has to be accommodated, even though the world has moved on.
incomingpain · 18h ago
Mozilla and Elon Musk are learning the hard lesson. Elon will weather this storm; he's well beyond cancelling.
Mozilla's marketshare has rather dwindled and i dont see them recovering.
I think they should cancel all those BS Firefox-the-browser unrelated project, and then use the resources to fork chromium while still developing Firefox as their main project. I would use Mozilla-maintained chromium fork (with manifest v2 and ublock origin) rather then using Google's Chrome. I tried FF but it's just too slow. I really want just chromium from trustworthy organisation.
arnoooooo · 17h ago
Firefox has caught up or surpassed Chrome in most performance benchmarks.
* their revenue comes mostly from Google, they need to diversify
* but nobody will pay for a browser, so they need to offer other services
* then everyone criticises that they shill their other services and should instead focus on the browser
Realistically, what should they do to stop relying on money from their competitor and be continue their mission?
- The Mozilla Foundation should be publicly funded, with Firefox being considered a reference implementation for all web standards; Google should be considered a "gatekeeper", and fined for introducing de facto "standards" into mainline Chrome without going thru the W3C. Perhaps the W3C should be regulated as well.
- Efforts like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive should be considered public libraries, and publicly funded.
- Privately-owned platforms with vast libraries of knowledge - like Youtube - should be required to allow easy and on-demand export to the Internet Archive (subject to the copyright owner's chosen license).
The question is, who is the "public" in "publicly funded". The EU and the US could cover the majority, but considering that the entire world's population is reliant on those products/services, perhaps that's a matter worth raising with the UN.
Am I exaggerating here? Heck no, livelihoods of billions of people depend on these things. It takes one of the "top 5" corps to pull the rug and cause worldwide chaos.
Who is the worldwide authority that has the power to declare Firefox a web standard?
Google being "fined for introducing de facto "standards" into mainline Chrome without going thru the W3C" is... wow, a leap of legal imagination. That is not how anything works.
None of this is realistic. We need attainable goals, using concrete steps. Getting Google declared a monopoly: one step. Keeping that ruling intact through the following years: another step (Hello, Microsoft in the 1990's). Establish web standards, beyond the current skeletal concepts: a BIG step.
It isn't about politics, or even corporations simply having control over our daily lives. At some point, it has to be recognised as a necessity, not just for the sake of our culture and legacy, but for our survival as a species. There's no other piece of digital infrastructure as important as the web, and there's hardly anything we do nowadays that doesn't depend on something digital.
Well you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.[0]
Surely it makes sense to have overarching goals, that you can then divide up into little concrete stepping stones.
Whether or not your big goal is possible or worthwhile is something you can keep examining along the way.
Incremental change is the only kind that you can make happen, but without big-picture direction you'll just skitter around local maxima.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z-xI1384Ry4
A lot of libertarian types’ arguments against publicly-funded infrastructure is mostly against that public funding being centralized.
I don’t think Mozilla becoming publicly funded, with money taken in from the EU, US, Russia, India, and China, would end up being good for users.
However, I do think that each of these entities having their own branch of Firefox/Iceweasel/whatever, with their own teams focusing on their users’ needs, contributing upstream, with a small team to handle the “mainline” version, would be pretty ideal.
The same should probably also be happening for at least one Chrome/Webkit browser, too (though, the mega-corps do seem to have its support system much more reinforced).
Arguably, they get more revenue than what they need to fund browser development. So they could be banking a fair amount. That would allow them to build an endowment that might keep them funded in perpetuity.
I think there’s an option where they don’t diversify and don’t act like a tech startup and do fine. Maybe Wikipedia is a model for them.
Tl;dr -- They do make more money than they spend on software development. They save a bunch of it and have a decently sized account (not near endowment levels though: they'd need to 3x+ it). They also spend a lot on other random shit, and compensate their executives well for how poorly they're doing.
People who have a problem with Mozilla the org tend to have a problem with Wikipedia the organisation too in my experience.
The thing is that I fully believe that Mozilla has a lot of experts in web-related software development, and have no reason to believe they have any particular competence in AI tech. So all the AI stuff seemed immediately off to me, like they were just jumping on the latest bandwagon.
