It’s hard because Mozilla need money to survive, and the world needs Mozilla, but it’s been hard for them to find a stable source of funding. Mozilla relying on their main competitor (Google) for most of their income is a massive risk. I can understand why they’re trying approaches like this, even if the users don’t like it.
Does anyone here have a suggestion as to a better way for them to increase their income?
1100 people does sound like a lot, but some of those employees are probably working on things other than the browser. I wonder how many people work on Google Chrome in comparison.
Firefox Monitor and Firefox Relay are good ideas for subscription services that may be useful to users and hopefully get revenue.
When I looked closely at Firefox Relay, the email feature was redundant because I also have a service which does this, and the phone feature isn’t available yet. Looking at Firefox Monitor and the list of companies/brokers it monitors, these appear focused on the US which isn’t where I live.
I hope they can get revenue by promoting these services and making them useful for more people. This would be better than showing ads. I’d pay for a useful service, not to have an-free experience for something which is freely available with ads.
The percentage of users that donate to open source projects they use is very low, and I’m not sure that’d significantly change just because Mozilla start asking people to do it.
Firstly, that’s not a scaling problem, you’re talking about poor uptake.
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters. That’s why a sophisticated organisation like Mozilla is so well placed to sell the stories behind some of these projects.
Thirdly, the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low. Particularly amongst more technical users.
Fourthly, this plan would actually drive users to Firefox. If Firefox is promoting donations for say, LibreOffice, then they would naturally have an interest in promoting Firefox.
With the advent of enshittification, free-as-in-beer tech is dead. I think people are realising that things need to be paid for. It’s very defeatist to just say “no one contributes to open source”. Why not try to find the format within which people might contribute?
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters. That’s why a sophisticated organisation like Mozilla is so well placed to sell the stories behind some of these projects.
This is definitely a good point.
the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low.
You’d be surprised. I’ve worked in ad tech. Retargeting ads (where you see ads for items you’ve viewed in the past) and abandoned cart ads (which you see if you add items to your cart but never check out, sometimes with a discount coupon attached) have very good clickthrough rates. Targeting based on customer list performs pretty well too.
In any case, I really doubt they could make even 1% of what they currently make with the Google deal. AFAIK they make around $400 million per year from that deal: pcmag.com/…/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google…
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters.
That is a huge assumption to make without data to back that up. Do you have a list of open source projects with high numbers of user donations, with evidence that the numbers are due to marketing? Barring that, I think this is pure speculation.
Do I think that better reach could have an impact on donations? Sure.
Do I think that lack of marketing is the reason for FOSS donations lagging behind other donation causes? Not at all; I think they are actually losing out on impacts, in most cases.
FOSS project donations are usually done by people who use the tool, and are interested in seeing it get improved. It’s not a “good cause” donation, like feeding kids. If you are collecting money to help people, donors don’t expect to receive something in return for giving. But I think it’s incredibly unrealistic to think that people will see someone building a software tool, not have interest in using it themselves, but still donate money to support the project anyways.
Marketing a tool that isn’t garnering much interest already probably isn’t going to see the tool get much additional uptake, especially with how much free marketing already exists in the FOSS space. If you post your software on Reddit and Hackernews and ArsTechnica (all free to do) and aren’t seeing interest, you’re probably not going to be massively helped by a marketing org stepping in.
I think they should move firefox development back from mozilla corp to mozilla org, so the development process can be funded with donation again.
For example, wikipedia development and operation are funded by donations to wikimedia foundation, there is a commercial corp (wikimedia enterprise) but they’re not in charge of development and operation of wikipedia.
Firefox, on the other hand, is entirely funded by mozilla corp. Any money donated to mozilla foundation is not used to fund firefox development. Instead, firefox development must be funded from search engine deals and ads. Why can’t the community chip in to keep firefox alive?
To my knowledge, the community donations are just laughably too low to fund a development team of hundreds of devs. The Mozilla Corporation is a subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, so transferring money in that way is possible, they just choose to not do it.
Well, and another aspect is that donations can falter. All it needs is one scandal (whether true/deserved or not). You can’t plan with that, and you can’t promise hundreds of devs to pay their livelihood on such a basis. You need other, stable sources of income anyways.
