The author suggests getting donations to (partially) finance Firefox. That would never work without changing the culture of Mozilla Corporation in a huge way: Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs. People would be very quick to cease donating if they are being annoyed in such a way. The only reason people currently put up with Mozilla's behaviour is because they didn't pay for the product.
Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.
> Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes.
I just use Firefox with some extensions and have seen nothing like this. I also used Thunderbird briefly (like a month). What am I missing? Do you have specific examples?
If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? The browser starts, I get to work, end of story. I get that Firefox has made some decisions people don’t like (Pocket and the suggested links on new tab) but that doesn’t mean they are annoying users on every chance or breaking my ability to work.
If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it?
People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.
Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".
It's a very "loud" piece of software. Messages about various things they want me to try (ads), tabs popping up with a fancy page telling me the browser updated (this might be OK if it happened like twice a year, but it's more like every week or two), and a busy, distracting default page.
This stuff bugs power users, but if you watch people who aren't in the power-user set, it's pure usability poison to them. Ditto UI elements moving around after an auto-update. Confuses the living hell out of them. It's about as far from good UX as you can get—a mediocre UI that never changes is far better UX than a good one that behaves unpredictably, and I mean from the perspective of normal people, not HN nerds.
> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.
As someone who is annoyed now:
Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead.
There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago.
And here I sit, wondering if
- it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time
- if I changed
- if Mozilla changed
- or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla
I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/
> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about.
No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.
> People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008.
Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance.
Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.
> FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab
It's something more complicated, to balance resources with stability. I don't know the rules, but for example I have 3 windows with ~700 tabs split across them, which appear to be using 6 processes with 193 threads. (Also I use Auto Tab Suspender, so that probably influences it as well)
You are right. After they ousted the inventor of Javascript, the woke crowd there set about making Firefox into a chrome clone. They also annoyed the users with everything else that was not a chrome feature. I knew this day would come.
https://www.opensourceforu.com/2016/08/firefox-past-present-...
I've used Firefox for decades now, and I have never understood the shear amount of vitriol that gets thrown at Mozilla when they change Firefox.
Sure, workflows I'm used to change, and sure they add in the odd experiment from time to time that is later abandoned, but it's at nowhere near the frequency Google does the same thing. Yes, Google cops a lot of criticism for this, but language used to criticise Google pales compared to level of vindictiveness I see thrown at Mozilla just in the comments here. It's like they been betrayed by their own mother.
It's even harder to explain given Firefox has clearly gotten better over the years. It's a bumpy ride like all software changes, but it's faster, more reliable, and more standards compliant than ever before. Yes, addon compatibility has been sacrificed to make that happen, but happened for a pretty good reason unlike say Google removing the interfaces that allow ad blockers to work effectively.
In the process they've made some hard core advances in the art, like Rust, and like WASM. From where I sit they've been more effective at this recently than Google. And yet what we hear about here is how Pocket doesn't work as they like. Really - does it matter, compared to the amount of good work that comes out of Mozilla?
Mozilla broke features that did not need fixing. They also removed features such as RSS support. RSS supports anonymity and does not add dollars to Google's kitty. So, Mozilla's policy was lockstep with Google's.
When they broke almost all existing Addons (some are gone to this day, like Classic Theme Restorer) with the Quantum Update for instance. Or when they decided to ditch Thunderbird for no reason at all. And then sort of undecided.
AIUI, Classic Theme Restorer has become redundant since Quantum brought back the "classic" look anyway. Of course there are many other examples of broken extensions.
> Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.
Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero).
Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN).
Now they spend nearly $100m per year.
So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.
I'm seeing lots of successful developments from the Wikimedia folks. Their latest project, namely Wikidata is already bigger than Wikipedia ever was; not to mention the projects they launched before that. (Wikimedia Commons free media repository, Wikivoyage travel guide etc.)
Donations to Wikipedia more than pay for the technical infrastructure, they do have lots of money to waste. Mozilla obviously doesn't. So as a donor, Mozilla wasting money is more of a problem, because as a donor I see it is actually not keeping Mozilla running and if I stop donating it will hurt far worse.
There's either a misconception in this comment or a misreading of it on this side.
Compare the Wikimedia numbers given (nearly $100m per year to keep running) to Mozilla's, who last reported spending much more than that (over $173m) just in their non-software development spending.
It looks like the misreading part was the right one, then. The intent of your original comment is clearer now, in light of this response.
You're saying that Wikimedia's spending is somewhat rational, whereas Mozilla's revenue might disappear as the result of a single party making a decision to walk away. You're not saying that Mozilla is a ragtag group of browser developers with barely any money. (There was too much focus on "Mozilla obviously doesn't [have the money to waste]" in the earlier reading.)
It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on. Currently, they probably don't accept such donations (as far as I can tell), but that's on Mozilla.
Money is the ultimate fungible asset, any restricted funds going to development frees up money that would have gone to development otherwise to go to something else instead. The only way this works is if the restricted fund donations exceed what the dev investment would have been otherwise, then it starts making a difference.
As a donor I don’t like this method because unless all donations were like this, since funds are fungible, budgets would still shift around.
For example, consider two features:
AwesomeFeature - budget has $100
DumdumFeature - budget has $200
They currently receive $300 in donations, $50 of which have no strings attached. So there’s donation stream A with strings and $250, and donation stream B with no strings and $50.
Allocation looks like this:
AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$75, B$25
DumdumFeature - budget has $200, funded with A$175, B$25.
If I donate $25 and say “this can only go to awesome feature” the budgets after my donation end up as.
AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$100
DumdumFeature - budget has $225, funded with A$175, B$50.
Technically yes, they could shift spending like that, but it would look bad enough, I think at least some would help where you want. Either way, asking for them not to shift funding as appropriate would be asking to control other finances not your own.
If they allowed targeted donations to firefox/quantum/rust/MDN I would donate, as I'm sure many other will. As it is, I don't and won't even if firefox were to fail.
In the case of Mozilla, it's more than the money can go to one of two places: Firefox development, or the black-hole of Mozilla's other projects and expenditures, including their overpaid leadership.
The new crappy address bar that nobody asked for, pocket, hubs, three different mobile browsers, some useless award and probably more that I don't remember.
Also annoying is how they constantly kill useful features like RSS or bookmark descriptions.
I use Firefox because I still like it better than Chrome and I like to support free software, but it's obvious to me that Mozilla doesn't really care about their users and they're too busy chasing shiny things. I expect they'll keep losing market share until they become irrelevant and disappear.
Pocket was a third party service when it became a default Firefox feature in 2015. Mozilla acquired it in 2017.[0] I could not find any data on what they paid.
Just go through https://github.com/mozilla and I bet you didn't hear about 90% of them. If you paginate further, you'll see most of them aren't maintained much anymore.
WebThings ? There are OSS projects in this space and I don't see how they plan on capturing value for the organisation or provide value to the community by building yet another solution that currently has very weak integration with 3rd party devices.
> Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs.
Isn't this a symptom of being detached from reality? In a sense that they are in their bubble, and didn't had the need to look outside of it?
Maybe that's the problem, they didn't have to make it work because the money was already there.
A company employing ~1000 people, with $500m+ revenue, is not a small company. It's not even mid-sized. This is a large multinational, only seeming small when compared with FAANG.
revenue isn't a good measure of business size. a $500m revenue might translate to very low "profit". Most size measurements will use owned asset value (or market cap, which is a very rough guesstimate of the net present value of all future profit of the company) as a measure, as it is more directly comparable between different businesses.
Mozilla, is at best, a small-cap software company. Calling them mid-sized is probably not wrong either, but would be closer to being wrong than right imho.
You are missing the point. They are smaller than the big tech companies but they are not objectively small. In my country a company is generally deemed to be large if it employs more than 500 people, which is easily surpassed here.
It boggles my mind that Mozilla didn't build an endownment with all the money they've received in the past 10-15 years (mid-billions!). They could've been a bit slimmer and slowly build an alternative revenue stream that would make them much more resilient to shocks like these and, long-term, independent of Google or other competitors' cooperation.
Looks like they spent like the money will be flowing forever.
Imagine, in the abstract, an organisation that wasn't exactly accountable to anyone with a half-billion dollar pot as the prize for whoever ended up in charge. Can't possibly end well. Brand that with a "Mozilla" logo and the situation doesn't change much.
If anything, I think - paradoxically, but as I do for all charities - that Mozilla is acting responsibly if they are burning through all their cash. If they fall on hard times that is more a signal that they've lost the faith of the internet at large than a marker of financial imprudence.
A charitable foundation with no doners should be wound up. Otherwise it'll just invite corruption. Exceptions for tiny amounts of money, but not for the sums Mozilla is dealing with.
Which is why I am so proud about the way the Blender Foundation does things. Given the success of the project things could have gone quite differently, but that they found a good model for it to work
I am more confident blender, inkscape, postgres will exist than Firefox.
I think money corrupted Mozilla and turned it into another VC powered YC company where talent left and product and engineering management created a replaceable r&d team without passion .
> A charitable foundation with no doners should be wound up.
For many charities, probably, yeah. But Mozilla being in the position that an endowment more or less funds at least 'support' level of maintaining a fully independent browser beholden to absolutely no one, even if literal zero money is flowing in otherwise - that's a nice thing to have.
It does invite corruption, and in the end, if nobody cares about mozilla (the browser), it should indeed go away, but 'being cared about' and 'raking in the dosh' aren't quite the same. Sure, you can turn care into cash (donate buttons and the like), but if you don't have to, that's nice. Mozilla (the browser) is likely to die if the funding that they CAN provide is a decent salary but nowhere close to what other companies could possibly offer – _and_ nobody cares about it.
Here's what I mean by that last one: I'm sure PKK (author of linked article), for example, could be convinced to do the job of quirksmode/MDN for a salary. And that salary does not have to be close to what PKK could get as a freelancer or at google or whatnot, but it should at least be somewhat representative of his particular skillset. Effectively, then, PKK is still donating - a lot - namely the difference between the salary he'd get vs. the salary he could get, but he gets something in return: Working on a thing he likes to do more, and contributing to the open web.
Had firefox been raking in millions a month off of user donations, and spending it all on the projects they were spending it on, you might be right: That's fine, and if the money dries up, they downsize - that'd be a better way to do it vs. setting up an endowment.
