Hey, Laura. Fuck you. Fuck your profits and your corporate greed. Enshit yourself till you close down.
Firefox closing down would be pretty big loss since we’d lose all our serious non-Chrome/Chromium-based alternatives
hey maybe firefox just wants to show that ladybird is worth the wait
What if we could have a world that wasn’t powered by ads? I’d like to get past this “only one way to run the internet” train of thought.
I’m just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It’s exhausting.
It’s either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I’d suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there’s enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
Says who?
Plenty of sites out there just run by people who want to run them, no fee, no ads.
It’s people who want to capitalize on having a website that have this problem.
And let’s be clear, it’s their problem. Not mine. If they can’t turn a profit with/without ads, that’s not my concern, that’s theirs. But they setup these web sites/services with the intention of making money through ads and surveillance, so let’s not go around acting like these orgs just won’t make it without us (there are exceptions, say archive.org, and guess what, people donate to them because they believe in the cause).
The problem is a bunch of people figured out the web was a brilliant way to data mine for profit. I actually had this discussion with a friend circa 1993. If we could see it then, imagine how many other people already had plans.
Universal Basic Income, ala star trek, is an option, then just let everybody make cool shit.
Star Trek has no Universal Basic Income. It has replicators for all your basic needs.
Replicators, which are universal and basic.
But is not income
It, uh…makes…food…uh…come in…?
Money has a definition. It is exchanged for goods and services. In the Star Trek universe, they are not trading replicators in exchange for goods and services, the goods are made by the replicator and services are provided freely. Therefore replicators are not money or income or anything.
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Hahahaha, you’re funny.
Because people suddenly become altruistic, and won’t try to fuck over the next person?
UBI won’t fix human nature.
oh no the human nature argument
If treated like animals, that’s what happens. Observe the difference between U.S. criminal justice, and the Netherlands. Without a chip in your shoulder, it’s pretty simple.
I would happily pay to download Firefox if they removed telemetry, ads, analytics. Security updates could be free, feature updates could have a small fee. Something similar.
There is a way to fund Firefox without user data and ads. Will it be as profitable, who knows, because quite simply, the vast majority do not want to make it a reality and loose what profit, control, or power they currently hold onto.
I’ve always said this about software. Let me license a specific version, with free minor updates until the next major release.
If the new version has something I need/want, I may be willing to buy it again.
I use lots of old software, on my PC and my phone. It works, why do I need the new version? And some, the new version sucks so bad I refuse to upgrade (FolderSync on Android, for example).
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
Even of they reduced everything down to just Firefox, Thunderbird, and all in infra to run those products (Mozilla accounts, addons stores, hosting, dev/build services…), as well as continuing to pay for dev time on open source they use/contribute to, and the time their employees put into w3c and other foundation/standards/steering initiatives, I don’t think you’d want to see the cost of a monthly subscription.
This stuff costs way more than people think it does, and behind the scenes Mozilla does a lot of work (with google, Microsoft, apple) on web standards, and trust me, you want them still involved seeing as each other browser group involved is well… You know… Much worse for privacy generally.
YouTube premium and kagi aren’t even remotely in the same league for comparison when it comes to the cost and value a “Firefox” or “Mozilla” subscription would be.
Right, I think people forget that Opera used to be funded by a subscription. But they had to move away from it because it just didn’t work. I think the golden age of Opera was shortly after they dropped that. And I dearly miss Opera as they were before they switched over to Chromium.
I think the history of early to mid Opera is the perfect example of actually wise and interesting and innovative software choices. They were in very early on things like browser extensions, and they had incredible innovations like Opera Unite, Opera Turbo, and all kinds of incredible customization. But I suppose in some ways they’re also a chilling tale of what could happen, because I’m pretty sure they sold to a Chinese company, switched to developing on Chromium, and seem to have abandoned the ethos of innovating. I know that some of the original developers from Opera went on to create Vivaldi but that too is based on Chromium.
