If it's a paid version of Firefox this means it will respect our privacy by having no telemetry, no remote code execution via Normandy, etc, or will it be the same thing in that regard?
That's open to discussion. Even if Chrome sends your data to Google (and it probably sends more data than Firefox), at least you know the data is being received by Google and not by unrelated third parties, like when Mozilla sent full URL history of some users to an advertisement company: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
> One of Mozilla’s core privacy principles is No Surprises: we will use and share data in ways that are transparent and benefit our users. That is why we are telling you about this today. We want users to understand why we’ve taken this approach and what it means for them. While still a small experiment, the data collection and new search experience are major changes in the way this build of Firefox performs. We hope that users will appreciate the improved experience, but if users want to turn it off, they can always disable data collection or remove the Cliqz add-on entirely.
Yes, if you go to the Google privacy policy they surely sound the same. But the truth is that they were funnelling your data to a third party. It doesn't matter if they say it's for the benefit of their users or how transparent they are. They were sending your private data to a third party and it was on by default for some users.
> When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps)
The logic here is that Google will never send/sell your data to third parties ?
How do you think Facebook et al gets a hold of your google data ? How do you think companies like Cambridge Analytica thrive ?
I am genuinely curious to know what your view of the world on these topics is and why are you so insistently (and apparently naively) defending google in this regard.
I said Firefox is bad at protecting my privacy. Someone compared Mozilla to Google, so I said that even Google is better. In other words I'm not defending Google, I'm saying Mozilla is even worse. I despise Google, too.
What's your proof that Google gives your data to Facebook? That doesn't sound right. On the other hand, I showed proof that Mozilla gives your personal data (list of URLs you visit, no less!) to a third party.
Are you hoping people don't read the article you linked or do you not understand the approach Mozilla used?
The data is not used to identify the user by building a profile and the source IP is removed on collection. Now of course there's a level of trust required in them doing what they say, but this is nowhere near Google et al's levels of data hoarding and reselling anyway.
Would privacy oriented use pay for anything in the first place? Based on my experience they are quite a tough audience to sell any products. No enterprise sales, and the small privacy oriented userbase usually has less disposable income.
As far as I understood Firefox is already very pro privacy and, unlike some competition, telemetry and others must be explicit opt-ins from the users.
Where the paid offering would shine is the bundled services: password manager, notification center, etc. All those features already there, but having a sustainable business model around them. Though not sure how free offering vs. paid offering can be discriminated so that the latter is attractive.
They kind of have to go that way (offer extra VPN/storage as a service for a monthly fee), their market share of users has tanked since their last deal with Google, they're not going to get that kind of money from them any more. Gotta diversify.
Excellent idea bundling VPN and cloud storage. Currently using proton and iCloud (mostly though relying on self hosted Nextcloud). Hopefully they’ll offer NextCloud too.
I'll buy whatever they're selling. I'm very happy with Firefox quantum, and I'd like Mozilla to have a sustainable income that doesn't come from the AdTech/surveillance industry.
But they fired their CEO, Brendan Eich, founder of Javascript, for donating to a charity they disagreed with (abortion). Given that I hold different political opinions than Mozilla, is Mozilla going to use this money to help or worsen intolerance between citizens?
Same for Wikipedia, who donated hundreds of thousands to feminist organizations to « rewrite Wikipedia ». Do I really want Wikipedia to rewrite history?
I'll buy too. I spend hours every day using firefox. It's worth almost every price they could demand. But I still hope they give me some freedom back I had before quantum.
Interesting bundling their services via the browser. Its a single point of entry vs Google (seemingly) access disjoint. Password management, notes, file transfer (and storage?) browse and secure connections through one browser is something I think Id want.
This is really scary. I keep getting messages from friends I converted to Signal, asking me to go back to WhatsApp since Facebook has a deal with their providers to not charge WhatsApp data.
Now picture those able to afford their first mobile plan, they don’t have disposable income, they don’t have the option to pay for Firefox, I’m afraid this will drive people to use Google even more.
It's a paid premium service, the free version will still be there.
People need to also stop thinking free internet services are genuinely free. Pay for things that provide value and if it's free, ask what value is in it for the provider instead.
I’m referring to those with no money to pay for anything, no wifi at home, no computer, their mobile phone is the first chance to access the web, so they are 100% on Android which already comes with Chrome.
Chances are very small they will download a new browser (they don’t have much data to download stuff) even if it’s free. But once the word gets out that you have to pay for Firefox, it won’t matter if the free version is still there or if it’s as good as the paid one, Google broadcasts a louder message that it’s definitely free.
To be as charitable as possible to the grandparent, it may depend on whether there are any closed-source elements to the cloud services. We don't know for certain because it has yet to be announced. (Of course there's no realistic chance of that happening given Mozilla's foundational principles and solid track record thereof.)
As long as all of the source is available under FOSS licenses, yes. Free as in speech, not free as in beer, remember?
Question is, will Mozilla actually stick to that? What the paid features also be open-source, at least to whatever extent the concept of source code applies?
Ideally, Mozilla would let us pay to use their servers, while also providing an OSS self-hosted version with equivalent functionality.
(Firefox is available under the MPL, which is a sort of compromise between copyleft and MIT-style licenses. So it'd be difficult to make any new FF feature entirely closed source.)
MPL does allow closed source extensions, Netscape wanting to create a proprietary browser on top of Mozilla was the main reason MPL was created and they didn't use something like GPL.
Yes because there is nothing preventing you from selling free (libre) software. Commercial use of free software is actually encouraged and part of its success.
No because while you can make people pay for free software, you can't prevent redistribution. In practice, it means you can't force people to actually pay.
That's why selling free software usually means selling a service. Usually some form of support or online account.
Note that proprietary software based on free software is not free software. For example Chrome not free even though Chromium is. And if Mozilla releases paid version of Firefox with even a tiny bit of proprietary code, it stops being FOSS.
A centralized VPN solution for all users is a terrible idea, and what is "secure cloud storage" going to offer that Dropbox doesn't?
I understand that developing a browser is expensive work and Mozilla need money to do it. I support them in this effort. But honestly no ones gonna buy this
I personally plan to, even though I run my own VPN & already pay for Dropbox. I definitely won't use the VPN, if the cloud storage looks decent I'll likely use it (since I already use encrypted volumes that I store in Dropbox, I only need to trust they won't delete/lose them).
I already donate to mozilla, I guess people have forgotten the web was during the days IE was dominant. I'm frankly shocked that so many web developers seem to be fine only supporting Chrome, at least those were the sentiments I was hearing when Edge went to chromium.
I'll probably buy it. I've been using Firefox for almost 15 years. Mozilla has never really let me down. I would much rather pay for an integrated vpn/cloud storage provider than maintain multiple accounts with multiple providers. Not to mention Mozilla's general focus on privacy protections that not all platforms share.
I'd be happy to pay for Firefox, but I have a few points that are important to me. They are probably not very realistic but here they are anyway:
1. I would like my money to go into Firefox development and nowhere else.
I certainly don't want my money spent on their content business, even if it is used as a leverage to generate more money for Firefox development. I'm torn about Rust development because I certainly would love to see Rust flourish, but if we allow the money go into personally preferred projects it becomes hard to draw the line.
2. I would like a Firefox with absolutely no strings attached.
- No Pocket, not even a trace of it. The proper place for Pocket is a plugin.
- No experiments, labs or whatever they call it (see Mr. Robot for an example)
- No network connections to third party hosts as long I haven't explicitly opted in.
- Safe search off by default
- No predefined search engines
- No predefined start page
3. I would like Mozilla (as a whole and not only the Firefox branch) to be more careful with the selection of their businesses partners.
I'm am not aiming at their co-operations with Google, Yandex and the like, which are OK for me. At least as long as my points from above are respected. Specifically I'm OK if the free version of Firefox continues to be sponsored mainly by Google. I'm not OK with business deals of the kind they had with Cliqz for example.
4. I would like to be able to pay without having to be logged into a Firefox account.
This is actually davidhyde's idea from another thread [1] but I added it here because I fully agree.
Yes, I couldn't agree more. I'm a Firefox user, never switched to chrome because I always had concerned with it.
