Hey, Laura. Fuck you. Fuck your profits and your corporate greed. Enshit yourself till you close down.
Firefox closing down would be pretty big loss since we’d lose all our serious non-Chrome/Chromium-based alternatives
hey maybe firefox just wants to show that ladybird is worth the wait
What if we could have a world that wasn’t powered by ads? I’d like to get past this “only one way to run the internet” train of thought.
I’m just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It’s exhausting.
It’s either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I’d suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there’s enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
Says who?
Plenty of sites out there just run by people who want to run them, no fee, no ads.
It’s people who want to capitalize on having a website that have this problem.
And let’s be clear, it’s their problem. Not mine. If they can’t turn a profit with/without ads, that’s not my concern, that’s theirs. But they setup these web sites/services with the intention of making money through ads and surveillance, so let’s not go around acting like these orgs just won’t make it without us (there are exceptions, say archive.org, and guess what, people donate to them because they believe in the cause).
The problem is a bunch of people figured out the web was a brilliant way to data mine for profit. I actually had this discussion with a friend circa 1993. If we could see it then, imagine how many other people already had plans.
I would happily pay to download Firefox if they removed telemetry, ads, analytics. Security updates could be free, feature updates could have a small fee. Something similar.
There is a way to fund Firefox without user data and ads. Will it be as profitable, who knows, because quite simply, the vast majority do not want to make it a reality and loose what profit, control, or power they currently hold onto.
I’ve always said this about software. Let me license a specific version, with free minor updates until the next major release.
If the new version has something I need/want, I may be willing to buy it again.
I use lots of old software, on my PC and my phone. It works, why do I need the new version? And some, the new version sucks so bad I refuse to upgrade (FolderSync on Android, for example).
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
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I subscribe to Nebula because f*ck Google, and I’d pay for Kagi if I could just simply pay $X for Y searches with no subscription BS.
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The enshitification of Firefox continues 😢
Cory Doctorow: “Disenshittify or die!” (YouTube)
Frankly, I’m surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt…
May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.
June 2024: Mozilla purchases Anonym, an AdTech company.
Not everyone?
Does anyone?
Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it’s kinda sad to watch a previously good org die
Fork, blah, blah, blah.
When one of these forks doesn’t depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.
Does anyone?
I don’t want to see Mozilla shutdown because Google no longer pays them, or due to the loss of another funding source.
Diversifying their income sources is a good thing.
At this point, I don’t see many other options to keep everything going for Firefox. If they somehow lose the go*gle money they use to keep themselves going, they need another revenue source and I severely doubt there are enough Firefox users willing to pay enough to keep it going as it currently does. Don’t like it, but I’m gonna at least play devil’s advocate.
It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current “donation” option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.
They could try not having an overinflated budget?
I don’t know a thing about their budget, so I’m not qualified to make any comments about how good or bad they are doing at managing it or make any comments.
Where would you cut?
Are you kidding?
I mean I don’t love it, but I’m also not sure what the argument is supposed to be about how this ties to browser market share. Mozilla made $593 million from their most recently released financials. The CEO made $6.9 million. My calculator tells me that’s 1.16%.
So is the argument that Mozilla that if they set the CEO salary to $0, used it all on more developers, that would spin up a browser experience that’s so improved it would lead to more market share? A 1% change in Mozilla’s spending will bring them to 50% market share? 40%? 20%?
What’s the cause and effect here? Do we even actually know that that’s true, that it even has anything whatsoever to do with development choices at all? I get that the CEO is an easy target but I think assuming that is explaining market share ignores things like Google’s dominance of search and ads, and how those piles of cash drive initiatives like Android and Chromebooks, which helps propel Chrome to dominant market share. Those are the drivers of market share. I don’t even think people have even tried to begin to think through this argument in real terms, it’s just a lot of knee-jerk reaction to news stories disconnected from any specific idea of cause and effect.
The CEO is for a good reason an easy target: Show me another company where this level of incompetence is rewarded with steady salary increases?!? (I am afraid you’ll be able to. ;-))
Given your calculation is correct, you are correct that paying the CEO nothing would not make a big difference for Mozillas income. Although it would hopefully open the road for a better CEO.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all. If all is a function of the environment and the tides of the market, we can easily replace her with ChatGPT and have the same results w/o wasting money.
At the end of the day, we are exactly where we have been literally a decade ago: Finding a sustainable business model for Mozilla/Firefox. Once more: This core problem of Mozilla/Firefox has been well known for over a decade by now, and again the CEOs only answer is advertisement. Why do we pay money for the bullshit every first semester MBA student would come up with a brainstorming within the first 3 minutes.