But that is NOT what happened. Firefox got most of the running funds via e.g. having google as default search engine. That is a cashcow that may at some point run out; at the very least you are too beholden to too few parties, and that itself is far more likely to be 'corruption' (as in, have the same downsides) than a charitable foundation with more cash than carers. Turning THAT windfall into an endowment does strike me as a wise move. Especially if you earmark that endowment for a limited purpose (presumably, earmark it for team gecko and very few other parts of moz).
You are shocked that a non-profit competiting with $100Billion+ corporations, whose mission statement is "people over profit", hasn't been able to build an endowment? And that's the fault of Mozilla, not the billionaire techies who'd rather buy advertising on buildings on college campuses?
This has been my thought since the first time I heard Mozilla was raking in cash with affiliate search. With some planning, they could have had a never-ending income and been beholden to no one. Anyone in here with insight in the decisionmaking process?
Shareholders generally like businesses to use their money on things only that business can do.
If the best thing the business can think to do with the money is put it in the stock market or a low-interest cash account, which anyone could do, investors usually demand that the money is returned to them (via dividends or share buybacks) so they can choose what happens to it.
Because "endowment" is a simply the non-profit term for "capital" in business.
Harvard's endowment is invested in profitable business to raise money. It's a non-profit so it doesn't pay out the profits. A profitable business invests its funds itself or returns them to the owner institutions, who chose whether to keep funding the business.
I'm not sure it would make sense for normal businesses, as owners want to, well, profit from the profits (share price rise, buybacks, dividends, sale of business at a higher valuation, etc).
However, in Mozilla's case, the owner of the corporation is a non-profit, and (to me at least) it'd make a perfect sense to set up something like this.
Normal businesses generally don’t have enough free money to do something like this. While the business has value by virtue of its assets, the amount of free cash is much less.
Software is an exception in this since you basically only have free cash, there are no physical assets as such.
> Normal businesses generally don’t have enough free money to do something like this.
And why don't they? Decades ago, having cash reserves was a Good Thing.
We need to get at the root of the issue and that is that companies have gotten used way too much on government bailouts and redistributing everything possible to shareholders/customers.
If your company has too much cash, someone will attempt take control to carve it up and get their hands on the cash.
So, every business basically runs fairly close to cashless or even carries debt in order to avoid corporate raiders unless they have SO much cash that nobody can even hope to buy them (see: Apple).
And then people complain that they're holding onto cash rather than 1.) Doing something "productive with it" or 2.) Returning it to the owners (shareholders)--the latter of which at least is not a wholly unreasonable position as it isn't really the company's money to hold on to at some level.
> Hell, it probably applies to Amazon (the retailer, not AWS).
That's perhaps the most genius thing in the Amazon system: the actual amount of cash bound in warehoused inventory is negligible - they only have the risk for stuff they directly sell. For all the other products, the sellers are on the hook towards the manufacturers.
Essentially they are an online Walmart with next to zero of the risk a real Walmart has because most of their inventory risk is shifted towards the "sellers"...
Most retail has net 90 day payments and forced returns where manufacturers have to accept unsold product. Walmart and other big retailers likely have little money tied up in inventory. They sell a product before they have to pay the manufacturer for it.
Walmart is tough on terms but meets obligations. I worked on a farm in high school that sold would sell them Fall stuff — pumpkins, cornstalks, etc.
They would pay net-10, which was unheard of, most of their big buyers habitually paid late. The local grocery chain would pay 60-90 days late on a 30 day invoice. The cash in hand was worth sometimes losing a little money.
Walmart is specifically famous for having some of the most onerous terms amongst all large retailers. Anecdotally, Walmart has asked for net 270 terms from a supplier I am accquainted with.
Because having "leftover cash" that is not immediately redistributed to shareholders is seen as a Bad Thing (tm).
Because in the end, when shit hits the fan like with the 'rona, the government will be conveniently pressurable to bail you out. Personally, I rather have government bailouts than mass bankruptcies - but bailouts should come with "strings attached" like, let's say, a requirement to always keep one year of expenses at a reserve to avoid the need for future bailouts.
> "leftover cash" that is not immediately redistributed to shareholders is seen as a Bad Thing (tm)
sort of a short sighted view if that's really the case - since the cash being in the company's books, or in an endowment, is still value owned by the owner. The small penalty of it being illiquid shouldnt be a problem.
I guess, from a shareholder perspective, why would I want my investment to invest in other things/companies? Then they might as well pay out the money, so I could invest it myself.
And that is why government regulation is overdue to ensure a fair and level playing field without leaving the government on the hook in crisis scenarios.
Most of the time, it has to do with investments failing regardless, so it is important to invest in multiple projects and to attempt to stay up-to-date with competitors. The story could have been "Why didn't they spend their money from the endowment to help ensure their product survived the competition". In hindsight, other people's mistakes or perception of mistakes is always skewed.
I personally would like to distinguish between donations to the Firefox product and Mozilla as a company. I donated every month for a year, but eventually didn't feel that my contributions were making it to the actual devs making a difference. Or even balancing the books. I cannot explain why, but something feels off about Mozilla. I'm not being conspiratorial, but is Mozilla really one of the "good guys"?
I feel like Mozilla does not understand the "old-internet" which it prostitutes to sell itself to users. Lawyers, Amazon extensions, this is how we are fighting Fake News!
Having all of your products that are absolutely free for everyone just promotes a culture of "gimmie dat opun sauce warez 4 free" cult and relying on donations for supporting 1,000 employees, doesn't make any sense for sustainability for them.
So what's the next step for Mozilla's mission for protecting your privacy? Re-new that contract with your #1 anti-privacy competitor [0] and continue selling free things.
Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this.
Oh, and I would happily pay/donate to Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird, but not for all the other "adventures" they went after. VPN service... As if there were not enough of those already...
Mission creep has been a fundamental Mozilla flaw for too long.
And are they a corporate, a charity, or a corporate non-profit? Charities very often pay substantially lower salaries, the tradeoff being you feel you contribute to a greater good. That's how I thought of them, but the wage bill doesn't match up.
there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise...
The Foundation is also the sole shareholder in the Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox and other open source tools. Mozilla Corporation functions as a self-sustaining social enterprise – money earned through its products is reinvested into the organization.
With over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide, Mozilla Corporation employee compensation is benchmarked to market by role and level balancing total compensation between individual and company performance with a pay-for-performance compensation model...
For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations.
Also:
Mozilla Foundation non-profit programs are carried out by 80 employees and thousands of volunteers around the world.
Wikipedia explains a bit more:
Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue.
A tax-paying entity is a regular for-profit company. It's a basically a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Foundation, confusingly.
More information about revenue:
Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath
And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
I was aware there was more complexity than I mentioned, I somehow missed that they mentioned a non-profit.
>And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
Google paid most of their corporate revenue. The last reported year, 2018, was the first under the new contract, and looking at revenues you can guess how much smaller it was then the Yahoo one. If I remember correctly, the contract information will be on the detailed financial report released this year.
>Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this.
To build a browser capable of taking any market share away from Google and Microsoft, available in 90 languages with regular updates, you probably do need numbers around there.
This sounded like a lot to me, so I looked through the last 4096 chromium commits and counted committer names. That is back until the beginning of August. In that time, remarkably, Chromium has indeed had 856 committers, most of which only made a few commits in that timespan. That is very much not what I would have expected.
For comparison, I repeated the experiment with Mozilla's gecko-dev repo, and got 480 people committing - still a lot more than I'd thought. I guess I'll see how this holds up with the downsizing in a month.
[edit] Though - only 199 with a Mozilla email address. Though I don't have a Chromium comparison here.
Someone did that 10–15 years ago, and they did it with a staff 1/10 the size and on a budget 10–20% the one that the current generation of executives are working with.
The job was also different. Compare someone trying to get into shape with someone trying to maintain their current body weight.
Early Mozilla did a lot of good work. Leadership during the 2010s undid almost all of it in ways that were predictable.
Mission creep is certainly a thing, but a fully featured web browser is a massively complex piece of software and most definitely not something you can do with a bunch of volounteers in their free time.
It may not require 1000 employees, but 100 is probably not enough. And that is still not easy to fund with volountary donations.
Then take 300 developers, if you need them. Financing would probably be sufficient, if it wasn't spread amongst three times the employees and would have to take care of several other projects.
All the existing VPN providers are shady. I'd much sooner trust one from Mozilla. I don't think this is a priori a bad market for them to get into at all. It could even be a decent money maker for them, especially with seamless integration into Firefox. Unlike browsers, people are willing to pay for VPNs, so there's a good potential additional revenue source there.
Yeah, so just get your own VPN up and running in half an hour. Invite your family to use it, too. That's probably around 5-10 $/month with some cloud VPS thingy for everybody in your house. Did it myself, combined with a PiHole, and it worked like a charm. In regards of trust: Mozilla is just another big corporation, a VPN from some other big tech company (one that isn't into advertising - how about Apple?) would just be as trustworthy.
(1) Where is your Internet traffic actually hitting the Internet? Is it emanating from your house? If so, that's not why most people get VPNs. If not, how many different countries can your endpoint be located in? Again, if you can't choose from a large list of arbitrary countries, then this doesn't satisfy many people's VPN use case.
(2) You are assuming a technical level of competence that most people don't have. Even if they do, they often would rather just pay for something simple that works rather than have yet another thing to maintain.
(3) Yeah, Apple would be as trustworthy to most people. But they aren't doing it. A service that doesn't exist isn't a real competitor. I think there's a real potential in this space for a non-shady company, and Mozilla seems like the best candidate.
From my understanding Mozilla VPN is just rebranded mullvad VPN.
So what benefit do you get by purchasing VPN access from Mozilla vs. directly from mullvad? I don´t see any from a security/trust perspective.
Also everyone is writing Mozilla wrong around here.
It´s not Mozilla. They changed it to Moz://a. How much did that rebranding cost? Was that money well spent?
So many bad decisions.
The VPN service was created to make money, not to spend it. They've been fishing for a new source of income for a long time, so far without much success. Pocket brings in some money but it can't sustain Firefox development on its own.
I doubt very much that when Sony uses that forked clang compiler, where they only upstream non-PS4 specific optimizations there is any user right to care about.
In this case Sony is the user and they care very much that they can freely change the compiler as needed without having to ask someone else for permission. Price is a secondary consideration here.
Benefits of strong copyleft or BSD-style copyright is another matter of discussion.
Open source is not "warez", and "supporting 1,000 employees" to work on an open source project makes zero sense. The best model for developer monetary support comes from individual crowdfunding campaigns by prominent devs, as is common, e.g. in the Rust community.