If this an attempt to switch the business model and become independent from search engines, it needs to do it properly. If it's the case, I would be a happily paying as, as much as I'm not fond of some of the decisions made by Mozilla like pocket or labs as you mentioned, it's the only browser I feel I can use without spitting on my beliefs.
I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them, just as a condition for maybe giving them something day.
See, that's one of the weirdest problem in FOSS: the fans hold them to a way too high standard, making it twice as hard to thrive. Once because it's hard to make money as an open source, benevolent product in a world of free for all. And another time because the very people that should be supporting you will always say you don't do enough.
>I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them, just as a condition for maybe giving them something day.
No, right now I'm not paying a dime to companies that don't provide me with the products I want.
Parent is talking about being a customer, not a charity.
The parent is not only talking about the products they receive but how that money is spent. Those assurances are pretty impractical and I doubt any company can reasonably be held to that kind of standard.
What would it even mean, though? It would just let them free up other, unencumbered funds, for things that aren't browser related when they would have otherwise been spent on the browser.
Surely the influence of "wow look at all this money coming in from browser development" is going to influence them to invest it there? If you don't think that then you don't trust them enough to give them money. And that's fine. But this idea that it makes sense to try to put strings on the very small amount of money we're talking about here...seems to imply some naive notion that you one could operate without trusting Mozilla...
I generally agree with this (FOSS fans can be wildly too demanding, especially for the tiny amount of cash donated)
But is the comment above really too high a standard? If a paid version of Firefox doesn't (1) at least strip the adware out, and (2) actually fund Firefox development, then what would even be the point?
I think a default search engine and default first tab is fine as two examples where that list of demands is excessive.
And depending on what “no network connections to third-party hosts unless I’ve explicitly opted in” means, this probably breaks CDNs, multi-host content serving, and lots of common js distribution mechanisms in ways that normal users will find confusing and result in “Firefox doesn’t work” if that’s the default it ships with.
I'm not sure why that is excessive, except that Mozilla made (maybe still does, I'm not sure) most of their money from getting paid to put search engines as their default. How hard is it to pop a dialog in the installer or on first run to let you pick? I don't think that is unreasonable.
And the default tab just means loading a blank tab up. The last time I used Firefox, this was already a setting that you could pick.
When I last installed it, the default tab was the Firefox home page (or some other Mozilla landing page), which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I find a lot of open source software insufficiently opinionated. Can't decide? Make it an option. Want to be "fair" to all? Make it an option and prompt the user during installation! As a user, I like when I have options but when some kind of sensible default has been pre-selected to shorten the time and mental effort between deciding to install and the first "wow" moment.
I'm pretty sure the poster meant no 3rd party connections initiated by Firefox independently of what's in the actual HTML it's loading. No telemetry, in other words. I strongly agree that telemetry features should be excluded.
No, it's not really that "out there", you just don't see it because the vast majority of companies take the money you give them, and spend it on one of two things: 1) operations, or 2) shareholder dividends/profits/etc. (with most going to #1 for normal companies). Operations, of course, includes employee salaries, building rent, utilities, but also new development/R&D, advertising, etc. (I might not be using the totally correct business definition of "operations" here; bear with me.)
Most companies do NOT spend a lot of money on things which do not help their bottom line or benefit (or return profit to) their shareholders. At best, they'll spend some token amount on some donation, in return for getting their name plastered on stuff, which in effect a form of advertising, just a better one than handing money to some media company for ad time or something, and creates something beneficial for the community (such as sponsoring a museum exhibit).
Your analogy is off, because (for example) the OP specifically said that they didn’t want the money to be spent on other things Mozilla does even if those things generate more money for Firefox in the end. That’s the analogy for spending the money on rent or advertising, or building a ball pit (be it called Pocket or VPN) in order to bring in more users.
I don’t care about “adware” and would likely be annoyed that I paid for something and it had less things in it. I use the Pocket feature for example. So for me the point would be why would I pay if my features are being reduced. Or things are changed that I don’t care about. So then for me it would become what’s the point of paying. You can’t make everyone happy. And not everyone feels the same way about things. L
> including making decisions for the direction product is taking
If I am the product, I expect to be able to participate in choosing the direction. Businesses ignore that, of course, and look what that's dealt them in reputation.
If I pay for something, I expect to be able to participate in choosing the direction. Businesses don't typically ignore paying customers.
This is a user stating what it would take to make them a paying customer.
This is not about FOSS. Full stop. The title is literally:
"Mozilla will reportedly launch a paid version of Firefox this fall"
Mozilla is free to ignore that feedback and sell whatever product they want. The parent user is free to not buy it.
> FOSS users like parent believe they have a birth right to the software they’re using, including making decisions for the direction product is taking.
This is not the conversation we're having. Shut up about it.
I agree. Unfortunately, I've seen this more demanding behaviour primarily from tech savvy people. Programmers/Engineers (me including) can have wildly esoteric demands. Only after did I start running a business, did I re-adjust my expectations of myself and that of others.
That said, fortunately, Firefox is still common of a tool which is used by the general public and I think they'll pay. This would have been a painful process had this been a library which was exclusively used by devs but browsers etc can escape that unreasonable expectation.
P.S. I don't think GP is making some extra-ordinary demands but I won't be surprised if someone will demand the heaven and moon from Firefox for 10 USD a year. Absolutely will not be surprised.
This is just people: I make games. Players want 100 hours of unique experience, DRM free, DLC free and oh free. Plus they want all their features and bugs fixed or they threaten you.
The reasons for this are complicated but just like FOSS, videogames have convinced players we can provide them with the moon on a stick when in reality it's a photo of the moon and they need to provide the stick.
Are you saying the pervasive DRM which degrades performance, day 1 DLC practices, and sectioning up content that used to come with the $60 game I bought are not problems with the game dev industry? Yeah there are some people who want exactly what you said, but the majority just want a complete experience.
I'm perfectly fine with a 20 hour game with no DRM(or at least no denuvo) and DLC after a few weeks of the game being out. I'll pay full price for it too. What I don't pay for is a game that costs $60, has 10 hours of content that are riddled with bugs, a "beta" two weeks before release, day 1,2,3 patches because it is broken, runs at 3/4 of the fps it should because of Denuvo, and has day 1 DLC and a $30 season pass (which doesn't cover all the DLC from that season, just some), and content walled off by pre-order.
Consumers bear the brunt of the blame for this. I worked at a few AAA game shops when DLC was just starting to be a thing. Consumers drove that by their habits: they demanded add-ons and extras that took enormous effort to develop but didn't want to pay as much as a third or half the original purchase price, so we tinkered with smaller releases at much lower price points and consumers ate it up.
Then as mass development by indies offering free apps took off the "problem" got worse. Consumers now expect apps, including games, to have a tiny purchase price or be free and to pay a-la carte for things they want.
This is absolutely correct. If this stuff didn't work, then consumers wouldn't buy it, and the game companies would go out of business or change their practices. Game companies are highly profitable, therefore this strategy, as horribly as it sounds, is apparently a successful one which consumers are happy to fund with their disposable income.
Games are a luxury; this isn't something like ISP access or cellular service that you basically need these days to fully function and participate in modern society. If people really didn't like the practices of the game companies, they could easily just not buy any games and do something else with their free time. The consumers are absolutely to blame here.
I don't think it's that simple: there was a feedback loop involved in which game (and app) developers share some of the "blame" for what has happened. A few could have differentiated themselves by continuing to offer high-end gaming and app experiences at a premium, but chose short-term, easy money. I don't blame them entirely, but someone in a position of power with even reasonable patience and foresight back then could have kept enough competitive share of the market to profit well without going into the race to the bottom we've seen.
But if there's more money in doing it the way they're doing it now (leading to you calling it "short-term, easy money"), and switching back to the old way isn't more profitable, then that's really down to the consumers, because without them there would be zero revenue for these game companies.
The game companies aren't really in a position of power here; the consumers are. If they stop buying, then the entire industry goes under immediately. As I said before, games are purely a luxury, though it seems like gamers refuse to believe this. But apparently there's no shortage of people willing to throw their money at these companies and buy into these business models of buying broken games and paying extra to "unlock" content to keep playing.