Mozilla survives thanks to Google and their (rightful) fears of being outed as a monopoly.
The discussion is always if Mozilla could survive on donations. I do not now if they could. I still think there are a lot of actors with an interest of an independent browser, even whole governments. What I know for sure is, I won’t donate to Mozilla as long as incompetent CEOs are payed.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all.
That’s my argument? I don’t recall supporting the CEO pay. Pretty sure I said I don’t like it. And just to be clear, I am finding it hard to justify that much for a CEO. So that’s not turning my argument against me, because that was never my argument.
What it would really look like to, as you say, “turn my argument against me” would be something that speaks to Google’s search monopoly, ads monopoly, and hundredfold advantage in revenue, and why, in light of those facts, they would imply that Mozilla should have more market share. Like if I forgot to carry a two somewhere in my math, or why they are actually proof of a synergy that Mozilla is benefiting from that I’m not accounting for. Those would be examples of turning the arg against me, and I’m happy to hear it if there is one.
Not sure if it s a language issue (non native speaker), but seems we have the same goals.
So sorry, if I misunderstood your position/point!
My point is mostly, that it seems every browser is mostly US controlled directly or transitively, and it should be in the interest of every other country/nation to have a free, open source, not US controlled browser on the market… but given the sad reality in my country, I’ll probably be long dead before corruption/lobby-ism and sheer stupidity of the the government will come to this conclusion. :-(
So it looks like the CEO of mozilla is bleeding firefox to pad his salary. Thats disappointing. Are we sure firefox wasn’t simply taken over by a private-equity firm?
It’s 1.16%. I don’t love it but claiming it’s bleeding them to death is, I think, not what we’re looking at. I think they just recognize their exposure because any given year 80 to 90% of the revenue is coming from their agreement with Google, and they’re screwed if they can’t diversify their income a bit more.
Any where more substantial to address the shortfall expected without Google default money?
And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
I’m afraid they aren’t wrong. The majority of people aren’t going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we’d end up with only the big players having usable sites.
People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.
Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website’s target audience not the user’s personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don’t see why they couldn’t go that way.
You posted this on Lemmy.
I don’t believe a web browser should be designed specifically for one business model, period.
There are plenty of free sites. Truly free, with no ads.
There are plenty of paid sites, supported by subscribers.
There are plenty of sites funded by educational institutions, nonprofits, or similar.
There used to be plenty of sites that were supported by non-invasive ads.
I don’t give a damn if everyone uses Facebook and Google. That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.
That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.
From what I have seen, it does… if you want to have a popular site that stays running well, and don’t charge your users for access.
That’s a problem for site operators, not for browser developers.
You might be right, but I don’t think that’s a problem they’re going to solve all on their own, meanwhile the rest of users will suffer.
So, instead, they should cater to an industry that has long been a known vector for malware, abuse, and PII theft?
that is the only current accepted alternative to paying for website access, yes
if you have better ideas though, we’d all love to hear them
Your stance appears to be roughly “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas, so let’s keep doing objectively harmful things”.
The simplest idea is not to accept the premise that an objectively harmful business model that only brings value to a shrinking minority is acceptable. Maybe commercialism of every part of the web isn’t something that humanity needs. As for paying for access, there are plenty of extant models that have never been attempted with any seriousness.
Then again, the whole Linux ecosystem is able to thrive without bending the knee to the ad industry. There’s no reason that a web browser cannot also thrive without ads except for a lack of desire to do so.
Maybe if people/browser makers didn’t bend over to this nonsense, the websites would figure it out. You know, the people who’s problem that is (because yes, if you run a website and want to make money off it, that’s your problem to fix not mine, and it’s certainly not my job to cater to it).
It’s a problem for users.
Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.
It was a different place, but worked ok.
Surveillance advertisement was already around.
Social Media platforms simply capitalized on it.
And users sucked it up for “convenience”.
If your product doesn’t generate enough revenue to turn a profit, you don’t have a viable business
I don’t want the internet to be exclusively business
I feel like I’m reading a different article than everyone else. The comments made me think the article would be adding advertisements, but it seems to be trying to find a way forward to facilitate advertisements while maintaining privacy.
Without technical details I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I know lemmy is largely “Mozilla bad”, but I’m just not sure the comments are in line with the proposal.
Thank you for breathing a bit of sanity into this thread. Same here. Some commenters were like “oh there’s already too many adds” and I was like wait, what? They’re not adding more adds to Firefox, are they? The article doesn’t suggest that.
The “Mozilla bad” crowd echo chamber has gotten completely out of control in my opinion, and it’s an avalanche of low effort comments, dozens of upvotes, and it’s kind of a self sustaining echo chamber that exists because it exists.