The most important software is the least visible. See OpenSSL. If you have individual developers doing crowdfunding, the most visible ones - the ones making GUI applications everyone uses - win, and all the critical infrastructure gets neglected because it is boring and 99% of people never think about it.
Which is why they aren’t. The amount of money was one of the big reasons they founded the Mozilla corporation, which is owned by the non-profit Mozilla foundation.
Mozilla Foundation holds 100% of M.Corp. and no one is allowed to purchase part of it. Essentially, this means Foundation owns all those earnings fully in some way (sans taxes); they need some legal channels to funnel it.
But Mozilla isn't either. That's the trouble. They make plenty of money from Firefox but then don't spend it on Firefox, so Firefox market share declines, so they make less money from Firefox. Maybe they should try turning that wheel the opposite way.
From where I sit, it looks like there has been a lot of technical effort going into Firefox in the last few years - like 'Electrolyis' and 'Quantum'. 'Quantum' in particular has been translating the more experimental work (Rust & Servo) into improvements in Firefox.
So it seems more like they've been losing marketshare despite investing in Firefox. Google has much more money to spend on development, and can potentially also make popular sites like Youtube or GMail work best in Chrome.
I use Firefox and I hope it will get more popular again. But I'm baffled how many people seem to think that if only Mozilla tried properly, the users would come flocking back. All the evidence suggests that most users go to Chrome no matter what they do.
MS switched to a Chromium base because they couldn't keep pace with Google's ever shifting web tech. Apple goes at its own pace, sometimes not implementing Google's standards at all.
Mozilla wants to have a say in how Google makes web standards. To do that effectively they need to keep up with Chrome. Admittedly even then Chrome's massive market share makes arguing against Google difficult. Apple sometimes joins the conversation but only when it directly affects something they're currently interested in.
No amount of requesting donations will ever support an organization the size of Mozilla. It's annual budget is half a billion dollars.
I also consider reverting to "nagware" a huge step back. Either you sell a product, monetize part of it, or offer it for free - giving it away "for free" while sneaking in a shower of requests for money is the worst possible outcome.
What's there really to improve? I don't think the experience with Firefox is fundamentally different, nor could it be made fundamentally better. It's a browser. People don't care about browsers, they care about websites. Even if Firefox were to implement some fancy feature, websites aren't going to adopt it until Chrome has it too.
Sure, you could argue that Firefox doesn't track you like Chrome does. That's basically their whole marketing message. People who care about this already use Firefox, the rest just doesn't care.
If you mean in about:config 1: they change it and add hidden options all the time (you have to browse the code to find them) and 2: this is about the first run, all of that data will be sent before you have the chance to open about:config.
> The code is all yours.
So is the Chromium code.
Regardless, considering Mozilla's trademark policy it can't technically be disabled in firefox.
> Seeing as your original comment said Chrome ...
Firefox contains proprietary components too (such as EME) that you can't modify. The code is all yours in Chrome as much as it is for firefox.
I personally do not buy that argument, it is like saying that firefox has an integrated emacs in it because "the code is all yours".
Is there such a cult? I keep reading arguments like "nobody would pay for Google search, therefore they must track everyone and push ads", but I'd happily pay for search if it aligned their interests with mine ("high quality search results").
I'd also happily pay for a browser, but I'm not a big fan of "donate because it's the right thing to do", I prefer "pay because the product is worth it".
As far as I understand, donations to the Mozilla Foundation won't go into development anyway because of the way they're structured.
Don't ask for donations in the browser. Offer a product that people want and sell it to them. My personal approach: focus initially on developers. They're somewhat easy to understand (you have developers on the team), they have more money than the average user, their requirements and desires are clear and a little effort goes a long way, they already pay for tools that do some jobs that could be done in the browser (e.g. Fiddler).
> Small company gives away software for free. Large companies give away the same software for free, and to them the cost is essentially peanuts, and they own the platforms the sofware runs on. Therefore small company will lose, decreasing diversity in the browser market. Simple as that.
Alternatively: Small company sells software, large company gives away the same kind of software for free. Small company loses, again.
You're not going to fix market forces artificially. We pay what we pay because that's what someone's willing to offer it for. Also, not all value is in dollars.
This is the key point here. Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari) and MIcrosoft (Edge) funnel money from other ventures to their browser dev teams.
For Apple and Microsoft it’s just a staple tool that each operating system needs but for Google it’s a platform that guides users towards their other services and ties them in, YouTube, Gmail, Drive, to name but a few.
In the current business model, there’s absolutely no competing with them long term. You’d have to either break them up or create some weird funding schemes driven by govs and users that don’t care (public good or some other utilitarian argument).
This where anti-trust kicks in, that you don't allow companies to leverage a monopoly/duopoly position in one market to destroy competition in another. Particularly if they give products away for free to destroy the existing competition or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.
> Particularly if they give products away for free to destroy the existing competition...
You're thinking of predatory pricing, but he market price for a browser has been zero for a long time.
Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product. That's competition at work. The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants.
If tomorrow Google decided to do something to Chrome, that isn't in the consumer's interest, immediately the opportunity arises for competitors to outdo them - with their own code even.
> ...or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.
Isn't that the point of most free products? I doubt there's an anti-trust case to be made there.
>The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants
I don't think your definition of anti-trust is accurate. Protect consumers by creating a competitive market. To promote and protect competition because consumers and the economy as a whole benefits when we have more competition in the market.
> Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product.
This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular.
These massive, unregulated companies can lose an enormous amount of money on products indefinitely, either choosing to sink cash into them quickly in order to follow (or drive) the market into rapid change that a company that is required to bring in revenue can't keep up with, or in a slower market just park the product at an adequate quality, and wait for the competition to stumble.
After the competition dies, then you can squeeze the customer for all they're worth.
> This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular.
Lets not oversimplify things. "Product competition" and "google doing nothing wrong" do not need to be, and are not, synonymous. These attributes are separated by at least a decade though.
I'm pretty sure enough of us in this thread were using the web when chrome was emerging, it _did_ offer a compelling alternative to the pretty dire alternatives at the time whatever your platform, and all on it's own merrits. For such complex beasts it's hard to quantize into best, and browsers wax an wayne in terms of keeping up with web standards and performance expectations... never the less at the time, chrome was a breath of fresh air in the context of the very stale state of browser development.
At the time it really didn't matter what Google's motives were, browsers sucked and this was good competition... But in the context of a monopoly in browser share (which lets face it chrome has become)... Motive is very important.
I agree with you though, the parent comment is wrong that the competition is still alive, it's merely historic at this point.
The underlying theme is motives vs competition - in the right context (competition), ulterior motives are neutralized due to market forces. However once overcome, those true motives take over.
I've been a Firefox user through all these years and still am. I don't like Google. I can still admit that during a crucial phase, Chrome was the better browser. Nowadays I don't think it's much of a difference, but the ship has sailed.
I never said that "Google did nothing wrong". I'm saying that if Google were to do something wrong that users actually care about, that would open the opportunity for competition to gain traction by offering a better product - based on their own codebase even!
That situation is what limits Google's options and that's what differentiates it from an actual monopoly. If you have a monopoly, your users are forced to use your services, because nobody else is able to compete. Nothing forces me to use Google's browser.
If you're making an anti-trust case, it has to be solid. If you just don't like the situation or making some sort of moral case, that's a different story.
It's also worth noting that even though Microsoft didn't need Edge to succeed to nearly the degree Firefox has to in order to continue development, the competition from Chrome was so intense they gave up anyway. Fields where even subsidized megacorp projects can't stay above water are very tough places for mid-size nonprofits.
I think if you look at Chrome from Google's pov originally, the last thing they wanted was someone putting out a browser where the default search engine of whatever you typed into the address bar couldn't be changed to google. A competitor could attack google by owning the browser, perhaps what they thought microsoft would do.
Or more accurately - developers create software for free and license it as Open Source because of social pressure within the development community. Large corporations say thank you very much and use it to make vast quantities of money without contributing back financially to the people who actually do the work. Anyone who points out that this is grossly counter productive if you want to build a sustainable ecosystem that doesn't depend on the unpaid labour of volunteers gets shouted down by free software cheerleaders who condescendingly stress that they mean "free as in speech rather than free as in beer," despite all Open Source licenses literally demanding that Open Source software can be distributed for free (as in beer).
It certainly sounds logical but we see no evidence of this. Software creation is the highest it's ever been and accelerating. Salaries are going up. Open Source is arguably one of the reasons we're where we're at. I'd argue anything that puts up a barrier or changes the incentives to open source might be the thing that killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
I don't currently get paid for all the open source work I do nor do I expect to be but if that expectation changed, if everyone expected to be compensated for their what at least starts out as their hobby, I'd guess the amount of people doing it drop drastically.
Of course it sucks if your project gets popular and you feel obligated to keep spending time on it but you can always walk away.
Otherwise my compensation is the feeling I get from helping. This is no different then volunteering. I don't go to the soup kitchen and demand a salary for helping out. I also feel compensated from everyone else's contributions. That companies like Apple (clang, llvm, swift, webkit), Google (android, chrome, angular, dart, flutter), Facebook (react, graphql), Microsoft (.net, vs code), etc...
They are paying me back by offering all of that. I'm sure you can name some rich company not contributing but I guess I really don't care.
I'd actually say it's one of the primary motivations, but then I think that's the reason most people do most things. On the second point freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum and exercising ones freedoms almost always involves impinging on the freedoms of others. Therefore there is a constant negotiation going on that involves the balancing of freedoms of different individuals, not to mention the balancing of freedoms with other ethical goods that people value (like equality, happiness etc.) There is very little recognition in the fsf / open source world that adopting a maximalist approach to a specific set of freedoms - those that fit into the free software / open source ideology - necessarily impinges on other freedoms that many people also value - like the freedom to own and profit from one's labour without further enriching google et. al (Yes there are differences between the fsf and open source camps but they're largely of the peoples front of Judea / judean people's front variety.)
Free Software and Open Source software are not the same thing. Open Source was entirely conceived in order to subvert Free Software through making it even cheaper.
So "free software cheerleaders" are not trying to defend Open Source. If you don't want large corporations, or any corporations, ripping off your work, make it AGPL and sell them licenses.
As it is, most of this type of thing seems to be a complaint that the commons is crowding out the small businessman i.e. "There are too many public parks, and they're keeping people from visiting my nature resort."