I also don't believe their AI projects are particularly valuable.
* Summarizing pages -- okay, this might be rarely useful. But I don't personally have much need for it, and I believe that the competition is probably better. I understand the privacy angle, but I don't think it works for my case. If I was summarizing all the things, then yeah, probably I'd be concerned about the privacy implications of feeding a good chunk of my web traffic to ChatGPT. But I don't. My needs to summarize are rare and mostly things like lengthy public news articles. And in such cases I don't want to sacrifice quality, so if ChatGPT does a better job there, that's the tool I'll go with.
* Fakespot and Deep Fake Detector to me are fundamentally fishy in that I don't believe they can possibly work properly. I have very little trust in such services and have a feeling they may be doing more harm than good.
Why will no one pay for a browser
Why are web browsers available for free
I'm submitting this comment using software I downloaded for free, like a web browser
But it is not a web browser like Mozilla's
The software I'm using is not supported by advertising
No developers were paid to write it
What makes Mozilla's software different
Is it really better than software that is not supported by advertising
Better for www users, better for software developers, better for advertisers
What if it is better for one group but worse for another
I'm in the www user group
I'm not so sure this is true. There are a few successful for-pay browsers. What's crazy, though, is that even though I'd be happy to give Mozilla money for Firefox, they don't provide a way to do that.
I also have a monthly donation to Internet Archive, which I highly recommend everyone do. It's a very important service; if you use it occasionally I'd recommend at least a one-time donation, and if you use it regularly, a recurring one is even better!
Ladybird should be interesting once it's ready; I'm happy to see a fully-new browser entering the space. That gene pool has gotten far too shallow.
Kind of sounds like Arc. But nowadays we rarely get new features and when they do come out, they’re often unpolished, so I wonder if the browser has much of a future. They’d have to step up their investment in FF to be competitive for sure.
All I can say is that spite plays a big part in why I’m using FF, not good if you want to gain users and make money.
A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly, but not to a browser which includes proprietary components, first-party ads and first part-spyware.
Also, such a huge proportion of their income goes to fund their C-suite, it’s ridiculous.
The developer of the ladybird browser has a pattern page where he makes £760/month [0]. That wouldn’t even pay rent for a 1 bed flat where I live.
If 200 people donated £10/mo, it still wouldn’t be minimum wage for me in the UK. So realistically, how much would you donate and how often?
Meanwhile Mozilla makes it literally impossible for me to donate to Firefox development as they only accept donations to their foundation which they don’t use to fund Firefox, and have Firefox under their for profit corporation which I can’t donate to.
> I donate $50/mo there for example which is not counted in your number
Great, we just need 149 more people to commit to that for a year for it to be viable.
> You’re ignoring their main source of donations from users which is Donorbox
Which I don't have numbers for.
> and significant money from larger sponsors which pays multiple dev salaries on Ladybird
I'm not ignoring them. I'm specifically responding to the comment of "A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly". Based on their sponsors page, there's (at least) $400k of sponsors there. That's what paying for 7 full time developers.
> Meanwhile Mozilla makes it literally impossible for me to donate to Firefox development as they only accept donations to their foundation which they don’t use to fund Firefox, and have Firefox under their for profit corporation which I can’t donate to.
I never said otherwise. You're the person who who decided to bring Mozilla into a thread of privately funding donations to work specifically on Firefox and _not_ mozilla.
Except that it is viable because they’re literally working on it full time right now with multiple devs.
> Based on their sponsors page, there's (at least) $400k of sponsors there. That's what paying for 7 full time developers.
Exactly, and they’re making great progress with just that. Imagine what Mozilla should be able to do with the money they have, or with the money they could have if they allowed donations to fund Firefox development.
> You're the person who who decided to bring Mozilla into a thread of privately funding donations to work specifically on Firefox and _not_ mozilla.
Firefox is part of Mozilla, and this is a post/comment thread about Mozilla and Firefox. I’m not sure why it’s strange I mentioned them. It’s in context with the discussion.
Paid for by the corporate sponsors.