Was never much of an opera user, but I have enjoyed vivaldi quite a bit. I don’t see myself using vivaldi due to the chromium aspect. I used to keep it around for the random chrome-only sites but that’s way too uncommom nowadays.
Lately safari/gnome web (i.e. WebKit engine) have gotten good enough to be my pwa installer browser depending on my OS, though i really hope firefox re-implements PWA support sooner than later.
Actually, I do. I have a YouTube Premium subscription and subscriptions for two news sites. And on top of that a ton of Patreon subscriptions and offline memberships. I am the one who
knockspays.I subscribe to Nebula because f*ck Google, and I’d pay for Kagi if I could just simply pay $X for Y searches with no subscription BS.
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The enshitification of Firefox continues 😢
Cory Doctorow: “Disenshittify or die!” (YouTube)
Frankly, I’m surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt…
May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.
June 2024: Mozilla purchases Anonym, an AdTech company.
Not everyone?
Does anyone?
Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it’s kinda sad to watch a previously good org die
Fork, blah, blah, blah.
When one of these forks doesn’t depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.
So just stick with firefox?
Well, if users don’t the source of the actual work, then none of the forks survive. I don’t know what people think are going to happen.
Shitting on Mozilla seems to be a competitor sport around here sometimes, and it’s fucking self-defeating. In 5 years, there will only be the Chromium engine, and then Google will shut down the opensource side like they pretty much did with Android. And then we’re truly fucked.
I’ve been using librewolf over the last week. Honestly… It’s a drop in replacement for me
Does it support containers and sync settings between installs on multiple systems? If so I’m in without hesitation.
Yeah
Thanks. Just set it up on one of my computers. I’ll be doing the rest as time allows. There’s a lot I love about it already, familiar but with better defaults, and including search engines like SearXNG. I hope enough of us can switch and send a message to Mozilla, though that feels very unlikely to stop the enshittification.
oh they’re full on corpo now it sounds like, which is too bad. They should have gone the proton route and go full non-profit org controlled, but here we are.
It’s basically hardened Firefox, you can do all the same things here too. Alas using it with an account kind of defeats the purpose. However you can use your account once to sync everything.
The problem with those sorts of forks is they still require moz to do most of the heavy lifting.
If Firefox stopped being developed they’d all pretty much freeze in place.
I agree to a point, I think some people would pick up the development. Idk if it’d be librewolf or if someone would fork off that, but if Firefox completely shit the bed I think someone would pick up the mantle a bit. We wouldn’t have nearly the release cadence of firefox though.
Does anyone?
I don’t want to see Mozilla shutdown because Google no longer pays them, or due to the loss of another funding source.
Diversifying their income sources is a good thing.
And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
I’m afraid they aren’t wrong. The majority of people aren’t going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we’d end up with only the big players having usable sites.
People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.
Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website’s target audience not the user’s personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don’t see why they couldn’t go that way.
You posted this on Lemmy.
I don’t believe a web browser should be designed specifically for one business model, period.
There are plenty of free sites. Truly free, with no ads.
There are plenty of paid sites, supported by subscribers.
There are plenty of sites funded by educational institutions, nonprofits, or similar.
There used to be plenty of sites that were supported by non-invasive ads.
I don’t give a damn if everyone uses Facebook and Google. That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.
That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.
From what I have seen, it does… if you want to have a popular site that stays running well, and don’t charge your users for access.
That’s a problem for site operators, not for browser developers.
You might be right, but I don’t think that’s a problem they’re going to solve all on their own, meanwhile the rest of users will suffer.
So, instead, they should cater to an industry that has long been a known vector for malware, abuse, and PII theft?
that is the only current accepted alternative to paying for website access, yes
if you have better ideas though, we’d all love to hear them
Your stance appears to be roughly “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas, so let’s keep doing objectively harmful things”.
The simplest idea is not to accept the premise that an objectively harmful business model that only brings value to a shrinking minority is acceptable. Maybe commercialism of every part of the web isn’t something that humanity needs. As for paying for access, there are plenty of extant models that have never been attempted with any seriousness.