The list of features modern web browsers have is incomprehensibly huge! Not to mention chrome keep proposing new api all the time, then use them on their products like google meets, then blame firefox for not supporting them when firefox users use those products.
Wikipedia gets something like $150 million in donations annually. Firefox absolutely could have done similar numbers back when they had a massive userbase, and it would have given the users a feeling of ownership. Instead they decided to be funded almost entirely by the technology monopolist.
That’s because mozilla foundation never actually taking donation drive seriously.
Let’s consider current situation: currently, mozilla corp allocates significant engineering resource to develop revenue-generating services such as pocket, vpn, and now, AI stuff. What if mozilla never need to try to chase revenue, and instead focus on being an actual foundation, funded by grants and donations? Their expense would be significantly lower.
Let’s say mozilla able to refocus development back to firefox and retain 250 highly paid engineers, with yearly expense for salary, benefits and other overhead at ~$100 million per year. That’s less than 1/4 of search royalties they got from google in 2020. Now put those $300 million extra money into an endowment instead of wasting it on marketing and other revenue-chasing activities, and start to seriously looking into grants and collecting donations like wikimedia foundation, and in a few years mozilla might be able to amass a huge fund to guarantee independent firefox development for years, or even in perpetuity with huge enough endowment.
Is there a picture of what this actually looks / would look like? Honestly, although it is going down a bad path, it isn’t actually all that surprising. Firefox already has sponsored address bar suggestions by default.
This appears to be an experimental initiative within Mozilla right now. It’s not available to the public and may never be if it doesn’t pass muster for them.
The problem is Mozilla started thinking about itself as a company, with its massive revenue from Google.
It isn’t. Firefox was most alive and most growing when it was still a grassroots initiative to build a better web browser.
When they go back to that - or someone forks and creates a charity with one sole focus (a great browser) I’ll start supporting them. I just don’t think Mozilla needs this size of org to build a better browser and and now they’re trying to do a bunch a crap I’m not interested in to justify their org size. They’ve got it back to front.
The Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company founded in 2005 by the Mozilla Foundation. I think part of the problem is more people don’t realize this. It’s the same reason you can’t donate to Firefox development, donations to “Mozilla” go to the Mozilla Foundation, not the company that builds Firefox.
Yes, but the profits of Mozilla Corporation are all owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which has to adhere to all the usual 501.c3 rules about spending (i.e. it must be in furtherance of the stated mission of the org).
The profits are owned by the Corporation, which is why the Corporation does all the crazy spending and paying millions to executives, because as long as there is enough separation what they do internally does not affect the tax situation of the Foundation. After the for-profit pays taxes, the non-profit can get dividends and other payments from them, but it is not just a way to wash away tax from all the money.
The Corporation acts like a company because it is one. This is different than Konqueror, Epiphany, or most of the Firefox forks.
It seems highly likely that you have mischaracterized the meaning of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled but it doesn't matter. The mere existence of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled is damning enough on its own.
I remember the Amazon icon on Ubuntu. It is why I initially gave up on Linux after the first install…like WTF I don’t want Amazon in this new to me OS.
That bugzilla page says they targeted version 122 for this change. I have Firefox 122 on my PC and when I look at the about:config page, that setting is still set to False. I think y’all are freaking out about a very small thing.
If you use Firefox, and you check your about:config page and you see true for that setting, then just change it to false and go about your day.
Or are we all just talking philosophically about this?
Sure, you can change literally everything about Firefox if you pay a time cost. The defaults do matter because that’s one more thing to fix when installing it. We could say this about any negative feature.
Last I heard, which was admittedly a long time ago, Pale Moon was dangerously out of date with respect to security and web standards and not much more than a meme. I feel like I remember a significant change in leadership relatively recently, but has Pale Moon actually become a viable alternative?
Beyond that, WebKit is still a thing. Ladybird is too though it’s still quite a ways from primetime.
Maybe I’m too much of a goof but I haven’t noticed any ads and I haven’t found any way to turn them off either. Is this only in the desktop version or is it also in the mobile version? Normally I just use the mobile version.
The tech communities are trying their hardest to get people to switch to Firefox. Meanwhile Mozilla is trying its hardest to get people off Firefox with decisions like this.
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