> Firefox is part of Mozilla, and this is a post/comment thread about Mozilla and Firefox. I’m not sure why it’s strange I mentioned them. It’s in context with the discussion.
I replied to a comment saying: "A lot of us would be willing to donate monthly, but not to a browser which includes proprietary components, first-party ads and first part-spyware" with "I’ve been writing c++ and working in web adjacent space for 15 years. I’ve regularly thought about setting up a kickstarter for 6 months of my salary that if I reached it, I would start a patreon and work full time on Firefox, in public." and your response is "but I can't donate to mozilla to fund Firefox". I'm not talking about that, I replied to someone who wasn't talking about it. Mozilla has nothing to do with what either of us said, until you brought it up again.
Doesn't matter the project. Mozilla, KDE, anything Canonical does, Gnome, Debian... someone will say "this isn't ideologically pure enough" and then not donate. But they're bullshitting you - they never would've donated.
And these are just a few simple income directions that are pretty common in other OSS projects. Instead they did braindead ideas like being a VPN reseller, giving away Pocket, and other things no one wanted or asked for.
The problem goes beyond them making it impossible to donate purely to browser development: they have arranged their structure such that you cannot donate to browser development at all. The Mozilla Corporation develops Firefox; it is a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, and donations to the foundation can't be used for the for-profit browser development subsidiary at all.
They've built their entire legal structure around reliance on Google's payments.
Of course Thunderbird's budget is in a different magnitude than Firefox but I'd guess the amount of users is also in a different magnitude.
As far as I know there has never been an attempt to fund Firefox by donations. You can _only_ donate to Mozilla, which does not go to Firefox development.
People keep saying it wouldn't work but it has also never been attempted so we do not know for sure.
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
People paid $7B through Google for a browser. The money did not come from the private bank account of Google executives, it was payment for people going to Google with their search.
"then everyone criticises that they shill their other services and should instead focus on the browser"
I agree it's way too late now, but had they put $7B into the foundation to pay for browser development, they could develop the browser for the next hundred years with no other income.
Advertisers paid $7B, for access to captive eyeballs. Users paid $0, directly.
We don't need strategy, we don't need vision, or any of that kind of bullshit. We just need a team of good developers sitting down and write a browser.
1. Ladybird isn't currently competing with Mozilla or anyone, so this is hypothetical.
2. It's a different problem space, because Mozilla is maintaining a decades old browser.
3. Mozilla is developing a very good browser considering how much money they have. They're competitive with Chrome on features and performance, while Google is dedicating much more money towards Chrome.
"The sailors on board a ship don't need a captain; they just need to sail." Admiral Nelson could have been replaced by democratic voting and focus groups.
Reality: Anarchy only works in very small settings.
Not as long as it's illegal to do so. You'd literally have to hack their bank account to pay for their browser.
Governance is the job of the foundation. Thunderbird has been spun off. So why does Mozilla need 750 employees? Correct me if I'm being naive, but that seems like 10 or even 20 times the number of employees they ought to have.
If you take a look at everything Mozilla does, it feels like Firefox itself is a side project that they do. In their most recent rebrand, Firefox was mentioned exactly once.[0] It's like they want to do anything else other than make a browser. But the problem is that I only expected them to do one thing: make Firefox. I can't be the only one.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o...
I'd be shocked if the executives spent more than 30 minutes a month thinking about Firefox instead of shilling VPN subs.
> So why does Mozilla need 750 employees?
Because it's not a browser company, it's a "non-profit" that happens to also own the codebase of a browser.
All of the activism, all of the politics belong in the foundation, not in the company. Which is the reason for my question: WTF is the company doing with 750 employees? They need to run a website, they need to coordinate with Google, they need to maintain their code (and coordinate pull-requests). That sounds like 30-40 people to me, not 750.
Wikipedia itself is easily funded for perpetuity.
The foundation needs millions every year to continue their philanthropy.
A top notch browser looks like it would need just a few low hundreds of developers.
Or does the Foundation not employ Firefox developers? The relationship between the Corporation and the Foundation isn't entirely clear to me.