I have coworkers like this. They complain a lot about the state of games, about how buggy they are and how they're entirely broken when they're first released, yet they keep buying them anyway. I ask them why and they don't really have an answer. Personally, I have much better things to spend my time and money on than entertainment products that disrespect me: I can go on a hike or bike ride, I can go on a date, I can go to cultural events, I can go to the gym, I can work on one of the languages I'm learning, or if I want to kill time at home doing something "mindless" I can just watch stuff on YouTube for free, watch Netflix, or play an old video game in an emulator even. Why so many young men insist on spending all their free time playing buggy games that aren't even complete when you buy them, I have no idea; there's many other things to do with your time.
I don't buy them. One of the many hobbies I enjoy, alongside coding, rock climbing, and a host of other activities, is gaming. You can turn your nose up at people's hobbies as much as you want, but playing games is no less mindless that most sports. My complaint is that game series that I enjoy playing turn into micro-transaction-ridden garbage.
Street fighter 4: great game, some netcode issues, DLC expansions released every year or two. Street fighter 5: buggy mess that didn't even work for the first 3 days after release, even after two(!) betas, with half the content locked behind a paywall, and literal advertisements put on costumes. That was probably the last AAA game I bought. I pretty much only play games from devs/publishers I respect, my problem is that list is ever-shrinking.
A lot of consumers are not like me: the hype is too much and they don't care about the actual game as much as getting to play it with other people.
>You can turn your nose up at people's hobbies as much as you want, but playing games is no less mindless that most sports.
I don't watch sports at all; I think they're idiotic and mostly a waste of time. I'll make a few rare exceptions for things like winter olympics events (downhill skiing for instance).
But I don't think this is a great comparison. At least with sports, when you pay the fee to watch the game, that's it: you go (or sit, if it's pay-per-view), watch the game in its entirety, and you're done. You don't suddenly get your view obstructed at half-time and are then required to pay an additional fee to watch the rest. If sports got that ridiculous, then I'd be making fun of people who continued to patronize them too.
>A lot of consumers are not like me: the hype is too much and they don't care about the actual game as much as getting to play it with other people.
So they're happy to support the publishers who treat them this way, and make them highly profitable. I don't really see the problem here: why shouldn't the publishers act this way then? They can treat their customers poorly, the customers happily come back for more, and they make a boatload of money. Maybe they lose a few people like you, but apparently that's not a big problem for them because they're making so much money on everyone else who refuses to abandon them. What's more, it sounds like there are some publishers who still do things the "old way" (according to your post here), but since that list is "ever-shrinking" according to you, that means this just isn't that viable a business model, because they're losing to the publishers who treat the gamers poorly. The people are speaking with their wallets, and apparently they like being treated this way, even when they actually still have alternatives!
Don't forget the "90 day roadmap" that tells players when the game will be worth playing and then gets blanked out like Anthem's when the players give up.
Imho the answer is already contained in your statement: paying for some kind of "professional service" transforms any interaction with the users into a provider/customer interaction. It will boil down to "this is good, please make it better" (which is implicitly stating that you may stop using if it's not done). The power of FOSS or heavily modded games is that the separation provider/customer is broken into a spectrum where some people are in between, are empowered to do some of the things they'd like being done.
Going back to firefox, i think it's a mistake. They are already far down the road of this provider/customer separation and going forward they will face such decisions over and over. This is a zugzwang and the sooner they break it the better. With a bit of wishful thinking i would have hoped they would flip the table and go full on with hardcore gnuish philosophy, making a big move and a new political depth into their browser. Perhaps regaining some sympathy from people that have long considered them as compromised, perhaps destabilizing big web players which will again have to face some public rumble to which they can't easily say anything else than "yeah we screwed up but hey it's not so bad and we are getting nicer" (an answer which is starting to get quite laughable).
To be fair, most of these points are just asking them to NOT include a feature by default, rather than demanding they build something new before paying up.
On top of the usual way in which people (such as myself) can become self-entitled if we're not careful, there's also the concern that FOSS has a need to point toward "true north", while the realities of the market tend to blow us to the west. Until someone comes up with that magical business plan (and I'm still hoping for this), these things will always be in tension.
The best solution I can think of for the moment is to always express our demand FOSS without compromise, but no matter what show appreciation for them for getting as close as they can, so long as they seem to be trying at least (unlike, say, Android at this point).
If we don't demand true north, the ship will drift further and further west and we forget our mission. If we don't show appreciation, they'll fail to see the point and give up the journey entirely.
I feel like most of these demands aren't too onerous because they're pretty much all in the form of "hey this thing you're doing that takes time and effort to do -- don't."
Like it would be one thing to demand lots of features that require effort to develop but the parent is literally asking to pay more for less.
It is very normal for donations to foundations to have stipulations about what they're allowed to be spent on which is why developement (not in the software sense) pushes so hard for donors to allow spending in the general fund. I have no problem letting Mozilla spend my money as they see fit but I absolutely understand people who are only interested in Firefox.
>I'm pretty sure you are right now paying a lot more money to companies doing a lot less efforts Mozilla is currently doing. And now you are asking even more of them
Examples, please. I'm not sure that I am, except perhaps in places where I don't have a lot of choice (e.g., my ISP). If your examples include things like Spotify, I don't use online music services. If your examples include things like Office 365, I sure as hell don't subscribe to that.
It's very unlikely that this will happen. Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free. When you have demonstrated you are willing to pay money for a service, you are likely to also spent money on other goods. This only makes you more attractive as an advertising target.
Most likely we will see premium features like:
- premium color themes
- more cloud storage for settings and extensions
- analytics on your browsing data (after you hand the data over to them) (??)
- more customer support (???)
To me what you're saying is Mozilla is no longer about FLOSS, they're now just a company whose only purpose is to make money selling their users downstream for as much as they can get?
I'm reacting the the GP, they said (paraphrasing) that Mozilla won't create an advertising and tracking free paid version because if you'll pay to buy such a version then Mozilla will be to eager to exploit your worth as an advertising target.
>Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free.
I have only seen major US news outlets do this - namely NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ etc.
I have subs to different publications - Ars, Ken, Nautilus - and they definitely are ad-free and a lot of others also claim to be ad-free for subscribers.
>Payed subscriptions to news-websites/magazines are also not advertising free.
All I ever hear about in regards to news websites is that they're dying out because no one wants to pay for subscriptions, and the arms race is getting worse as many of them have strengthened their paywalls so that non-paying viewers can't see the articles (while others develop workarounds for the paywalls).
Magazines, like newspapers, also seem to be dying out, though not as fast as the print newspapers.
Maybe companies should rethink this business model.
Insert standard response here that donations to Mozilla Foundation do not go towards software development.
While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.
Even better, would be to have install options that offer: TOR and/or a built-in VPN service (like Opera).
I'd also add that Mozilla fluff (pocket, etc.) be an install option (default off).
Finally, I'd like to be able to build stable macros again (ala greasemonkey). GM functionality in FF has been an annoyingly moving target - dropping and radically changing functionality - to the point where I now just keep an old version of FF w/ GM around so that I don't have to keep trying to re-write my macros.
Your list of "strings attached" to Firefox are fairly weak because most represent a trivial few clicks in settings. Insisting that a piece of software must ship preconfigured exactly to your liking seems a bit selfish to me.
Really though, how onerous is it to configure a fresh Firefox profile to suit your preferences? (And how often do you reset your Firefox profile anyway?)
Complaints about Pocket are largely emotional. It's a service run by Mozilla just like Firefox Sync and others. I agree it would be neater for Pocket to be implemented as a plug-in, but you could say that about a dozen or more Firefox features besides Pocket, so why single that one out? And really, why do you give a shit how Pocket is implemented if you don't use it anyway? Just switch it off.
Firefox Studies is a mechanism that is in principle no different to automatic updates. Studies is functionally less invasive than automatic updates and exists only because Studies allows for progressive roll-outs, rapid roll-outs and rapid roll-backs. Don't like it? Just switch it off.
i think it’s a principle thing. for 90% of people, they’ll use it with default settings. seems like OP doesn’t want to support the usage of those default services in general (say, google search default?), so supporting a product that implicitly advances their usage is unattractive.