Mozilla brought in $450M last year because Google wanted to be the search engine on its free software. You can give software away and make money in other ways. Plenty of software companies do it and it's a perfectly valid business model. Small company does not "lose", and $450M is not small
Mozilla brought in $450M last year because Google didn't want to be involved in an antitrust action. Conflict between Mozilla and Google is keyfabe; Mozilla is virtually a subsidiary of Google.
Oh wow. So from a financial standpoint they're not in a radically different position to earlier years (assuming between 10-20% more in other revenues), in fact seems as if they have approx 100M$ more coming in as revenue in comparison to the previous year of comparison (2018) [1]
Because they they already re-upped it, why spend more money when you already got the rewards? That is what happens when a company doesn't care about the product.
IMO there is one more factor in play: pricing inertia once “market prices” are set
ie why are upfront mobile app prices free or peanuts? A big reason is cause they started that way. If mobile app prices started at closer to desktop app prices at the beginning, we’d probably have a much different mobile app marketplace today.
Another example: developer salaries in the US compared to rest of world, where they’re much lower even after normalization. I posit that a key reason was the easy money VC years around 2010, and they just stayed high ever since.
I’m sure there’s a proper economic term for this phenomenon :)
Netscape tried it. GetRight tried it; darn, even winzip tried it but people just wont pay for it. On the other hand, once you start adding copy protection mechanisms that work, we all start whining.
Corollary law: once a good enough product is released in a consumer categoryfor free, nobody will ever want to pay for anything in that category again, even if they could easily afford it :)
That's essentially my problem with the open source.
I was an open source apologist some time ago, but since I quit full-time job
and started to freelance/working on my own personal projects I began to
realize, that I as an independent developer can't actually profit from it.
In fact, it takes a lot of my time to contribute to something and I get nothing
in return.
From my perspective:
* Behind every popular open source project there is a company (typically big),
which pays core team salary to maintain open source project.
Community is typically do work for free. The bigger the project, the better
for the company public image.
* Open source projects end up to be designed by committee, which inevitably
turns projects to bloatware, which are hard to maintain and hard to use.
* Increase in technology turn-over. Projects become hyped and die faster that
* Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment
manager if there's Kubernetes?
* En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to projects while
doing a lot of work for free. One may argue that in return they get polished
product, but in reality that's far from true.
> That's essentially my problem with the open source.
And that's my problem with the moniker 'open source' - it gives people the wrong idea. Free software is all about freedom, and surprisingly that often turns out to be easier to explain than the nebulous appellation 'open'.
Amusingly, each of your five dot points applies entirely to non-free software (behind non-free software there's a commercial entity, their products often end up getting designed by committee and are the worse for it, projects die as soon as they (product or company) cease being commercially viable, competition is discouraging and leads to similar but worse in slightly different ways products, and people contributing via bug reports or plugins or code contributions or blogs on how to use the product are doing it 'for free').
You said behind every popular open source project there's a big company -- what would that be for the Linux kernel, Apache, KDE, Python, VLC, gimp?
Btw, don't tell Hashicorp that it's pointless trying to write a better orchestrator than K8s. : )
I don't think "open source" needs to apologize for anything. Making profit from it wasn't ever the goal for most projects. That you cannot derive profit from it may have to do with your business model.
You could offer support for the product you are offering or maybe you can just write proprietary software. To think that there is a problem with open source as a concept sound like a pretty alien conclusion to be honest.
Most open source projects don't have corporate backing obviously. The large ones that are heavily in use? Sure, because their developers use it too.
> Open source projects end up to be designed by committee [..]
I can agree on that point, but again, that is a minority of project that have become very successful.
> En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to project
That is the point of any free contribution. I know that can get exhausting and that there are ungrateful users that can ruin it for you, but I still don't see how open source is the problem and not your disposition to it.
I think the article overall is not convincing. Maybe our expectations are too high, but whose aren't in todays software world. Without open source it just isn't possible to let developers teach themselves as efficient as they can do now. That these costs are externalized by companies and that they might not give back enough is the nature of voluntary work. But it certainly not undercutting some imagined market.
The problem with open source is not that the source is available, that you can modify it to your own needs, or that you can contribute back, it is that anyone can redistribute your software for free, and that you can't discriminate between e.g. small businesses or personal use and Google in your license terms. This cuts off the possibility of actually supporting yourself financially as an open source developer in many cases and is an ideological commitment that mostly benefits large corporations at the expense of individual developers.
Then someone can dual license the code. Something like AGPL for general development and commercial licenses via request. This way the source is open at all times and companies that want to use it and modify it for commercial purposes can get a commercial license for that. In this case the biggest issue is copyright assignment. In order to dual license you require everyone who's contributed to agree. In large projects that's difficult. In a company, copyright can be handed over to the company, but anyone outside the company who contributes has to either sign over copyright or agree to letting their contributions be dual licensed.
The best option looks like a tight copyleft license combined with a contract for copyright assignment and revenue sharing for contributors and dual licensed for commercial use. The most difficult part of this would be gauging developer worth based on contributions, but that's something that happens in every company anyways.
> At the same time, you can also study how Kubernetes does the job, and come up with radical superior solutions.
I feel that's a bit of a reach. A small team will magically come up with something better than hundreds/thousands of developers that thought/developed k8s?
It's nice to think anyone can do that, but I believe only another company (and probably not a small one) could try and do that. I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
But that's a different discussion regardless if open source or closed, big companies vs small teams issue will ever exists.
What I'm saying is that the product being open source allows you to study it, let's say you want to do something as fast as Redis, you have all that previous work open.
I don't imagine a single person in a room going line by line studying it, what usually happen is that many people study particular aspects and write about it the problems they had, improvements and so on.
> I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
Well it depends a "bunch" of open source contributors can organise themselves and grow into organizations, there are many examples.
yes, that's what happen with MongoDB and AWS, right?
The ugly thing is that they take advantage from the brand too just saying "X brand compatible" they can use the brand reputation and re-package it, I agree on that point being an issue.
Thought doesn’t scale. A solid design/architecture can only come from a handful of minds. The hundreds/thousands of developers than can provide volume of features, not necessarily quality. This is why one person (or small team) can still be disruptive.
> * En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to projects while doing a lot of work for free. One may argue that in return they get polished product, but in reality that's far from true.
If you frame it like that, sounds like people are forced to work for free, think about other open source advantages, for example the freedom to customise the software to your needs without questions asked.
You can fix a bug that is blocking you for doing something, instead of waiting a big company to prioritise your little problem.
And that's just the first that comes to my mind, there are much more.
But I understand that your statment seems to come from a frustating experience, I'm curious about what was that product.
> "Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment manager if there's Kubernetes?"
Open source projects are there as common heritage of mankind that addresses a major need. To me they are similar to roads ans railways. Where is competition to a road? Is there real competition to tcp/ip?
There are well maintained Open Source projects that have effectively a BDFL and don't lose focus. Go language or Lua come to mind.
But people like to complain "Go is Google's language" because it's authors rejected some fringe proposal. Not that I like Go, but there are many ways of doing open source.
Similar experience, that is how I changed from an advocate with Linux Journal subscription and stuff like M$ on my email signature, to work again mostly with commercial software.
Mozilla needs a more focused leadership to survive, not a perpetual gofundme campaign. The current leadership focused on free lock-in features (Firefox Lockwise, Pocket integration etc). But that's how you play when you have deep pockets. Mozilla Corp. never had them.
If instead Mozilla Corp. had focused on cross-browser freemium/paid features, they could have been self-sustained by now. E.g. I would definitely pay for a Firefox Account that included:
- Password manager with cross-browser cloud sync. They already have Lockwise. Only need to make it cross-browser.
- Firefox send. Great convenience feature. Trivial to integrate to other browsers. Currently "unavailable while we work on product improvements." WTF?
- Cross-browser bookmarks sync with improvements in core functionality. E.g. make tagging easy, support tag-based dynamic folders to the bookmarks bar. I wish they had brought the person behind Buku bookmarks manager aboard instead of buying Pocket.
> So allow me to make a modest proposal: build in a donations function in Firefox itself — for instance by adding a simple “Please support us” message to the update page you get to see whenever you update the browser, and by adding a Donations item to the main menu.
Agreed. We need a way to directly fund Firefox development, and Mozilla is not currently providing this.
It is difficult to have a discussing about funding Firefox without knowing what kind of company or organization that Mozilla want to be. Do they want to be an advocacy non-profit like EFF and ACLU, getting their main revenue from donations (and then maybe pay their CEO similar to those organizations)? Do they want to be more like IBM, using the free open source products to promote and support the paid services and proprietary products (in which the CEO get paid according to market rates)? Or are they more like the Linux foundation, focusing around maintaining and developing a core open source project, funded and paid by corporate sponsors and donations.
I tend to do all my work for free, and in open-source[0]. One big reason, is that I don't feel like I really want to watch other people destroy my work, like they did for thirty years.
Another reason, is that I am not particularly thrilled about having someone else calling the shots on my work. I do what I do for love, not money or status. Once money comes into the picture, the fun drains out like a popped balloon.
I write my stuff as enterprise-class software. It may be the "tinkering" of an old codger, but it is nothing to sneeze at.
And I set the agenda. If you don't want to use my stuff; fine. No loss to me. It's great stuff, but tastes differ.
If, on the other hand, you pay me to do work for you, then you get to call the shots. That's just the way of the world. It doesn't matter whether or not it's "fun." You are paying me for a service, and it is my fiduciary responsibility to deliver. I spent my entire career delivering software on schedule, and to spec. Like I said, I found it annoying that it wasn't treated so well, after delivery, but it was their property, and I had no say.
I just found out that a company that makes two great, free, open-source utilities I use all the time, has been sold; throwing their future into doubt. That sucks, but it is also not something that I really have a right to whine about.
I am not particularly thrilled with corporations making commercial products on the back of free, open-source projects; even really high-quality ones (I won't list any, because there are religious wars over them).
Who is going to pay for Firefox if they fired the people pushing the tech forward (i.e. the servo team)?
If anybody is going to pay for a browser it must be better than its competition.
I would pay for better privacy, adblocking, higher speed, better dev tools and what not.
But Firefox is not so much better than Chromium in any of these points to warrant payment.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like a giant branding error.
Individually, all their paid offerings aren't that interesting. Scroll, Pocket, and privacy VPN's are all fine little niche products, but bundled together and called Firefox Pro, it gives you vision of what a premium browser might look like: the browser is free, paid users get a collection of services and support the open web.