Then again, the whole Linux ecosystem is able to thrive without bending the knee to the ad industry. There’s no reason that a web browser cannot also thrive without ads except for a lack of desire to do so.
Maybe if people/browser makers didn’t bend over to this nonsense, the websites would figure it out. You know, the people who’s problem that is (because yes, if you run a website and want to make money off it, that’s your problem to fix not mine, and it’s certainly not my job to cater to it).
It’s a problem for users.
Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.
It was a different place, but worked ok.
Sounds like you’re forgetting about the dot com bubble. The internet wasn’t fine abck then because nobody really had a sustainable business model.
The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren’t the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc…
The reason I mentioned the dot com bubble is because a lot of the companies back then failed because they couldn’t figure out a sustainable business model. It was mostly hype-driven with the idea of getting users first, then figuring out monetization later.
That’s why we have ad-supported sites today. It was the main business model that was the most sustainable.
There were a lot of small sites, sure, but a lot of them were hosted on services with no real business model. Even back then, not a lot of people self-hosted.
That’s a fair thing to bring up. I think your point went over my head, because I was mostly reminiscing about how the less capital-oriented parts of the internet were relatively pleasant before companies like Facebook came along and encouraged them all (with their newly acquired capital) to jump into the big centralized areas.
Surveillance advertisement was already around.
Social Media platforms simply capitalized on it.
And users sucked it up for “convenience”.
More effective is a massive understatement. Now they can precisely measure effectiveness and adjust their strategy in real time to maximize output. They have increased effective effectiveness several fold. The cat is out of the bag, even if we try to roll this back the googles of the world know the data is there and can’t not harvest it. Our best strategy has to combine regulation and monopoly busting, break these companies into smaller ones that have less power to comb through big data.
For a good read on this, check out The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuniga.
If your product doesn’t generate enough revenue to turn a profit, you don’t have a viable business
I don’t want the internet to be exclusively business
At this point, I don’t see many other options to keep everything going for Firefox. If they somehow lose the go*gle money they use to keep themselves going, they need another revenue source and I severely doubt there are enough Firefox users willing to pay enough to keep it going as it currently does. Don’t like it, but I’m gonna at least play devil’s advocate.
It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current “donation” option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.
They could try not having an overinflated budget?
Where would you cut?
Are you kidding?
I mean I don’t love it, but I’m also not sure what the argument is supposed to be about how this ties to browser market share. Mozilla made $593 million from their most recently released financials. The CEO made $6.9 million. My calculator tells me that’s 1.16%.
So is the argument that Mozilla that if they set the CEO salary to $0, used it all on more developers, that would spin up a browser experience that’s so improved it would lead to more market share? A 1% change in Mozilla’s spending will bring them to 50% market share? 40%? 20%?
What’s the cause and effect here? Do we even actually know that that’s true, that it even has anything whatsoever to do with development choices at all? I get that the CEO is an easy target but I think assuming that is explaining market share ignores things like Google’s dominance of search and ads, and how those piles of cash drive initiatives like Android and Chromebooks, which helps propel Chrome to dominant market share. Those are the drivers of market share. I don’t even think people have even tried to begin to think through this argument in real terms, it’s just a lot of knee-jerk reaction to news stories disconnected from any specific idea of cause and effect.
The CEO is for a good reason an easy target: Show me another company where this level of incompetence is rewarded with steady salary increases?!? (I am afraid you’ll be able to. ;-))
Given your calculation is correct, you are correct that paying the CEO nothing would not make a big difference for Mozillas income. Although it would hopefully open the road for a better CEO.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all. If all is a function of the environment and the tides of the market, we can easily replace her with ChatGPT and have the same results w/o wasting money.
At the end of the day, we are exactly where we have been literally a decade ago: Finding a sustainable business model for Mozilla/Firefox. Once more: This core problem of Mozilla/Firefox has been well known for over a decade by now, and again the CEOs only answer is advertisement. Why do we pay money for the bullshit every first semester MBA student would come up with a brainstorming within the first 3 minutes.