It's a principle thing? No, it's a train wreck. It's a sure-fire recipe for cutting the installed base of Firefox in half overnight.
Using your example and estimate, the 90% of people who use default settings will install Firefox and then immediately conclude it's broken because it can't search the internet. So they'll just switch back to Chrome and never try Firefox again.
Remember, these are the "default settings" people. They're not going to change the default settings. And with the OP's prescription for "no predefined search engines," there won't be a "Google" setting anyway even if they did try.
This is an oddly vehement response to a lot of sane defaults.
One simple solution to this "train wreck" would be for Firefox to simply link users directly to the search engine settings if they try to search without one set.
That’s not a simple solution because the OP is not just calling for the removal of a default search engine, but also calling for "no predefined search engines," so there will be nothing in settings to choose from.
My point is that you can have sane defaults without sacrificing usability. I'm sure with a few minutes of brainstorming, you could find a solution that both educates the user on why a predefined search engine is a bad practice, and direct them to resources to make an educated-choice on which one they'll choose.
What you're describing is a terrible user experience. The only people who would want that are people who don't need the education. The people who need the education don't want to spend money on software just for it to lecture them when they launch it and force them to make a bunch of decisions. This would literally be paying Firefox to make you do extra work.
True, which is why I go back to my original comment of just having it take you to the search engine settings, with the different services listed out. It's a reasonable compromise of being honest & sane without much friction on the user's end.
I know you're claiming that's not what the OP is calling for, but we're literally just going on four words from them. Regardless, "train wreck" is an over-exaggeration for either of our assumptions.
The OP is what I responded to. That idea is what I described as a train-wreck. And I stand by it.
I agree it's not a train-wreck to have your browser offer the choice of Google, Ask Jeeves or Lycos upon performing the first search. What this is is pointless. Nearly everyone doesn't care and will just reflexively select Google. The remaining people will have changed the setting themselves anyway.
I've got no problem if he wants to lobby Mozilla to offer Firefox: Weinzierl Edition alongside the standard one. I do have a problem whenever someone speaks like their specific array of demands are more important than the quiet people who may actually prefer the status quo.
These are all good reasons to not use Pocket. I do agree that it should be easier to disable. I guess I just don't see it as a big deal because I disabled it years ago and it hasn't ever come back.
Pocket replaced Reading List, which was all of those things.
Pocket was a third party when Mozilla integrated the service into Firefox. Mozilla employees denied for months that Mozilla took money for the integration. It came out later that Mozilla took money for referrals.
Pocket doesn't follow Mozilla's privacy principles.[1] Despite that, the Pocket website says "as a member of the Firefox family, privacy is paramount."[2]
Mozilla committed to make Pocket open source over 2 years ago. There are no longer plans to release the server-side code.[3]
It's a big deal to some people because they trusted Mozilla and vouched for Mozilla to other people. My parents understood "even Mozilla can't see your bookmarks". Explaining that Mozilla could see the new kind but not the old kind was harder.
But the vast (vast!) majority of users will be expecting Google as an option when they want to search. Removing it from the paid product by default would be a negative in terms of user experience.
From the end user perspective you'd be asking money for a product that takes more effort to set up. That's silly.
i basically agree with you and would want the same if i were to be paying for it. but. usually when companies try to sell a thing they try to make it _less_ alienating, not more. loosening up wallets is hard enough; when you pry out all the “helpful” features it gets even harder (for a very large portion of the market. maybe opposite for you and me, but who will this be targeted with this product?)
in general it’d be great to see the wider market start to see these “helpful” features as actually harmful, but that 180 degree reversal is slow going. we’re in the middle of it right now with security/privacy vs convenience. seems like half the companies are going one way and half are going the other.
1. Rust _is_ helping Firefox development, and is a key part of why Firefox is remaining competitive. And they should have the flexibility to invest back into future R&D, and into supporting the open source projects that they depend on. That's part of what makes Mozilla so great as a company, and why many of us love it.
2. For the paid version that seems fine. But it seems fair that the free version of Firefox needs to be flexible in figuring out how to find sources of revenue. For example, if they pulled the plug on the predefined search engines then Mozilla would be dead pretty soon.
The average person loads up the browser and wants it to just work. We're software engineers, but we have to understand our users too - and they're vastly different to us.
Anecdote incoming - most of the people who use Firefox in my immediate circle are family members, and they don't care about configuring a default search. They don't know about DDG, they don't know about Bing, and they don't care. They want to open their browser and search whatever they need to find.
Configurability is the engineer's pipe dream, but it dismisses a lot of people - and what matters is the masses, not the HN minority.
I would gladly pay for your #2 ("Firefox with no strings attached"), and not even as a charitable donation. I just want something like that for personal use.
I would also like to add to this list the fact that I want a voice as a paying member. There are a few longstanding issues that still haven't been solved (e.g.: dark GTK themes causing problems) that I would like my money to go to somehow.
Can confirm, I would pay for a version of Firefox with just four "features":
- No Pocket anywhere in the code
- No telemetry / experiments / Normandy anywhere in the code
- No network connections to third party hosts (other than websites I'm viewing)
- No "discovery" feed / whatever they're calling the activity stream sponsored content thing now anywhere in the code
Just let me monthly subscribe via Paypal or whatever, and give me a private build server link and tar.gz of the source.
To be clear, I think there's quite a decent size market for something that could mostly be accomplished with a bash script that runs "rm -r" a few times.
Support for detecting RSS in a page would be great, but that's probably not going to happen.
These in particular are bad ideas. Default settings should always target the average user, not the power user.
Having Google as the default search/start option doesn't harm you or me at all and takes only a few seconds to change, but not having it adds significant friction and frustration for the average user.
1. Rust development is expressly used with Firefox development though. The point is more reasonable libraries with fewer security issues and tighter constraints that is more maintainable.
2. Would be happy with an install / first run option to speciry autocomplete and/or start page options.
3. Agreed, and definitely no such shenanigans in the paid version.
4. Not sure that would be possible, you'd probably at the very least need to log into something (like the VPN service included).
Adding my comment from the other thread since it also applies here.
I agree, I'd be interested in this as well. Based on the replies you're getting, I'd also like to point out that I'm tired of this trend in discussions:
Person A states their preferences regarding a product and says that they wish that the company would offer certain options. Person A says that they would be more likely to buy (or would only buy) the product with those options available. Nowhere is it demanded that the company implement these options, but person A has very clearly indicated their preferences.
Persons B, C, and D then immediately come out of the woodwork to shut down the discussion:
* Person B explains why nobody else would be interested in the options that person A has asked for. Person A is a "niche" user and their opinions are unimportant.
* Person C characterizes person A as "unreasonable" or "entitled" and explains why no company in their right mind would want person A as a customer.
* Person D counters person A's statement by explaining that the company can produce any product they want to, and that they don't have to listen to person A's request. It's a private company, etc, etc. (Note that nowhere did person A imply that the company had to listen to their request.)
For real-world examples of this phenomenon, see any thread regarding (in particular) Apple, Mozilla, or Tesla.
I would add to this that Person A's comment is almost always upvoted near the top of the post as it is in this case, which immediately disproves Person B's characterization of A's preferences as "niche".
Good luck to them, assuming they stick to their principles. But IIRC, experiments with paid browsers have typically not ended well. What makes them think they can pull it off?
- it's only an experimental additional source of revenue. They already got money covered, they are just trying to find new way to become more financially independent.
- they don't intend to sell the current state of Firefox. It will still be free. They intend to add stuff on top of the already awesome experience.
There is a class of products with strong elements of charitable contribution. For example Plex Pass, endangered species chocolate, LWN subscription, and select blockchain tokens--and maybe this too. There are hard to pin down non-commercial benefits to purchasers mixed in with traditional value drivers.
With Plex, I purchased a lifetime membership not because I valued any of the added features (I don't use them to this day), but because I got so much value out of the project that I felt indebted and wished to express my gratitude. I wanted the project to live on, and I also got to brag about my deeds on tech forums. The incredible scaling characteristics of software allow me to already enjoy most of the benefit from the free/open base edition alone.