> But Firefox is not so much better than Chromium in any of these points to warrant payment.
I vastly prefer Firefox and always did for some reason (I keep testing Opera, Vivalidi, Chromium and what not but none of them clicked with me) but I still see you point, it would be hard for many to justify a high price even if they prefer it.
I'd still happily pay for Firefox (not Mozilla) but I'd consider it an insurance more than an investment at the moment.
- Privacy and security-centic browser-based email (to replace Gmail).
- Basic browser-based apps to replace Google docs, sheets, etc.
- A legit no logs VPN
- A privacy-centric replacement for Google analytics
- A privacy focused comms tool - a la Zoom, Whatsapp or Messenger.
In short, an alternative to Apple without the commitment to their hardware.I understand that many of these exist on their own. I'm asking (read: begging) for a unified offering (again a la Apple), one vendor to pay, and so on.
The problem with Firefox and free is that they're trying to compete again an entity (i.e., Google) that has the same type of product as a loss leader. That's a suicide mission on Mozilla's part. Without a blue ocean (e.g., Apple) they will struggle - just like every other company that doesn't seek higher less competitive ground.
Just putting this out there: The government should have grants for critical OSS infrastructure, like it does for medicine, scientific research, and even (though highly gutted now) art. It’s only because the web got started after the Regan years that this isn’t blindingly obvious to everyone. Why is FireFox getting its money from Google and not Uncle Sam?
If MDN closes, productivity for millions of web developers across the county will plummet. Why is this being left to charity?
I wonder if it is not so much "the cult of the free" as "the art of directionless misspending". Look at all the projects Mozilla got involved in that were not really related to the browser.
Also, from the list of jobs laid off there are some jobs that seem superfluous to the main core concept of browser development:
Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager, Director of Strategic Alliances and Platform Strategy - Mixed Reality, Global Event Maker, Senior University Recruiter, Senior Product Designer + Growth, Staff Business Strategist, Lead UX Designer for Brand, Senior Brand Designer, Head of Design, Senior Executive Assistant, Brand Designer.
I am not even sure what some of those jobs involve! Some even sound like invented jobs to me.
I mean, is a "brand designer" someone who actually draws graphics or is it just someone who thinks what the "brand" should involve? ie. The Web, a browser.
> Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager
Staff recruitment and retention roles.
> Director of Strategic Alliances and Platform Strategy - Mixed Reality
Easily mockable since it has "strategic" in it twice, but ultimately this role should either get money into FF or get FF into more platforms. Focus on mixed reality / AR seems questionable in retrospect.
> Global Event Maker
Did Mozilla have many events? I don't really remember hearing of any.
> Senior University Recruiter
Fairly obvious: recruit graduates from universities.
> Senior Product Designer + Growth
This actually sounds pretty core; someone has to define the product, and I don't think you really want that left to the forums.
> Lead UX Designer for Brand, Senior Brand Designer, Head of Design, Brand Designer
That may be one or two many designers, resulting in unnecessary UI churn.
> Senior Executive Assistant
Everywhere has one of these. PA to the boss. They tend to be surprisingly critical since they know what's going on even if they don't have formal responsibility.
If you look at the Mozilla events page, in the past few years they've held a huge amount of dev events/user groups/outreach outside of Europe and North America. I would expect that someone there was working to make sure they were connecting and recruiting devs globally.
And I can see why, when you had Facebook pushing their walled garden with WhatsApp and Internet.org in various spots in Africa and India. Mozilla was all about an open global internet.
Needing D&I simply means the company and its employees did not self-regulate. And not needing one doesn't mean you don't care or it's not important, just that you don't need one. You're probably not brushing your teeth right now and it's not because you don't think oral hygiene is important.
If you're one of the people who don't need to be educated then D&I is an annoyance. If you're one of the ones who do then D&I is an annoyance. And unfortunately many times it's more than just an annoyance, it makes matters worse by polarizing or radicalizing people further.
You don't necessarily need a function like this to fix a behavior. You don't need a Basic Human Decency Lead to achieve this in your company. You instill it with education starting at a young age, and then you filter for this at every step of the way, including via interviews, promotions, etc.
But if it's one of those companies they probably couldn't care less about D&I, whatever they have works just fine for them. They want to look like they care so they proudly announce such functions and measures. All the while the people responsible for being in that situation in the first place still hang around, working just a bit harder to do the same things they always did and make it look legit this time. That's usually the role of D&I, shielding the company from responsibility while not actually changing much, if anything.
Important as topics some people need to keep in the back of their minds while doing their jobs? Important as full time roles that are inherently out-of-hierarchy so that they conveniently need paycheck-induced status or else nobody will listen to them? Those are very different kinds of "important".
Because "diversity offenses" typically happens against minorities, which definitionally aren't most people. It's also a questionable use of funds in that the places that would hire one are probably less likely to need it. But treating everyone well and handling issues through HR as normal is no longer sufficient; a diversity and inclusion staff has become the requisite "Workers of the world, unite!" sign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...
Add to this that most people don't like being preached at not to be racist etc. when most already aren't.
Okay so I am a bit more confused now. You are comparing being told about diversity and inclusion in the workplace to communism?
> handling issues through HR as normal is no longer sufficient
I am almost certain most of these "diversity and inclusion staff" you speak of are part of HR, so yes, it is still normal.
I get it, you don't want to preached to about something you aren't, but isn't that life in general? Being told stuff daily that either doesn't apply to you, you already know, or would never do?
> I get it, you don't want to preached to about something you aren't, but isn't that life in general? Being told stuff daily that either doesn't apply to you, you already know, or would never do?
To me, that's not life, that's being micro-managed or treated like a child. I'd never want to work somewhere that treats employees like that.
Do you throw your hands in the air every time your lead reminds you of a due date you already knew? Do you skip "meetings that could have been emails"? I have yet to find a place that doesn't tell me something I already know or hold on my hand on some minor things. I just go about it, being upset over it isn't worth my time.
No, but were it a regular problem, I'd absolutely bring up that it's likely an annoyance and a productivity hit for most people and a good manager would try to help fix the issue.
No, I'm trying to draw an analogy. Companies over the past few years have been expected to vocally articulate a commitment to a certain set of social values. This typically involves hiring diversity staff, mandatory training, letters of solidarity, etc. The mission of the corporation is still to make money, just as is the mission of a greengrocer.
> isn't that life in general
Sure, it still happens, but if it happens repeatedly in the workplace, I might try to reduce it. I also sincerely doubt that a terrible racist person will stop being one because his company implements mandatory diversity training.
This sorts of stuff is very often experienced by staff as lame box-ticking exercises they have to suffer through annually or quarterly, put together by people who spend most of the time keeping their chair from floating to the ceiling, and were only hired to make things look better if anything bad happens ("well look, we did something, look at all these records of training videos and ridiculous quizzes we made everyone take!")
That may not have been the case at Mozilla but it absolutely is at a lot of bigcos and in government.
How are you so sure this version of it so rampant everywhere? I am genuinely curious why so many people state this is such a common occurrence yet I have yet to see it myself personally.
You may not have worked at or know many people who work at sufficiently boring workplaces. It's the default at those, and that's... most workplaces, among the ones big enough to have this kind of thing.
"Training" from HR means "watch dumb videos in a browser for two hours, then take a quiz you could have passed with a 100% score without watching the videos". If you're really unlucky it's some in-person variant that's the live equivalent of that. If this is not what you mean you're doing when you tell someone you've got "training" this week, you'll need to specify, because that's what all your fellow-suffering workers will assume it is. Many of them probably experience it at least annually, on a schedule, no matter how many times they've done essentially the same crap, and some more often.
I've been fortunate to be with small companies almost my entire career so I've experienced this first-hand exactly once, but my friend circle's not at small companies and not in tech. That's what they talk about when they talk about (complain about, commiserate over) "training". It's super common.
Viewing it as an annoyance is both “against” and very much
not an example of not caring.
I'm not saying this is your actual motivation, but it kind of comes across as a clumsy attempt of someone hostile to the idea to try to get people in favor to back off by conjuring an image of the maligned neutral that they think those in favor will be more sympathetic to than actual opponents, but failing to be able to even imagine what neutrality would look like when presenting the argument.
When people say they're "neither for or against, just annoyed" about something, they usually mean that they genuinely don't care about the underlying issue, and the annoyance comes from the idea that they have to care about it. I think this is pretty much just the maligned neutral you're describing.
> When people say they're "neither for or against, just annoyed" about something, they usually mean that they genuinely don't care about the underlying issue, and the annoyance comes from the idea that they have to care about it. I think this is pretty much just the maligned neutral you're describing.
It's not very nice to immediately be racist when someone says something that you could observe to be true, even in many an office not filled by "white, straight men".
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
I don't see how counteracting a history of racist discrimination with new, antiracist discrimination is ever going to eliminate discrimination. A system where people get jobs based on their race and gender isn't genuinely equal, even if every race and gender is allocated a proportionate share.
I see poverty as an orthogonal issue here, since there are plenty of African Americans from affluent families. If Microsoft's goal was helping people of any race break the cycle of poverty, I would consider that perfectly fair. Fighting historical racism with new-age racism in the opposite direction isn't the way to go.
I don’t want to jump into this particular garbage fire, but the answer to your second question (and implicitly your first) is in the post you’re responding to.
I find it somewhat off-putting that you would declare a bunch of standard tech industry jobs to be "superfluous", while at the same time admitting that you have no concept of what these roles even entail.
>you would declare a bunch of standard tech industry jobs to be "superfluous",
It looks like you're misquoting GP. Unless they edited it later and I didn't notice... the commenter said, "_seems_ superflous" not "_are_ superfluous". They said they were willing to be educated on what those roles did.
It feels awkward having to spell this out: Throwing a "seems" into a sentence, and ending with "but I am willing to be educated" doesn't make whatever precedes it innocuous.
Don't share if you know (and admit) that you have no idea what you are talking about. If all you want to do is learn, ask. Nobody is interested in ignorant assumptions.
Also you might take offense in my interpretation of what has been written but I did not misquote anything.
>It feels awkward having to spell this out: Throwing a "seems" into a sentence, and ending with "but I am willing to be educated" doesn't make whatever precedes it innocuous.