Yes, that’s the same thing every time Firefox is mentioned here. It’s like people here WANT to be angry.
It’s like people here WANT to be angry.
Outrage addiction is absolutely, 1000% a thing.
In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech it’s built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.
Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.
Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Bingo.
As if de-anonymizing hasn’t been demonstrated, repeatedly.
No one starts a company because they care about people
Oh you mean one of the only two reasons I use this fucking thing? Ad blocking and privacy?
You’re shitting on both. That’s like… Idk, Craftsman making tools out of plastic and removing the lifetime warranty… Wtf do I even need you for then?
Eh, I care about a third: browser engine diversity. If they drop Gecko, I’m out, there’s literally nothing left to keep me here.
Funny that’s exactly what Black & Decker did the moment they got their hands on the Craftsman brand
Did you read the article?
I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.
I was wrong.
I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.
So it goes.
Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant’s grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.
How about not have a multi-million-dollar-costing CEO? Seems a bit rich (pun intended) for a supposed non-profit org.
Yeah I’m not defending that but CEO pay only rounds to like 1% of their total expenditures. Developing a browser is expensive.
only 1%? That’s about on par with a fortune 500 company, which supposedly Mozilla is not.
Ideas:
- directly ask for donations, and actually use those donations to fund browser development
- build an add-on to pay sites instead of seeing ads - Mozilla could take a cut here
- push harder on existing, optional add-ons that generate revenue, like their VPN
But the article here reads like, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas. Have ads…”
What makes you think that developing a free web browser needs to grant anyone any income?
Do you think developers don’t have to eat? or pay rent? And donations alone do not cut it.
Being a developer myself (with no ads in his software), I don’t think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. That’s why I also have an actual job.
You are aware that there are full-time developers working at Mozilla, yes? Developing a browser is not a hobby-project that you can pull off with some volunteers in their free time. You need professionals that work on such a giant project with their full attention.
Developing Firefox is their job. And of course they want to get paid for that (and deserve it). Just like you get paid for your actual job.
(and deserve it)
Please enlighten me: how do they deserve to be paid for a non-profit product?
How does someone deserve to be paid for work done? Is that your question?
Is this some kind of pathetic troll attempt?
I will not reward that with further attention.
Non profit means their earnings must match their expenses or be used to actually improve the product/service, not that they earn nothing at all
Non-profit doesn’t mean that there’s no employees. They’re still organizations that have a cash flow, seek to raise funds, and employ people to serve their mission. Most non-profits have paid employees.
Non profit does not mean what you think it means
I could see them trying to take themselves away from Google which wouldn’t be a bad thing as that’s where most of the money comes from for them … Unless that’s changed recently…
I’m afraid it won’t last long without it. That’s the key problem.
People hate ads, as do I, but what’s the alternative?
Pay executives less. Focus on grants and PBS-style ‘underwriting’. Subscription services like email and VPN.
Getting into advertising is just jumping into an intractable conflict of interest.
No ads?
People need money mate. Not everyone can afford to run a website.
Ideas:
- donations - these need to actually go toward Firefox development, they don’t, so I don’t donate
- paid services (e.g. their white-labeled VPN, they could also white-label Tuta or Proton services)
- and add-on that pays sites to not see ads (my preference)
- funding of privacy-oriented startups - they have something like this, so do more of it
Mozilla’s non-profit status needs to be revoked.
I think at this point they have a nonprofit and a company, the later being used for all their taxable income.
I know; they should not be allowed to do that.
She went on to work at eBay for 13 years, followed by PayPal, Skype, and Airbnb. source
why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ☞
“Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.”
Advertising will not improve unless we address the underlying data sharing issues, and solve for the economic incentives that rely on that data.
thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising
We can’t just ignore online advertising — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years. - MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA source
if we stay with that metaphor of “We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it”, it’s not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he’s “staring straight in the eyes” :/
i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad
She’s not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.
Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last “free” browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?
Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?
There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don’t neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.
This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.
She’s not particularly wrong,
yes, and that’s the saddest part
Literally no one but advertisers like ads. Anything that leads to more ads being shown is a negative to your community. Some might understand the need to make money, but that doesn’t make anyone like ads.
But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history.
Is it?
I would rather have a world where Mozilla is actively engaged in creating positive solutions for hard problems, than one where we only critique from the sidelines.
Maybe your users don’t.
In addition to your good points:
a world where Mozilla is actively engaged
That doesn’t have to mean a world where Firefox itself is involved in this engagement, despite her insistence that it for some reason must be. Firefox is not Mozilla as a whole.