Here are reasons for my "charity-driven" purchases:
- Admiration for project vision and desire to ensure its longevity
- A sense of gratitude due to incommensurate value enjoyed for very cheap or free
- Wanting to belong to the community and feel like part of the journey
I find myself valuing these items as "real commercial benefit":
- Strong privacy guarantees
- Cost-plus models such as selling managed storage, bandwidth, etc.
- Subscription to updates backed by regular human labor
If they want us to pay, they MUST provide dev tools that are as good as Chrome's, if not better.
My team builds a lot of PWAs, and Firefox simply did not provide good enough diagnostic tools, so we couldn't use it in earnest (even though we really wanted to).
yeah, i keep hearing that here on HN (and only here, for some reason) but i myself use firefox and chrome dev tools almost daily and i never once thought "yeah this is missing".
well, for one, chrome is actually missing one big thing for me: a dark theme.
Ability to stop/start/reinstall service workers, view app manifests, validate app manifests, add apps to the desktop etc, store local results as global variables in the console. Connect mobile devices and run a local server on the mobile device.
There are more, but I can't think of them currently.
I've been working as a professional web developer for 5+ years. In that time I have always used Firefox for development. I have never once felt that Firefox dev tools was missing any tool that I needed.
I'm curious what kind of applications your building that require some sort of specialized tool that Firefox dev tools doesn't provide.
When it comes to dependence on ad-tech money, the writing is on the wall:
> Cost per click on Google properties — which roughly measures the amount Alphabet charges advertisers for each ad served on its web sites — dropped 29 percent from last year and 9 percent from last quarter, which might be alarming investors concerned that Google’s pricing power for ads is eroding. [1]
Additionally, Firefox is losing users, around 50,000 - 100,000 per day. [2]
They now want to add all kinds of additional stuff in order to make money. For a browser this is a death sentence. A browser can not be more than a browser, and ad tiles are the only practical way of making money next to search engine deals. While a pro-version of Firefox is certainly an interesting idea which can be sold to a tech-savvy minority, it neither can diversify their revenue in a meaningful way, nor is clear yet whether Mozilla is going to offer a paid Firefox version, or simply tries to upsell a software bundle branded with their name.
Mozilla paid around 30 million to aquire Pocket (one of their supposed foundations for making money), but there isn't any data to show whether they are profitable with it. Given the low number of ads in Pocket, they probably aren't profitable. In 2017, according to their financial report, they only made 2,5 million with Pocket ads.
Opera is the only other major browser that has to survive without having a tech giant behind them. They do everything they can to make money with Opera. And it has boiled down to ads in the start page and licensing. There’s nothing more you can do.
Opera is surviving on three kind of deals: [3]
– search (ca 60%)
– ads in start page
– licensing deals on mobile phones
Licensing is off limits to mozilla because they have lost the mobile market.
So all that is left is ads on the start page. Its that simple. There’s also a lesson to learn for Mozilla from the time Opera abandoned Presto: [4]
> “Because of our switch to the Blink engine, our retention rate on desktop users is much better now. This is because most websites work in Opera since we’re using the same engine as Google. We think we’ve become more relevant after we moved over to the Blink platform, and more companies now start to work with us,” Boilesen said.
> “We’ve got twice as many developers on the desktop browser now than we had with Presto, because all [our] resources went into maintaining Presto. The only error we made with Presto was that we kept it too long. Our change to Blink was because we wanted to get on the offensive with regards to innovation, we used too many resources to keep Presto competitive."
There are only two ways. You either stay innovative and keep up with the times, or you downsize and develop for a small niche group. Mozilla is doing neither.
My greatest hope at this point is that some small group survives whatever happens and becomes the new Firefox, like Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox did with the original Mozilla. Maybe the Servo team?
Mozilla has seemed way too big to me for the actual useful development they accomplish (which is quite a bit! But the company's giant...) for years, and this move stinks of "death spiral" :-/
[EDIT] and Firefox has been the new Mozilla browser since, what, 2.0? Bloated and slow. The original was so easy to sell to friends and family in no small part because it was snappy and light, even on early 2000s/late 90s (still-running desktops from a few years earlier) hardware.
I'm a huge Firefox fan, but as many others here point out: for this to work in the long run they have to respect us and stop pulling all kinds of iRobot nonsense etc.
Mozilla needs to understand it is not OK to mess with my Internet banking client.
The browser is now critical Internet infrastructure and it is not OK when someone scares me by force installing extensions.
Also while Normandie would have been OK with me of I knew about it ot annoyed me when I found out about it because of a mistake.
Mozilla could have had a 9/10 score but thanks to issues like this I rate them 7/10.
This looks like they're not so much launching a paid version of Firefox-the-browser, but a paid subscription service, including e.g. a VPN service. This is in line with their recent push towards Firefox as a brand for related services and products like Firefox Send and Lockwise in general, with the browser being specifically referred to as Firefox Browser.
So presumably, Firefox accounts will become a freemium service, where paid accounts have e.g. higher limits for Firefox Send, a VPN, etc.
If Mozilla is able to setup Firefox as a turn-key noob-friendly solution for a more secure and private web experience, then I can definitely see this as a sustainable business model.
For that however, many things (which are far from trivial) have to be done. Among other things:
1. Focus on security. That means among other things:
1a: Reducing core code complexity (for example, removing Pocket and integrating it only as an opt-in extension)
1b: More audits
1c: More Rust (and Servo by that extension)
2. Focus on integrating more privacy-enhancing features, such as:
2a: Reducing the effectiveness of browser fingerprinting
2b: Integrating more features from Tor-Browser into vanilla Firefox. Would be even better if they integrated Tor out of the box too.
In fact, Firefox should perhaps aim at 0 difference between TBB and vanilla Firefox.
2c: Reducing reliance on (user-hostile) search engines. Perhaps integrate DuckDuckGo as default search engine in the future?
3. Focus on marketing campaign which includes super noob-friendly (video) tutorials. I'm thinking something in the Kurzgesagt style.
I will pay for this IF they improve their PDF view/print. I know a lot of people say this, but it's just a really important feature for me which is really poor in Firefox. And I do pay for software and contribute financially to open source projects.
Otherwise, I'll keep using a pre-australis fork, until I probably eventually just decide to use Chrome. Firefox different distinguish itself from Chrome.
Finally, a proper way to vote with my wallet in the browser wars. I'm sure Firefox can make more money from me individually by allowing me to pay them, rather than funneling me through Google for some eyeball $$$s, especially since I've personally switched to DuckDuckGo.
Actually that makes me wonder - how does Mozilla currently make money off me if I've stopped using Google searches in Firefox?
It depends on what other value adds they bolt onto their "Firefox Pro" offering.
Just for Firefox itself as it currently is, if there was some official way to pay for it, I think $5-10 (some small multiple of a cup of coffee deal) is fair to support development for what is essentially the only remaining competitor to Google.
Not sure about a Mozilla-run VPN. I'd trust them to have a competent-enough service, but I would definitely not expect them to try resisting any western government getting hold of their logs (though I guess the claim of any VPN to actually accomplish this is dubious at best).
Maybe a good option if you live somewhere like China or certain Middle Eastern countries where you need a VPN just to get news not controlled by the government, but all of the VPN users who just want to hide their IP when torrenting will probably look elsewhere.
I think the latter would be fine as well. The objective their is to block DMCA notices sent by bots not suboeonas that require a human to be involved. Those rarely if ever occur.
>Maybe a good option if you live somewhere like China or certain Middle Eastern countries where you need a VPN just to get news not controlled by the government
199 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadThose monsters!
> When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps)
How do you think Facebook et al gets a hold of your google data ? How do you think companies like Cambridge Analytica thrive ?
I am genuinely curious to know what your view of the world on these topics is and why are you so insistently (and apparently naively) defending google in this regard.
What's your proof that Google gives your data to Facebook? That doesn't sound right. On the other hand, I showed proof that Mozilla gives your personal data (list of URLs you visit, no less!) to a third party.
The data is not used to identify the user by building a profile and the source IP is removed on collection. Now of course there's a level of trust required in them doing what they say, but this is nowhere near Google et al's levels of data hoarding and reselling anyway.
As far as I understood Firefox is already very pro privacy and, unlike some competition, telemetry and others must be explicit opt-ins from the users.