Yes, I'm aware of the rhetorical technique of the "question that's actually a veiled insult". E.g. "Why does Facebook/Airbnb/Dropbox have all those thousands of programmers?!? What do they all do?!?" ... are often not really sincere questions but really a humblebrag of commenter saying, "I can code a Facebook clone over the weekend with one hand tied behind my back...yada yada yada"
I hope my example above shows the we both have a shared understanding of unstated but implied messages in what people write. That said, I still think it's a more productive discussion to try to answer the question the way pjc50 did[1] rather than the retaliatory criticism of your reply.
>Nobody is interested in ignorant assumptions.
Well, those "ignorant assumptions" was (for several hours) the top-voted comment in this thread so it seems that many are interested in it. (I'm using "seems" in a sincere way.)
If you think it's unproductive to try to answer the commenter's question because you believe they were only trolling Mozilla, consider reframing it as "educating all the lurkers who upvoted that comment". The silent lurkers may have sincere curiosity about what all those roles actually do even if the commenter you responded to does not.
How do you think this makes it at all better? This "I only said you 'seem' like an <expletive>. That wasn't an insult." is something not even preschool children would be fooled by.
I think we should assume the most charitable interpretation, unless we all want to sound like angry old men. Keeps interaction pleasant in spite of anonymity.
Read the next words as well. that seem superfluous to the main core concept of browser development. It wasn't claimed that "no company should ever have those jobs", just that they don't really seem central to browser development.
>Look at all the projects Mozilla got involved in that were not really related to the browser.
Mozilla isn't just about the browser. It's about free and open internet. So of course they should be involved in authentication, search, messaging (mail, chat, and video), and secure dns. But they don't do any of those projects any more so whatever.
> Mozilla isn't just about the browser. It's about free and open internet.
Which is contradictory with what they have actually been doing for a decade, which is pushing, pushing and pushing again for Web-everything and everything-Web everywhere.
Even the items you list after, in Mozilla strategy, were meant be implemented inside and around a single piece of tech: a Web browser, over a single protocol (HTTP(S)); also replacing classical libraries with Web-tech (that's now new since the interface of their products has always been based on some form of it, but they kept on pushing the pedal of webisation).
Man... Mozilla could've been it's own Google if they wanted to be. Maybe they even would've had the clout to produce a privacy friendly ad network. What a wasted opportunity.
Given that the ad industry is filled by the kind of people who are vocally hostile to privacy (especially when it comes to "targeting ads"), this is a product without a market.
Not really. Mozilla desperately needs a market to make money, and consumers desperately need privacy preserving ad technology so creators don't sink under a lack of funding. The advertisers won't really care since fraud/bad clicks/bad data will just get priced into the bid anyway. Ad fraud is only bad for ad dashboards.
I'm not sure what you're saying. I've (sadly) worked with and met many adtech professionals over the years and they are just not the kind of people who would go in for more privacy.
adtech is a big area. It's not clear who you're talking about. People who sell ads? People who buy ads? People who make the networks?
AIUI, web sites that host ads probably want the ads to be shown so they can get their money. And people who buy ad space probably want the ads to be shown so they can market their product or service. And maybe the ads will be shown if users white list ad networks that respect privacy.
> Look at all the projects Mozilla got involved in that were not really related to the browser.
Do you have some examples of this? Also, their mission is beyond the browser:
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent." [0]
I've said it before but I'll say it again since it's relevant:
The cost of building and maintaining a competitive browser is huge and it's hard for Mozilla/Firefox to compete with Google/Chrome. Firefox saw its monthly active users go down by ~6% in the last 12 months [1]. I think Mozilla should consider stopping Firefox development and fork Chromium to focus on accessibility and privacy (both in and out of the browser). It's far from ideal--there'll only be one popular browser engine--but it's a trade off that could help Mozilla put more money and time towards its true mission: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all". The cost of building/maintaining Firefox is holding them back from putting more money and effort toward that mission (and I think that's why they're reducing their workforce [2]).
[2] "Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people." https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...
Can they run a browser which does not work by embedding safari? Can they run another browser which runs JS in JIT mode?
> Can I no longer "shape my own experience" if I use an iPhone with Safari?
Until relatively recently, the answer was "no". And Mozilla was one of the reasons people knew the alternatives world existed and people kept raising this as an issue with both default iPhone and Android browsers. Neither Safari nor Chrome allowed custom ad and trackers blocking.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make regarding Google. Sarcasm doesn't help with readability here.
I explicitly mentioned custom ad/tracker blocking because the ad blocking provided by iOS Safari was pretty simplistic. You couldn't block specific cookies, div on a page, or other behaviours as far as I understand.
If I care about my privacy, why would I want a third party app to have complete access to my browsing history? That’s the problem solved by iOS’s framework. The third party ad blocker has no visibility into your browsing history.
Safari is increasingly making it difficult for third party tracking cookies.
And Mozilla was one of the reasons people knew the alternatives world existed
So it look like you thought that Mozilla who no one outside of geek circles no exist, had more to do with people wanting third party browsers as the default than Google.
> Mozilla who no one outside of geek circles no exist
Let me remind you that 5 years ago FF had ~20% usage on the desktop. It was a commonly known name and even more popular at homes if you remove the enterprise usage.
5 years is ago is when the mentioned adblocking was added. Enterprise use is different because people normally don't have influence over that, but home use is actually their real choice.
Desktop, because ff mobile didn't really exist yet, so mobile segment is not really relevant for comparison.
Depends on what you mean by "because of". Adblocking became really popular with the adblock extension. When it was released it was a FF extension, because other browsers didn't really have the same functionality / ecosystem available. So in a sense Mozilla enabled adblock to become popular and something that people know about/want. I'm sure Apple didn't say "FF had it so we have to". Instead, Mozilla/FF enabled the ecosystem years ago, where adblocking became both possible and popular, leading to inclusion in iOS.
Apple’s method of ad blocking - having a JSON file that gives the browser engine rules is relatively browser intensive - at least in regards to what mobile processors could do during the iOS 8 era. Apple didn’t even support it on 32 bit phones that did run iOS 8.
Apple could have only shipped it two years sooner for iOS. iOS 8 was the second version of iOS that supported 64 bit processor.
Apple didn’t just come up with the idea of ad blocking because of Firefox. Apple couldn’t implement the form of ad blocking that Safari uses on its mobile processors and still keep Safari performant before the iOS 8/iPhone 6 era. You could tell the performance difference on the iPhone 5s (the first 64 bit iPhone). They didn’t even support it on 32 bit phones.
While I agree with your last sentence to some extent, I do believe that having a vibrant, viable Mozilla does serve to empower Internet users in a somewhat similar way as the GPL does.
Linux and other GPL software I believe has served as a viable alternative to closed/walled gardens like the Apple ecosystem (and I say that from my Macbook with my iPhone and iPad close at hand). Every time we lament the issues of loss of user power in walled gardens, I think it's substantially true that "it could be even worse" if there were no countervailing forces, like Mozilla.
If your mission statement is too concrete, it can actively prevent you from looking at opportunities.
Mission statements are like a wind in the sails of the corporation. It doesn't replace the role of the rudder (that's the job of the C level leaders), but it does lead you in a particular direction.
It's cute, to be sure, but it felt like kind of a slap in the face when I saw that rebrand logo front and center on the blog post about Mozilla laying off 250 staff.
I lean more to setup nonprofits like Mozilla as Cooperatives, that way it will attract less the wrong kind of people (execs aiming to get millions of dollars in comps) and the money can be shared among the people doing the grinding.
I don't get the heartbreak over Mozilla, the only people I know who use Mozilla products are tech enthusiasts and people who would fall into the political spectrum of "cyber activist". It's not sad when an org that ignored the bulk of users to chase idealism finds itself beaten out by corps that decided to focus on giving users what they want.
Overwhelming sentiment seems to be the opinion that Mozilla should be focusing on Firefox but at the same time raising vague concerns about Servo being cut. Servo was an R&D project that fulfilled its purpose with respect to Firefox.
The problem I have with non-free software isn't that it's free, but that the community and support are much, much worse than OSS alternatives.
Back in the site-backed-by-CMS days, I was always on the lookout for something better than Wordpress. Every time I thought I landed on a good alternative, I'd start to hunt down some esoteric needs that just didn't exist, and discussions with the staff who ran said solutions were usually fruitless. Meanwhile, the answer to literally any problem with Wordpress was just sitting there on Stack Overflow.
Today I've moved on to JAMstack, and while everything is massively superior from both a consumer and developer perspective, the headless CMS offerings — which seem like a natural fit for the OSS world — are mostly proprietary and very, very expensive. It feels just like trying Wordpress alternatives, where the support is uncommunicative and the community is nonexistent.
My clients can afford to pay for a good headless CMS, but I'm seriously considering using Wordpress API for "headless" because the paid options are a pain in the ass.
Perhaps the problem is the reverse: The more things that aren't free, the more money people need. By expanding the amount of free things, that reduces the amount of money required to produce new free things. Put another way, if 'software is eating the world', then if it's free software the cost of goods and services should drop dramatically.
> Put another way, if 'software is eating the world', then if it's free software the cost of goods and services should drop dramatically.
Software cost generally isn't a "dramatic" part of cost, wherever you look. Because of zero marginal cost, the price of widely-used software approaches zero naturally. Only highly specialized software commands high prices, those reflect the cost of developing or replacing it, as well as the value that it is providing.
Is that true? I can buy a blank laptop for £215 (https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/gemini-IV/) and then install Debian for free. The same laptop with Microsoft Windows / Office costs £352. So I'd say that in this case at least, software is a dramatic part of the cost.
You were talking about the "cost of goods and services", by which I assumed you meant COGS as a factor of running a business.
Let's say you put a minimum wage worker to some task on that laptop. Over the amortization period (3 years) of that laptop, that extra cost of the Windows license amounts to maybe 0.1% of the cost of that worker, assuming they use nothing but that laptop to perform the work.
Now, let's say that the worker needs to learn how to use Linux and it costs you, say, 20 hours in opportunity cost to get them up to speed. Linux is now more expensive than Windows.
Okay, let's go with your figure of 0.1% of the cost of the worker. My point is that if society were to switch to Open Source software that 0.1% is compounded because all the other goods and services that a business has to buy become cheaper. This then means that they can lower their prices while still making the same profit. Which in turn lowers the cost of inputs to other businesses in a virtuous cycle.
So using your analysis of the single worker, which I agree with, it actually makes a very big difference when applied to all workers.
To address your point about the training costs of moving from proprietary to Open Source, again this disappears if the move happens at scale. It disappears because every worker would have learnt Linux at their previous job (or at school / college etc.) and so in fact the cheapest thing becomes to use Linux.