I don't know how many people who have say "commented on a pull request in the last 12 months" that mozilla employs. Maybe it is hundereds.
just couple hours ago loaded new Rasp Pi 5, and between Chromium and FF I of course chose FF (first time i built it, ie. Mozilla, back then in 99, and i really don't like Chrome and the ilk). The FF didn't took a bunch of keyboard keys while for every other application i used there the keyboard works just fine. Didn't have time or intention to troubleshoot, just switched to Chromium. Pity. Just another illustrative FF loss vs. Chrome in that downhill ride of FF losses under the stewardship of Mozilla, whether it is the company or foundation, doesn't seem to matter.
* Pocket
* Fakespot
* Deep fake detector
* Orbit
I feel that this is a good thing. Have not used any of them, have been annoyed by Pocket integrations, just want a browser.
It felt very much going back to read a newspaper of interesting articles. I wonder what replacement will be available on Kobos.
Maybe if Firefox' new tabs would suggest useful ethic things like this instead of clickbait and spam, Mozilla would be more successful in its goals.
All the other services always seemed like somebody wanted to add a bullet point to their CV
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/building-whats-next/
Vertical tabs? That's a trivial feature that's been implemented by plugins for decades. I've been using vertical tabs for as long as I've been using firefox, probably since it was still called Phoenix or Firebird.
Smart search: what even is that? Is that the default garbage in the address bar that I have to disable on every fresh install? I don't want my browser to search. I've got search engines for that. I might want a better in-page search, with regex support. Maybe even with fuzzy search support. But that's probably not considered "smart".
AI-powered features: such as what? Why would this be a compelling feature? A better editor on saved form data would be actually useful. Editable, per-website autocomplete in forms would be useful. But I guess that's not as flashy.
If these are their best ideas for "the next era of the internet", they might as well throw in the towel.
I'm trying my best not to be too negative, but yikes they make it hard.
What's the bet that AI is where they're spending all their effort?
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/address-bar/
But we'll have to wait until Google finally stops paying them for the default search engine. Maybe diverting resources on the Firefox Focus brand will be a transition phase.
This should be OPT IN, not out.
Also, long live udm14.
Defaults may differ by inferred country, for example.
I don't believe this remote-toggling can be disabled via config, even if you'd expect it covered by "experiments".
Orbit served me well for summarizing pages and videos. I tried to ask the ChatGPT in the sidebar to do the same, but it seems to lack the browsing context. Any idea how to achieve similar one click experience Orbit used to provide?
They have a bunch of frameworks to deal with networking, layouts and JS. They maintain the second most used repository of Root CA. And all those projects all work towards the betterment of the browser, Firefox. If people think that MS with all their resources decided to use Chrome because it was cheaper, you will be missing the full picture: browsers are very complex beast that have to deal with swats of devices, platforms, interactive code, and all of that while being the biggest surface of attack for all your users. That's not easy, nor cheap.
Servo should have been pushed more, if it's truly meant to be the replacement for Gecko.
https://adguard.com/en/blog/mozilla-deletes-promise-to-never...
The trust is gone.
This is really bad. "Basic functionality" is typing something into a form, which Mozilla has no business spying on.
I'd pay for a browser that just follows the standards, does not change layout and menus in every release and does not spy on me. Also, I'd not finance an overpaid CEO.
In this instance though Mozilla is shutting down annoying services like Pocket, so maybe they'll recover.
But we went beyond 'perfect competition' and now have Chrome or Safari, with Firefox as this poor kid that we have to cater for too. The problem with Firefox is that they have just enough users to be a blocker on features such as scoped CSS, which we really should be implementing right now, as it is the way to go. However, Firefox are not planning to do scoped CSS urgently.
Without them then we could go back to the IE6 days of no innovation, and I think we have that with Safari, which is also slow to implement some cool things that have been in Chrome for a while.
I used to use Firefox but nowadays it is the IE6 of the browser world, it still has to be accommodated, even though the world has moved on.
Mozilla's marketshare has rather dwindled and i dont see them recovering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeikdFrx78k
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/campaigns/platforms-pro...
Mozilla is doubling down on their mistake.
Example : https://kahana.co/blog/fastest-web-browsers-2025