Where the paid offering would shine is the bundled services: password manager, notification center, etc. All those features already there, but having a sustainable business model around them. Though not sure how free offering vs. paid offering can be discriminated so that the latter is attractive.
Answer: Maybe Facebook?
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/30/facebook-navigator.html
TLDR; AOL bought Netscape, who sold it to Microsoft, who then sold it to Facebook.
Edit: Maybe not, the domain WHOIS shows it points to Yahoo! Oath Inc. - https://www.whois.com/whois/netscape.net
Same for Wikipedia, who donated hundreds of thousands to feminist organizations to « rewrite Wikipedia ». Do I really want Wikipedia to rewrite history?
Now picture those able to afford their first mobile plan, they don’t have disposable income, they don’t have the option to pay for Firefox, I’m afraid this will drive people to use Google even more.
People need to also stop thinking free internet services are genuinely free. Pay for things that provide value and if it's free, ask what value is in it for the provider instead.
If there's a cost I want to see that passed on to the consumer. Otherwise I can't trust a company, simply put.
Chances are very small they will download a new browser (they don’t have much data to download stuff) even if it’s free. But once the word gets out that you have to pay for Firefox, it won’t matter if the free version is still there or if it’s as good as the paid one, Google broadcasts a louder message that it’s definitely free.
Question is, will Mozilla actually stick to that? What the paid features also be open-source, at least to whatever extent the concept of source code applies?
(Firefox is available under the MPL, which is a sort of compromise between copyleft and MIT-style licenses. So it'd be difficult to make any new FF feature entirely closed source.)
Yes because there is nothing preventing you from selling free (libre) software. Commercial use of free software is actually encouraged and part of its success.
No because while you can make people pay for free software, you can't prevent redistribution. In practice, it means you can't force people to actually pay.
That's why selling free software usually means selling a service. Usually some form of support or online account.
Note that proprietary software based on free software is not free software. For example Chrome not free even though Chromium is. And if Mozilla releases paid version of Firefox with even a tiny bit of proprietary code, it stops being FOSS.
I understand that developing a browser is expensive work and Mozilla need money to do it. I support them in this effort. But honestly no ones gonna buy this
I already donate to mozilla, I guess people have forgotten the web was during the days IE was dominant. I'm frankly shocked that so many web developers seem to be fine only supporting Chrome, at least those were the sentiments I was hearing when Edge went to chromium.
1. I would like my money to go into Firefox development and nowhere else.
I certainly don't want my money spent on their content business, even if it is used as a leverage to generate more money for Firefox development. I'm torn about Rust development because I certainly would love to see Rust flourish, but if we allow the money go into personally preferred projects it becomes hard to draw the line.
2. I would like a Firefox with absolutely no strings attached.
- No Pocket, not even a trace of it. The proper place for Pocket is a plugin.
- No experiments, labs or whatever they call it (see Mr. Robot for an example)
- No network connections to third party hosts as long I haven't explicitly opted in.
- Safe search off by default
- No predefined search engines
- No predefined start page
3. I would like Mozilla (as a whole and not only the Firefox branch) to be more careful with the selection of their businesses partners.
I'm am not aiming at their co-operations with Google, Yandex and the like, which are OK for me. At least as long as my points from above are respected. Specifically I'm OK if the free version of Firefox continues to be sponsored mainly by Google. I'm not OK with business deals of the kind they had with Cliqz for example.
4. I would like to be able to pay without having to be logged into a Firefox account.
This is actually davidhyde's idea from another thread [1] but I added it here because I fully agree.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20144726
See, that's one of the weirdest problem in FOSS: the fans hold them to a way too high standard, making it twice as hard to thrive. Once because it's hard to make money as an open source, benevolent product in a world of free for all. And another time because the very people that should be supporting you will always say you don't do enough.
No, right now I'm not paying a dime to companies that don't provide me with the products I want.
Parent is talking about being a customer, not a charity.
Surely the influence of "wow look at all this money coming in from browser development" is going to influence them to invest it there? If you don't think that then you don't trust them enough to give them money. And that's fine. But this idea that it makes sense to try to put strings on the very small amount of money we're talking about here...seems to imply some naive notion that you one could operate without trusting Mozilla...
But is the comment above really too high a standard? If a paid version of Firefox doesn't (1) at least strip the adware out, and (2) actually fund Firefox development, then what would even be the point?
If you want to blanket donate to everything Mozilla, you can already do that today. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
And depending on what “no network connections to third-party hosts unless I’ve explicitly opted in” means, this probably breaks CDNs, multi-host content serving, and lots of common js distribution mechanisms in ways that normal users will find confusing and result in “Firefox doesn’t work” if that’s the default it ships with.
And the default tab just means loading a blank tab up. The last time I used Firefox, this was already a setting that you could pick.
I find a lot of open source software insufficiently opinionated. Can't decide? Make it an option. Want to be "fair" to all? Make it an option and prompt the user during installation! As a user, I like when I have options but when some kind of sensible default has been pre-selected to shorten the time and mental effort between deciding to install and the first "wow" moment.
https://i.imgur.com/hGe837H.png
Maybe on the first launch you could get a wizard allowing you to pick your search engines, or to have none at all.
I assumed they were looking to block any cross-origin fetch that they hadn’t whitelisted.
Will you only buy a big Mac if McDonalds commits the money to ball pit maintaine only?
Most companies do NOT spend a lot of money on things which do not help their bottom line or benefit (or return profit to) their shareholders. At best, they'll spend some token amount on some donation, in return for getting their name plastered on stuff, which in effect a form of advertising, just a better one than handing money to some media company for ad time or something, and creates something beneficial for the community (such as sponsoring a museum exhibit).
FOSS users like parent believe they have a birth right to the software they’re using, including making decisions for the direction product is taking.
If I am the product, I expect to be able to participate in choosing the direction. Businesses ignore that, of course, and look what that's dealt them in reputation.
If I pay for something, I expect to be able to participate in choosing the direction. Businesses don't typically ignore paying customers.
This is not about FOSS. Full stop. The title is literally:
"Mozilla will reportedly launch a paid version of Firefox this fall"
Mozilla is free to ignore that feedback and sell whatever product they want. The parent user is free to not buy it.
> FOSS users like parent believe they have a birth right to the software they’re using, including making decisions for the direction product is taking.
This is not the conversation we're having. Shut up about it.
That said, fortunately, Firefox is still common of a tool which is used by the general public and I think they'll pay. This would have been a painful process had this been a library which was exclusively used by devs but browsers etc can escape that unreasonable expectation.
P.S. I don't think GP is making some extra-ordinary demands but I won't be surprised if someone will demand the heaven and moon from Firefox for 10 USD a year. Absolutely will not be surprised.
The reasons for this are complicated but just like FOSS, videogames have convinced players we can provide them with the moon on a stick when in reality it's a photo of the moon and they need to provide the stick.
I'm perfectly fine with a 20 hour game with no DRM(or at least no denuvo) and DLC after a few weeks of the game being out. I'll pay full price for it too. What I don't pay for is a game that costs $60, has 10 hours of content that are riddled with bugs, a "beta" two weeks before release, day 1,2,3 patches because it is broken, runs at 3/4 of the fps it should because of Denuvo, and has day 1 DLC and a $30 season pass (which doesn't cover all the DLC from that season, just some), and content walled off by pre-order.
Then as mass development by indies offering free apps took off the "problem" got worse. Consumers now expect apps, including games, to have a tiny purchase price or be free and to pay a-la carte for things they want.
Games are a luxury; this isn't something like ISP access or cellular service that you basically need these days to fully function and participate in modern society. If people really didn't like the practices of the game companies, they could easily just not buy any games and do something else with their free time. The consumers are absolutely to blame here.
The game companies aren't really in a position of power here; the consumers are. If they stop buying, then the entire industry goes under immediately. As I said before, games are purely a luxury, though it seems like gamers refuse to believe this. But apparently there's no shortage of people willing to throw their money at these companies and buy into these business models of buying broken games and paying extra to "unlock" content to keep playing.