What your argument demonstrates is the network effects of proprietary software, whereby if you're the first to use Open Source software it's a disadvantage, but if everyone used it, it would be an overall advantage to society.
The question then becomes, how do we get from here (often proprietary) to there (mostly Open Source)?
> So using your analysis of the single worker, which I agree with, it actually makes a very big difference when applied to all workers.
It doesn't, because it's still just 0.1%. That may be billions upon billions of dollars in aggregate, but per unit sold, it's still just 0.1%.
So, if your question is "how much cheaper could goods become by switching all production to free software?", then answer would be 0.1%, if we assume that 0.1% is the average share of software licenses in COGS.
In practice, software licenses averaged over all industries might be 1% or higher. Again, that might be trillions of dollars, but it's still just 1% per unit sold. Also, that money isn't evaporating, it's mostly going into the pockets of people who build that software.
Sure, there's a profit margin in software development, maybe 10% on average. So, if you eliminated that profit, you'd save 10% of 1%. You'd still have to pay for that development, even if it is free software. If you eliminate the profit motive, what governs development? Some form of bureaucracy. We already know bureaucracies are inefficient. So you would probably end up paying more to develop "free" software.
From an efficiency perspective, free software is strictly unnecessary, because the marginal cost of software is zero, the cost of developing it is a constant, and therefore its price naturally converges to zero as its development is amortized.
Let's say OpenSSL was proprietary and cost $1000. That would add $1000 to the cost of developing anything that uses it, until a cheaper competitor comes around. How expensive is it to implement SSL? Not that expensive. How many people use SSL? A lot! Do the math, make the business case, and you would probably find that you can turn a profit selling a competing implementation at only 10$. Why is this not happening? Well, because somebody already made OpenSSL free and it's "good enough".
It is a misunderstanding of market forces to assume the compounding effect of free software licenses would be greater than the compounding effect of cheap software licenses that the market produces all by itself.
People can and do pay for "free" web services like Firefox. They pay with their personal data. This is exchanged into regular currency via the advertising industry. Services that cannot or will not exploit this income stream will inevitably run into financial trouble.
Economically, spending personal data makes sense for a lot of people. Unlike money, you generate personal data continuously and effortlessly. You can spend it multiple times, many people spend it with little obvious downside, and the process is completely frictionless. Consider the effort involved with setting up, maintaining and eventually cancelling a subscription to a money-financed service, vs. a data-financed one, which you simply start and stop using at your leisure.
Some people do not like this situation. They object to the entire notion of personal data being used as a currency. They attempt to prevent it via advocacy and legislation. Advocacy does not seem to work, at least on its own. Many people, if you explain the situation to them in terms of privacy, will express a theoretical desire not to trade away their personal data. However, their behaviour is not consistent with this. Faced with a choice between using data-financed and money-financed services, the majority chooses the former.
Legislation attempts to resolve this dilemma, either by outlawing the use of personal data as a currency at all, or more often by making the spending of personal data more a onerous and explicit process, in the hope that a closer equivalence in terms of convenience combined with repeated reminders of people's stated preference to maintain their privacy will alter their behaviour.
Personally, I'm skeptical this type of legislation will succeed. Clicking a few checkboxes and cookie banners is still far more convenient than giving my credit card details to every single website or app I want to use. And most humans act in opposition to their stated ideals and desires in myriad ways, every single day.
I recommend Michael Widenius's video[1] about "Doing business with Open Source" it goes trough different models, and explains the reasoning behind MySQL license model, although I'm aware how different is a browser from a database it might help to think about this problem from different angles.
In the case of Firefox, if I'm not mistaken they do only consumer focus products, maybe they could release something that companies are willing to pay for.
They could captilize on the good reputation while it lasts, and maybe employees that resonate with Mozilla history will promote their products to their bosses for free.
This makes a lot of sense. I would rather they either built amazing orthoganal SaaS products and charged me for them, or had some >$100k ACV enterprise plays.
On the former, it's of course a massive shift off of their current focus and they'd get a lot of kickback from the community, but you could imagine a world where they had a model like 37 Signals/Basecamp/Hey etc. On the latter, I don't know anything about the browser market in proper enterprise and if there are many opportunities for products there - you would presume there could be some value capture though.
I hate to break it to you developers and tech people out there, but Firefox isn't used by consumers. It has become a niche web browser for you guys. I've been a developer for 20 years and briefly used it in 2009-2010. Then Chrome took over and I switched to what my customers use. I have zero reasons to use Firefox. I do feel bad about since it is dear to the community of developers I am part of. In the end though, and logically, I don't have any incentive to use Firefox.
Mozilla in my mind is a lab company with one product to monetize it: Firefox. At the end of the day though if you're product can't bring in enough money, you need to cut. Seems to be what's happening.
I happen to be staying with a non-technical man of around retiring age at present. Yesterday he had his laptop returned from a service which included an OS reinstall. After that, Firefox was installed and Chrome was not; he knows of Firefox, but has been a Chrome user for whatever reason. He observed: “Firefox? But no Google. I suppose they’ve installed Firefox and didn’t reinstall Google. Hmm. Firefox. Is it any good?” I responded: “well, I use Firefox”. So now he’s using Firefox and having no difficulty. (I then watched him hunt-and-peck “www.google.com” into the address bar. I told him that he didn’t need to do that, he could just type his search term straight away. In this case, he wanted to access Gmail. I despair sometimes, really I do. But this all matched what he’d been doing in Chrome, it wasn’t anything specific to Firefox.)
The observations here:
1. Most casual users don’t actually care which browser they use. (Citation needed, to be sure, but among casual users, I suspect it’s the substantial majority.)
2. Corollary: often I have seen cases where a different browser is installed, and the user just accepts it and keeps going. This has been used most parasitically by Google, bundling their browser with other things (an obnoxious practice in the industry at large that is I think not as common as it used to be, but is still widespread in certain niches). A great many users that have Chrome don’t even know how it ended up on their computer; it just… became their default browser at some point.
3. Google as a whole has been extremely underhanded in its marketing and positioning of Chrome, abusing their position of strength in one industry in order to dominate another. There has been some grumbling about this in legal circles, but not a great deal of action; yet if current trends continue, antitrust lawsuits will assuredly come. He wasn’t calling it “Chrome”, he was calling it “Google”. Google search, Google mail, Google browser, Google horizontals.
I think it is actually the other way around. We technically minded people are mostly the tastemakers on this kind of topics.
I know a lot of "normal" people using Firefox with privacy add-ons, mostly because someone knowledgeable told them to. I have often seen these people very receptive when I tell them why I deem Firefox a better Choice then Chrome.
I do however see no way to convince my coworkers to switch. And look at hacker news threads on this topic. It's always some variation of "I don't like google collecting everything I do but Mozilla did this one thing once so I can never ever use Firefox!"
So if we, the people who are supposed to be in the know don't recommend it, why would anyone who is not in the know want to use it?
I don't think this is particularly true in the case of Chrome.
In the case of FF, maybe, but Chrome had a well-oiled marketing machine behind it.
I was volunteer coaching a HS debate team, none of whom had any interest in "tech", and they all of my students switched to Chrome from FF/IE with zero input from a supposed tastemaker like myself, and Chrome had no extensions/adblock on launch, which kept me from adopting it.
I would gladly pay for MDN access. Mozilla has done a wonderful work with that, it's a goto place for any kind of web related documentation (and I'm probably not the only one).
I am SO waiting for Mozilla to give my ANY endpoint to throw my money at, and I bet I am not alone. Why cannot I have an Firefox mug? Or get that VPN running in Europe finally?
I agree with the author that this expectation everyone has that things are actually free hurts everyone.
Some people say they'd pay for Firefox. Some say they'd support it, but nothing outside of the main browser. But are there really enough people to fund something as big as Mozilla?
Sure there might be some excesses (like I keep reading about the CEO's salary every other comment), but it seems few realize that the commercial ventures were created for a reason: to bring money in.
If Mozilla only ever worked on the browser, would they have survived up until now? I reckon no.
I do think they should create some sort of recurring donation system in a Patreon style (even without rewards, maybe with nice lists for the biggest donors) and test the waters. Are there really a lot of people willing to put money where their mouth is? I hope so, but my gut feeling also says no.
> But are there really enough people to fund something as big as Mozilla?
I believe so. My favorite example is JetBrains. They're making about half of what Mozilla is Making (if you include the other commercial competitors, it's much probably closer, and they're competing with Microsoft giving a free IDE away), people are happy to pay. JetBrains' products are significantly better than the free alternatives though.
In essence, people overvalue free goods. This means it is very hard for a paid product to compete against free goods, even when the paid product is itself cheap and better quality. This explains a lot about the state of the Internet, where a large number of eyeballs go to free products maintained by a large companies with other revenue streams or to low quality junk. It also makes me, unfortunately, doubtful that any efforts to directly monetize Firefox will be successful.
Why don’t others consider Firefox as worth funding?
The EU is spending 1e9€ over a decade to build a neuroinformatics platform.
It seems like having a major browser not beholden to corporate interests on another continent could be at least as beneficial as speculative science projects
(1000 employees at 50k€/yr puts Firefox in a similar price range)
Governments need to communicate with whomever they govern and in their language. It should be a strategic imperative to have a browser that isn't reporting back to Silicon Valley with every click and that can be the defacto in a given locale.
Browsers are expected to be for free. The work done on developing the things has been done. At least up to where they are now. There is no god given right for browser developers to be on a money train. We have standards and governments that give a damn about things like education should be making sure that they have a standards compliant browser for their citizens to use. None of this up to the free market malarkey as it doesn't work with a free product.
Problem is there is no realistic way to fund Firefox development that I know of - there's only ways to fund Mozilla - and that was not my intention originally and less and less now.
I value time the further into my professional life I get. So for me, paying for good quality documentation, wether it comes in form of a website or a book, is a better bargain than me trying to read up on 10 blog posts and going down the rabbit hole of the source code.
> This brings us to the core point I’d like to make: the culture of volunteering in web development, and especially within the Mozilla segments of our community. To my mind it’s not only outdated and should be replaced, it should never have been allowed to take root in the first place
Never 'been allowed'? By whom?
This 'cult of the free' is also historically how software development was done long before the web ever existed - the 'cult of not free' arising from the PC era is the one encroaching on open software, and it's attendant software profit incentive is largely what created the need to document for-profit browser incompatibilities which the author is complaining needs commercial support..