Mozilla survives thanks to Google and their (rightful) fears of being outed as a monopoly.
The discussion is always if Mozilla could survive on donations. I do not now if they could. I still think there are a lot of actors with an interest of an independent browser, even whole governments. What I know for sure is, I won’t donate to Mozilla as long as incompetent CEOs are payed.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all.
That’s my argument? I don’t recall supporting the CEO pay. Pretty sure I said I don’t like it. And just to be clear, I am finding it hard to justify that much for a CEO. So that’s not turning my argument against me, because that was never my argument.
What it would really look like to, as you say, “turn my argument against me” would be something that speaks to Google’s search monopoly, ads monopoly, and hundredfold advantage in revenue, and why, in light of those facts, they would imply that Mozilla should have more market share. Like if I forgot to carry a two somewhere in my math, or why they are actually proof of a synergy that Mozilla is benefiting from that I’m not accounting for. Those would be examples of turning the arg against me, and I’m happy to hear it if there is one.
Not sure if it s a language issue (non native speaker), but seems we have the same goals.
So sorry, if I misunderstood your position/point!
My point is mostly, that it seems every browser is mostly US controlled directly or transitively, and it should be in the interest of every other country/nation to have a free, open source, not US controlled browser on the market… but given the sad reality in my country, I’ll probably be long dead before corruption/lobby-ism and sheer stupidity of the the government will come to this conclusion. :-(
So it looks like the CEO of mozilla is bleeding firefox to pad his salary. Thats disappointing. Are we sure firefox wasn’t simply taken over by a private-equity firm?
It’s 1.16%. I don’t love it but claiming it’s bleeding them to death is, I think, not what we’re looking at. I think they just recognize their exposure because any given year 80 to 90% of the revenue is coming from their agreement with Google, and they’re screwed if they can’t diversify their income a bit more.
Any where more substantial to address the shortfall expected without Google default money?
I don’t know a thing about their budget, so I’m not qualified to make any comments about how good or bad they are doing at managing it or make any comments.
In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech it’s built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.
Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.
Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Bingo.
As if de-anonymizing hasn’t been demonstrated, repeatedly.
No one starts a company because they care about people
Oh you mean one of the only two reasons I use this fucking thing? Ad blocking and privacy?
You’re shitting on both. That’s like… Idk, Craftsman making tools out of plastic and removing the lifetime warranty… Wtf do I even need you for then?
Eh, I care about a third: browser engine diversity. If they drop Gecko, I’m out, there’s literally nothing left to keep me here.
Funny that’s exactly what Black & Decker did the moment they got their hands on the Craftsman brand
Did you read the article?
I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.
I was wrong.
I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.
So it goes.
Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant’s grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.
How about not have a multi-million-dollar-costing CEO? Seems a bit rich (pun intended) for a supposed non-profit org.
Yeah I’m not defending that but CEO pay only rounds to like 1% of their total expenditures. Developing a browser is expensive.
only 1%? That’s about on par with a fortune 500 company, which supposedly Mozilla is not.
Ideas:
- directly ask for donations, and actually use those donations to fund browser development
- build an add-on to pay sites instead of seeing ads - Mozilla could take a cut here
- push harder on existing, optional add-ons that generate revenue, like their VPN
But the article here reads like, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas. Have ads…”
What makes you think that developing a free web browser needs to grant anyone any income?
Do you think developers don’t have to eat? or pay rent? And donations alone do not cut it.
Being a developer myself (with no ads in his software), I don’t think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. That’s why I also have an actual job.
You are aware that there are full-time developers working at Mozilla, yes? Developing a browser is not a hobby-project that you can pull off with some volunteers in their free time. You need professionals that work on such a giant project with their full attention.
Developing Firefox is their job. And of course they want to get paid for that (and deserve it). Just like you get paid for your actual job.