I have coworkers like this. They complain a lot about the state of games, about how buggy they are and how they're entirely broken when they're first released, yet they keep buying them anyway. I ask them why and they don't really have an answer. Personally, I have much better things to spend my time and money on than entertainment products that disrespect me: I can go on a hike or bike ride, I can go on a date, I can go to cultural events, I can go to the gym, I can work on one of the languages I'm learning, or if I want to kill time at home doing something "mindless" I can just watch stuff on YouTube for free, watch Netflix, or play an old video game in an emulator even. Why so many young men insist on spending all their free time playing buggy games that aren't even complete when you buy them, I have no idea; there's many other things to do with your time.
Street fighter 4: great game, some netcode issues, DLC expansions released every year or two. Street fighter 5: buggy mess that didn't even work for the first 3 days after release, even after two(!) betas, with half the content locked behind a paywall, and literal advertisements put on costumes. That was probably the last AAA game I bought. I pretty much only play games from devs/publishers I respect, my problem is that list is ever-shrinking.
A lot of consumers are not like me: the hype is too much and they don't care about the actual game as much as getting to play it with other people.
I don't watch sports at all; I think they're idiotic and mostly a waste of time. I'll make a few rare exceptions for things like winter olympics events (downhill skiing for instance).
But I don't think this is a great comparison. At least with sports, when you pay the fee to watch the game, that's it: you go (or sit, if it's pay-per-view), watch the game in its entirety, and you're done. You don't suddenly get your view obstructed at half-time and are then required to pay an additional fee to watch the rest. If sports got that ridiculous, then I'd be making fun of people who continued to patronize them too.
>A lot of consumers are not like me: the hype is too much and they don't care about the actual game as much as getting to play it with other people.
So they're happy to support the publishers who treat them this way, and make them highly profitable. I don't really see the problem here: why shouldn't the publishers act this way then? They can treat their customers poorly, the customers happily come back for more, and they make a boatload of money. Maybe they lose a few people like you, but apparently that's not a big problem for them because they're making so much money on everyone else who refuses to abandon them. What's more, it sounds like there are some publishers who still do things the "old way" (according to your post here), but since that list is "ever-shrinking" according to you, that means this just isn't that viable a business model, because they're losing to the publishers who treat the gamers poorly. The people are speaking with their wallets, and apparently they like being treated this way, even when they actually still have alternatives!
Going back to firefox, i think it's a mistake. They are already far down the road of this provider/customer separation and going forward they will face such decisions over and over. This is a zugzwang and the sooner they break it the better. With a bit of wishful thinking i would have hoped they would flip the table and go full on with hardcore gnuish philosophy, making a big move and a new political depth into their browser. Perhaps regaining some sympathy from people that have long considered them as compromised, perhaps destabilizing big web players which will again have to face some public rumble to which they can't easily say anything else than "yeah we screwed up but hey it's not so bad and we are getting nicer" (an answer which is starting to get quite laughable).
The best solution I can think of for the moment is to always express our demand FOSS without compromise, but no matter what show appreciation for them for getting as close as they can, so long as they seem to be trying at least (unlike, say, Android at this point).
If we don't demand true north, the ship will drift further and further west and we forget our mission. If we don't show appreciation, they'll fail to see the point and give up the journey entirely.
Like it would be one thing to demand lots of features that require effort to develop but the parent is literally asking to pay more for less.
It is very normal for donations to foundations to have stipulations about what they're allowed to be spent on which is why developement (not in the software sense) pushes so hard for donors to allow spending in the general fund. I have no problem letting Mozilla spend my money as they see fit but I absolutely understand people who are only interested in Firefox.
Examples, please. I'm not sure that I am, except perhaps in places where I don't have a lot of choice (e.g., my ISP). If your examples include things like Spotify, I don't use online music services. If your examples include things like Office 365, I sure as hell don't subscribe to that.
Most likely we will see premium features like: - premium color themes - more cloud storage for settings and extensions - analytics on your browsing data (after you hand the data over to them) (??) - more customer support (???)
That may be true but it's extremely sad.
I have only seen major US news outlets do this - namely NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ etc.
I have subs to different publications - Ars, Ken, Nautilus - and they definitely are ad-free and a lot of others also claim to be ad-free for subscribers.
All I ever hear about in regards to news websites is that they're dying out because no one wants to pay for subscriptions, and the arms race is getting worse as many of them have strengthened their paywalls so that non-paying viewers can't see the articles (while others develop workarounds for the paywalls).
Magazines, like newspapers, also seem to be dying out, though not as fast as the print newspapers.
Maybe companies should rethink this business model.
While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.
— https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq#item_8
I'd also add that Mozilla fluff (pocket, etc.) be an install option (default off).
Finally, I'd like to be able to build stable macros again (ala greasemonkey). GM functionality in FF has been an annoyingly moving target - dropping and radically changing functionality - to the point where I now just keep an old version of FF w/ GM around so that I don't have to keep trying to re-write my macros.
Really though, how onerous is it to configure a fresh Firefox profile to suit your preferences? (And how often do you reset your Firefox profile anyway?)
Complaints about Pocket are largely emotional. It's a service run by Mozilla just like Firefox Sync and others. I agree it would be neater for Pocket to be implemented as a plug-in, but you could say that about a dozen or more Firefox features besides Pocket, so why single that one out? And really, why do you give a shit how Pocket is implemented if you don't use it anyway? Just switch it off.
Firefox Studies is a mechanism that is in principle no different to automatic updates. Studies is functionally less invasive than automatic updates and exists only because Studies allows for progressive roll-outs, rapid roll-outs and rapid roll-backs. Don't like it? Just switch it off.
Using your example and estimate, the 90% of people who use default settings will install Firefox and then immediately conclude it's broken because it can't search the internet. So they'll just switch back to Chrome and never try Firefox again.
Remember, these are the "default settings" people. They're not going to change the default settings. And with the OP's prescription for "no predefined search engines," there won't be a "Google" setting anyway even if they did try.
Train wreck.
One simple solution to this "train wreck" would be for Firefox to simply link users directly to the search engine settings if they try to search without one set.
I know you're claiming that's not what the OP is calling for, but we're literally just going on four words from them. Regardless, "train wreck" is an over-exaggeration for either of our assumptions.
I agree it's not a train-wreck to have your browser offer the choice of Google, Ask Jeeves or Lycos upon performing the first search. What this is is pointless. Nearly everyone doesn't care and will just reflexively select Google. The remaining people will have changed the setting themselves anyway.
Pocket was a third party when Mozilla integrated the service into Firefox. Mozilla employees denied for months that Mozilla took money for the integration. It came out later that Mozilla took money for referrals.
Pocket doesn't follow Mozilla's privacy principles.[1] Despite that, the Pocket website says "as a member of the Firefox family, privacy is paramount."[2]
Mozilla committed to make Pocket open source over 2 years ago. There are no longer plans to release the server-side code.[3]
It's a big deal to some people because they trusted Mozilla and vouched for Mozilla to other people. My parents understood "even Mozilla can't see your bookmarks". Explaining that Mozilla could see the new kind but not the old kind was harder.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/principles/
[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/
[3] https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75...
From the end user perspective you'd be asking money for a product that takes more effort to set up. That's silly.
In addition, I hope this does not give license to Mozilla to make the free version of Firefox in to a télémétrie nightmare.
They donated to Godot[1]. Don't think this rule should be so broad.
[1] https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...
in general it’d be great to see the wider market start to see these “helpful” features as actually harmful, but that 180 degree reversal is slow going. we’re in the middle of it right now with security/privacy vs convenience. seems like half the companies are going one way and half are going the other.
2. For the paid version that seems fine. But it seems fair that the free version of Firefox needs to be flexible in figuring out how to find sources of revenue. For example, if they pulled the plug on the predefined search engines then Mozilla would be dead pretty soon.
You don't know that. What if all the money that went into Rust would have been spent on a new renderer in C++?
The average person loads up the browser and wants it to just work. We're software engineers, but we have to understand our users too - and they're vastly different to us.
Anecdote incoming - most of the people who use Firefox in my immediate circle are family members, and they don't care about configuring a default search. They don't know about DDG, they don't know about Bing, and they don't care. They want to open their browser and search whatever they need to find.