Regarding donations that the author mention, it is always tricky to balance between getting a stable revenue stream (monthly patronage) and simplicity for the user (one time payment so I don't have one more expense to keep track of).
As a user/consumer I found that setting a monthly sponsorship budget helps. I spend a part of it monthly when available (ex through Patreon), then sum up what is left by the end of the year and do one time donations (for projects that work that way, ex Wikipedia or Thunderbird).
I'm curious how others sponsor software or projects you care about?
I think this comes down to the old socialism vs capitalism debate. Industries gain a lot at relying on 'free products' that are most of the time financed by states (think roads, infrastructure, etc...), but you can find counter examples where privately owned & sold products work better.
Concerning software, I agree the situation is a bit different as states are hardly strong players there. But I would disagree on the fact that the 'clut of free' is a sin. The whole industry gained a lot in terms of openness, sharing of best-practices and just innovation. Try finding how to build a washing-machine from scratch or just getting the PCB layout of your radio, it's a really painful process.
But I would agree that I'm worried too on the future of software, but I would rather push for more financing of open source (& free) projects - by states or NGOs - rather than pushing the whole industry to go sales first.
Why "states or NGO's" rather than nimble, grassroots campaigns via crowdfunding? The latter seems to be working quite well for a bunch of projects, while "institutional", politicized funding is a lot harder to come by and brings its own unwanted distortions.
You're right I think crowdfunding campaigns can be a really useful tool for such financing. Altought, I think recently, crowdfunding have a bit diverted from their original purpose to become marketing tools for some companies.
I think the ideal solution is hard to find, but I doubt we will come to something stable without a bit of regulation.
Micropayments are proven to work but everyone seems to hates micropayments. Software is good when regularly updated but everyone hates on subscriptions, claiming to be OK with one time payment but that business model got almost wiped out because people actually don’t like to pay one the (sustainable) one time fee too.
Pay with your data and liberties business model seems to be the darling of the masses.
Cult of free is actually just that and Mozilla is also part of it as it is making its revenue from Google.
I am not big fan of the series so I would not know what is the current situation(maybe now they also do annoying ads? I wouldn't know), but essentially if you want to play all day long you need to chip in, otherwise you wait for life refills. There are also pay-to-win options(consumable power ups) but you don't have to use it. It is a delight for the people who are into the genre, my mother plays the game since years and she is loving it.
What I liked was that, the deal is sipmle: We will give you a game that you like but if you want to play it a lot or be given an easy time you will have to pay. This is in contrast of all the ad-based software out there where the deal is "We made something that you want however we would like you to consider doing something else by clicking on our ads, we insist".
I myself play a lot of PUBG Mobile and it's also an excellent experience. It's free to play, ads's don't interrupt and I can play as much as I would like but If I like to customise my characters appearance, then I need to pay.
Fund the business. Yes, everyone hates on them but there's a reason why every game and every software is switching to "pay for the extra feature or resource or pay monthly" model. I also find it far less fun-killing than the ad-supported ones. The ad-supported games and software(I will count the websites also in this) has terrible user experience as it is geared to interrupt you and make you do something else.
Free(as in beer) software has become a bait to direct you to something else. You want to drive a virtual car? Here is your virtual car but why don't you check the bubble popping game first? Here are your bubbles to pop but why don't you try jumping over hops instead? Here are the hops you may want to jump but wouldn't you not like to get angry for this political issue first?
This endless ad-supported stream of offers, I believe, is taking the oxygen of truly high quality works. Why would you buy the 0.99$ app or game when you can use the free version, right?
I see in-app purchases and subscription models as quite different from micropayments. Micropayments would mean something like Spotify - you pay some amount up front, and the company pays artists a tiny amount for each time someone listens to their work.
A quick search suggests that that amount is on average less than half a US cent per play on Spotify, and similar services range from about 1/10 to 2 cents per play. It's not a system that the artists are very happy with.
It’s the same thing but they pay programmers and designers instead of musicians. It’s actually better because most of these programmers and designers make decent amount of money - unlike Spotify.
> Mozilla should take a small step in that direction by requesting donations from inside Firefox — on an entirely voluntary basis.
That's a sure fire way to annoy users. Mozilla have tried various ways diversify their funding. Vocal users have reacted strongly against anything they perceive as "ads" in their browser, no matter how benign. And yes "please support us" will be seen as an ad/nag. Just as it was when they promoted Mozilla donations for a time.
I use Firefox because it does things that Chrome won't like extensions on mobile and better (and riskier) extension capabilities overall. So many of their projects stink of indulgence and adventurism rather than anything that differentiates them from other browsers.
Right, because the enhancements directly benefit the company donating the kernel code. A similar thing happens with compilers: Sony donate code to Clang/LLVM.
Couldn't that apply to web browsers too, though? If a company stands to benefit by some browser feature becoming widely available, perhaps it would make sense for them to do the work on the major browsers and donate the code. From their point of view, this might be better than waiting for the browser vendors (who may view it as a low priority) to do it.
I don't know of this ever happening, but I can't see a reason it never could.
The trouble is Firefox is, objectively, not a major browser. I think it's below 5% share at the moment. If companies were to contribute to a browser it'd be Chromium. But there's rarely a reason to do so as Google itself has more than enough resources to throw at Chrome whenever needed.
Mozilla needs to "rent" the browser, just like every other application or app on the market today. $5/mo, or $50/yr. They could continue to give away a version that, say, doesn't allow plugins or something.
Out of the question. Firefox is not Opera. It's Free* and Open Source software, and that's central to its appeal. You can't treat it as a paid-for proprietary software product.
* Hopefully this doesn't need to be said, but Free in this context refers to software freedom, not to price.
That's utter bollocks. This has been central to the debate since it started in the 90's. You absolutely can charge for Free Software, and many people have done so. I collectively paid a lot of money for boxed releases of Red Hat and SuSE back in the day, to support development. The risk, of course, is that someone else will take the codebase, and produce a free-as-in-beer version (ala White Box Linux). I say: let them. I'm willing to pay for a supported, professional version, and I have a history of doing so.
I don't know of a single Free Software project that gets significant income from selling the software. Introducing the option of paying for Firefox would change nothing, as people would continue to download Firefox without paying, and Firefox would continue to auto-update itself without charge.
People are already able to donate to Mozilla (although not directly to Firefox), if that's what they want to do.
> I collectively paid a lot of money for boxed releases of Red Hat and SuSE back in the day, to support development.
Right, exactly. It's essentially an optional donation, and sadly, few people choose to make optional donations.
> I'm willing to pay for a supported, professional version
Charging for premium support is a different idea.
I'm not opposed to paid Free Software support, in principle I think it's a great idea, but I doubt it would generate much revenue.
> So allow me to make a modest proposal: build in a donations function in Firefox itself — for instance by adding a simple “Please support us” message to the update page you get to see whenever you update the browser, and by adding a Donations item to the main menu.
The core problem is the product itself. People haven't paid for web browsers in 25 years.
Rather than trying to fit the square peg of "ending free" into the round hole of browser software, a more sustaining change would be for Mozilla to develop a product that people will pay for. One they have not been conditioned over the course of decades to get for free.
In other words, Mozilla needs a product (or service) built not for the masses but a small group of people who:
1. have a problem that needs to be solved; and
2. have money to spend
Whether or not Mozilla has the leadership or even culture to pull this off is another question.
I remember when free access to the web and its technologies was something good. From having a free browser, free web server (as in Apache/Linux, not the hardware/connection) to being able to read the very HTML code that's used to send you that stuff.
Now it's paywalls, gated communities and Valley technologists crying about moochers from the steering wheels of their Teslas.
The problem of the cult of the free is a microcosm of the larger global struggle against capitalism. Who will (or rather, can) build an open and secure browser?
Obviously, a corporation (like Google, MS, Apple, etc) can't be trusted because they have too many conflicting interests. The MS monopoly lawsuit was about browsers; how people connect to the internet is a big huge deal and there's a lot of money and power to be gained if you become top-dog in that space.
Just ask Google, whose dominance of the browser space with Chrome has massively shaped the way to web works today, making it much friendlier to invasive DRM, micropayment schemes, invasive advertising, and many other consumer exploiting features.
So you need an independent source for a browser, but browsers are big and very complicated and need strong security and on and on. It's neither easy nor cheap, but why would the average person want to pay for an independent browser when MS, Apple, and Google will all give you a great browser "for free?"
There is no real answer to this under our current economic model. Donations and fund-raising are patches on a broken system, usually requiring additional support from advertisers, corporate donations, influencing foundations, and so on. If the money isn't coming from consumers buying or donating, then it's coming from someone with money and a vested interest that their money is buying influence for.
The Internet was built on public money from university grants and military funding. But the internet was stolen from the public decades ago and sold to big capital. Until we fix that, Mozilla is just another in a long line of past and future downsizings as the corporate world continues to pillage and privatize the Internet.
5 years ago it would have been worse because the community was smaller back then. But it's grown since and more companies have adopted Rust, contributing back by maintaining own open source projects.
Years ago I worked for a company called Redgate. We bought a widely used free tool called .NET Reflector from its original author. The idea was that the recognition we received from owning and continuing to provide .NET Reflector for free would translate into additional sales of our other tools.
It didn't work.
For other related examples see the numerous social media stars/influencers who have moderate to large followings, but don't necessarily make that much money. The majority don't make enough to give up their day jobs.
Recognition often isn't worth that much. The real test of how much people value something is whether they'll pay for it.
A good example of how little recognition is worth, thought I’m slightly surprised I never heard about that purchase given I did hear about your flying sharks.
It’s a shame the sponsored spaceflight never worked out; but I guess even though Virgin Galactic still isn’t flying customers, that scheme brought more recognition than Reflector.
Indeed: it's frustrating that we were legally obligated to offer a cash alternative. It would have been cool to send someone into space regardless of any other benefits, real or imagined.
Anyway, I wasn't involved at all, so you have to understand that this is my personal viewpoint and not the view of the company but, again, the idea was that the recognition from that contest would translate into additional sales of our tools.
I remember that! I think it actually hurt the brand of Redgate. I just remember .NET Reflector being a free shareware tool which everybody used, and suddenly Redgate bought it and made it cost money.
Mozilla should abandon Firefox, fork Chromium, create the gold standard privacy-focused Chromium variant, and they should ask for donations. But they won't, and I think we'll have forgotten Firefox existed in about 10 years.
Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.