Configurability is the engineer's pipe dream, but it dismisses a lot of people - and what matters is the masses, not the HN minority.
We are a minority.
- No Pocket anywhere in the code
- No telemetry / experiments / Normandy anywhere in the code
- No network connections to third party hosts (other than websites I'm viewing)
- No "discovery" feed / whatever they're calling the activity stream sponsored content thing now anywhere in the code
Just let me monthly subscribe via Paypal or whatever, and give me a private build server link and tar.gz of the source.
To be clear, I think there's quite a decent size market for something that could mostly be accomplished with a bash script that runs "rm -r" a few times.
Support for detecting RSS in a page would be great, but that's probably not going to happen.
> - No predefined search engines
> - No predefined start page
These in particular are bad ideas. Default settings should always target the average user, not the power user.
Having Google as the default search/start option doesn't harm you or me at all and takes only a few seconds to change, but not having it adds significant friction and frustration for the average user.
2. Would be happy with an install / first run option to speciry autocomplete and/or start page options.
3. Agreed, and definitely no such shenanigans in the paid version.
4. Not sure that would be possible, you'd probably at the very least need to log into something (like the VPN service included).
I agree, I'd be interested in this as well. Based on the replies you're getting, I'd also like to point out that I'm tired of this trend in discussions:
Person A states their preferences regarding a product and says that they wish that the company would offer certain options. Person A says that they would be more likely to buy (or would only buy) the product with those options available. Nowhere is it demanded that the company implement these options, but person A has very clearly indicated their preferences.
Persons B, C, and D then immediately come out of the woodwork to shut down the discussion:
* Person B explains why nobody else would be interested in the options that person A has asked for. Person A is a "niche" user and their opinions are unimportant.
* Person C characterizes person A as "unreasonable" or "entitled" and explains why no company in their right mind would want person A as a customer.
* Person D counters person A's statement by explaining that the company can produce any product they want to, and that they don't have to listen to person A's request. It's a private company, etc, etc. (Note that nowhere did person A imply that the company had to listen to their request.)
For real-world examples of this phenomenon, see any thread regarding (in particular) Apple, Mozilla, or Tesla.
- it's only an experimental additional source of revenue. They already got money covered, they are just trying to find new way to become more financially independent.
- they don't intend to sell the current state of Firefox. It will still be free. They intend to add stuff on top of the already awesome experience.
1. Paying users are too valuable.
2. Free users can "opt out" of experiments by paying - and they'll get some nice features for "free" as they do so.
(Edit, formatting)
Of course, FF + uBO is free, and one can always make donations. But buying a product feels different.
Also, businesses can expense what they buy with an invoice -- usually not the case with donations.
With Plex, I purchased a lifetime membership not because I valued any of the added features (I don't use them to this day), but because I got so much value out of the project that I felt indebted and wished to express my gratitude. I wanted the project to live on, and I also got to brag about my deeds on tech forums. The incredible scaling characteristics of software allow me to already enjoy most of the benefit from the free/open base edition alone.
Here are reasons for my "charity-driven" purchases:
- Admiration for project vision and desire to ensure its longevity
- A sense of gratitude due to incommensurate value enjoyed for very cheap or free
- Wanting to belong to the community and feel like part of the journey
I find myself valuing these items as "real commercial benefit":
- Strong privacy guarantees
- Cost-plus models such as selling managed storage, bandwidth, etc.
- Subscription to updates backed by regular human labor
- Access to premium support/SLA
My team builds a lot of PWAs, and Firefox simply did not provide good enough diagnostic tools, so we couldn't use it in earnest (even though we really wanted to).
well, for one, chrome is actually missing one big thing for me: a dark theme.
There are more, but I can't think of them currently.
I'm curious what kind of applications your building that require some sort of specialized tool that Firefox dev tools doesn't provide.
The best thing about Firefox is that if there is a dev tools feature that you need, you can easily submit a feature request in the support forums: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/firefox
Or, if you have the time and energy, you can always build it yourself: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
or direct link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146535
> Cost per click on Google properties — which roughly measures the amount Alphabet charges advertisers for each ad served on its web sites — dropped 29 percent from last year and 9 percent from last quarter, which might be alarming investors concerned that Google’s pricing power for ads is eroding. [1]
Additionally, Firefox is losing users, around 50,000 - 100,000 per day. [2]
They now want to add all kinds of additional stuff in order to make money. For a browser this is a death sentence. A browser can not be more than a browser, and ad tiles are the only practical way of making money next to search engine deals. While a pro-version of Firefox is certainly an interesting idea which can be sold to a tech-savvy minority, it neither can diversify their revenue in a meaningful way, nor is clear yet whether Mozilla is going to offer a paid Firefox version, or simply tries to upsell a software bundle branded with their name.
Mozilla paid around 30 million to aquire Pocket (one of their supposed foundations for making money), but there isn't any data to show whether they are profitable with it. Given the low number of ads in Pocket, they probably aren't profitable. In 2017, according to their financial report, they only made 2,5 million with Pocket ads.
Opera is the only other major browser that has to survive without having a tech giant behind them. They do everything they can to make money with Opera. And it has boiled down to ads in the start page and licensing. There’s nothing more you can do.
Opera is surviving on three kind of deals: [3]
– search (ca 60%)
– ads in start page
– licensing deals on mobile phones
Licensing is off limits to mozilla because they have lost the mobile market.
So all that is left is ads on the start page. Its that simple. There’s also a lesson to learn for Mozilla from the time Opera abandoned Presto: [4]
> “Because of our switch to the Blink engine, our retention rate on desktop users is much better now. This is because most websites work in Opera since we’re using the same engine as Google. We think we’ve become more relevant after we moved over to the Blink platform, and more companies now start to work with us,” Boilesen said.
> “We’ve got twice as many developers on the desktop browser now than we had with Presto, because all [our] resources went into maintaining Presto. The only error we made with Presto was that we kept it too long. Our change to Blink was because we wanted to get on the offensive with regards to innovation, we used too many resources to keep Presto competitive."
There are only two ways. You either stay innovative and keep up with the times, or you downsize and develop for a small niche group. Mozilla is doing neither.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/alphabet-earnings-q4-2018.ht...
[2] https://data.firefox.com
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/browser-maker-opera-has-fi...
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/show-me-the-money-how-opera-st...
Mozilla has seemed way too big to me for the actual useful development they accomplish (which is quite a bit! But the company's giant...) for years, and this move stinks of "death spiral" :-/
[EDIT] and Firefox has been the new Mozilla browser since, what, 2.0? Bloated and slow. The original was so easy to sell to friends and family in no small part because it was snappy and light, even on early 2000s/late 90s (still-running desktops from a few years earlier) hardware.
Mozilla needs to understand it is not OK to mess with my Internet banking client.
The browser is now critical Internet infrastructure and it is not OK when someone scares me by force installing extensions.
Also while Normandie would have been OK with me of I knew about it ot annoyed me when I found out about it because of a mistake.
Mozilla could have had a 9/10 score but thanks to issues like this I rate them 7/10.
(Chrome however is far worse.)
So presumably, Firefox accounts will become a freemium service, where paid accounts have e.g. higher limits for Firefox Send, a VPN, etc.
For that however, many things (which are far from trivial) have to be done. Among other things:
Hopefully Mozilla will not go down that path. I certainly don't think so with all they are doing in respect to privacy.
Dropped WideVine
Dropped WebRtc
Brought back XUL Extensions
Otherwise, I'll keep using a pre-australis fork, until I probably eventually just decide to use Chrome. Firefox different distinguish itself from Chrome.
Also, Firefox doesn't come with Widevine. You have to click yes to download the module the first time you visit a page that uses it.
Actually that makes me wonder - how does Mozilla currently make money off me if I've stopped using Google searches in Firefox?
Just for Firefox itself as it currently is, if there was some official way to pay for it, I think $5-10 (some small multiple of a cup of coffee deal) is fair to support development for what is essentially the only remaining competitor to Google.
Maybe a good option if you live somewhere like China or certain Middle Eastern countries where you need a VPN just to get news not controlled by the government, but all of the VPN users who just want to hide their IP when torrenting will probably look elsewhere.
Could this cause Firefox to be banned in China?