> Small company gives away software for free. Large companies give away the same software for free, and to them the cost is essentially peanuts, and they own the platforms the sofware runs on. Therefore small company will lose, decreasing diversity in the browser market. Simple as that.
Alternatively: Small company sells software, large company gives away the same kind of software for free. Small company loses, again.
You're not going to fix market forces artificially. We pay what we pay because that's what someone's willing to offer it for. Also, not all value is in dollars.
This is the key point here. Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari) and MIcrosoft (Edge) funnel money from other ventures to their browser dev teams.
For Apple and Microsoft it’s just a staple tool that each operating system needs but for Google it’s a platform that guides users towards their other services and ties them in, YouTube, Gmail, Drive, to name but a few.
In the current business model, there’s absolutely no competing with them long term. You’d have to either break them up or create some weird funding schemes driven by govs and users that don’t care (public good or some other utilitarian argument).
This where anti-trust kicks in, that you don't allow companies to leverage a monopoly/duopoly position in one market to destroy competition in another. Particularly if they give products away for free to destroy the existing competition or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.
> Particularly if they give products away for free to destroy the existing competition...
You're thinking of predatory pricing, but he market price for a browser has been zero for a long time.
Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product. That's competition at work. The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants.
If tomorrow Google decided to do something to Chrome, that isn't in the consumer's interest, immediately the opportunity arises for competitors to outdo them - with their own code even.
> ...or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.
Isn't that the point of most free products? I doubt there's an anti-trust case to be made there.
>The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants
I don't think your definition of anti-trust is accurate. Protect consumers by creating a competitive market. To promote and protect competition because consumers and the economy as a whole benefits when we have more competition in the market.
> Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product.
This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular.
These massive, unregulated companies can lose an enormous amount of money on products indefinitely, either choosing to sink cash into them quickly in order to follow (or drive) the market into rapid change that a company that is required to bring in revenue can't keep up with, or in a slower market just park the product at an adequate quality, and wait for the competition to stumble.
After the competition dies, then you can squeeze the customer for all they're worth.
> This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular.
Lets not oversimplify things. "Product competition" and "google doing nothing wrong" do not need to be, and are not, synonymous. These attributes are separated by at least a decade though.
I'm pretty sure enough of us in this thread were using the web when chrome was emerging, it _did_ offer a compelling alternative to the pretty dire alternatives at the time whatever your platform, and all on it's own merrits. For such complex beasts it's hard to quantize into best, and browsers wax an wayne in terms of keeping up with web standards and performance expectations... never the less at the time, chrome was a breath of fresh air in the context of the very stale state of browser development.
At the time it really didn't matter what Google's motives were, browsers sucked and this was good competition... But in the context of a monopoly in browser share (which lets face it chrome has become)... Motive is very important.
I agree with you though, the parent comment is wrong that the competition is still alive, it's merely historic at this point.
The underlying theme is motives vs competition - in the right context (competition), ulterior motives are neutralized due to market forces. However once overcome, those true motives take over.
I've been a Firefox user through all these years and still am. I don't like Google. I can still admit that during a crucial phase, Chrome was the better browser. Nowadays I don't think it's much of a difference, but the ship has sailed.
I never said that "Google did nothing wrong". I'm saying that if Google were to do something wrong that users actually care about, that would open the opportunity for competition to gain traction by offering a better product - based on their own codebase even!
That situation is what limits Google's options and that's what differentiates it from an actual monopoly. If you have a monopoly, your users are forced to use your services, because nobody else is able to compete. Nothing forces me to use Google's browser.
If you're making an anti-trust case, it has to be solid. If you just don't like the situation or making some sort of moral case, that's a different story.
I think if you look at Chrome from Google's pov originally, the last thing they wanted was someone putting out a browser where the default search engine of whatever you typed into the address bar couldn't be changed to google. A competitor could attack google by owning the browser, perhaps what they thought microsoft would do.
It's also worth noting that even though Microsoft didn't need Edge to succeed to nearly the degree Firefox has to in order to continue development, the competition from Chrome was so intense they gave up anyway. Fields where even subsidized megacorp projects can't stay above water are very tough places for mid-size nonprofits.
Mozilla brought in $450M last year because Google wanted to be the search engine on its free software. You can give software away and make money in other ways. Plenty of software companies do it and it's a perfectly valid business model. Small company does not "lose", and $450M is not small
Because they they already re-upped it, why spend more money when you already got the rewards? That is what happens when a company doesn't care about the product.
Oh wow. So from a financial standpoint they're not in a radically different position to earlier years (assuming between 10-20% more in other revenues), in fact seems as if they have approx 100M$ more coming in as revenue in comparison to the previous year of comparison (2018) [1]
Mozilla brought in $450M last year because Google didn't want to be involved in an antitrust action. Conflict between Mozilla and Google is keyfabe; Mozilla is virtually a subsidiary of Google.
Or more accurately - developers create software for free and license it as Open Source because of social pressure within the development community. Large corporations say thank you very much and use it to make vast quantities of money without contributing back financially to the people who actually do the work. Anyone who points out that this is grossly counter productive if you want to build a sustainable ecosystem that doesn't depend on the unpaid labour of volunteers gets shouted down by free software cheerleaders who condescendingly stress that they mean "free as in speech rather than free as in beer," despite all Open Source licenses literally demanding that Open Source software can be distributed for free (as in beer).
It certainly sounds logical but we see no evidence of this. Software creation is the highest it's ever been and accelerating. Salaries are going up. Open Source is arguably one of the reasons we're where we're at. I'd argue anything that puts up a barrier or changes the incentives to open source might be the thing that killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
I don't currently get paid for all the open source work I do nor do I expect to be but if that expectation changed, if everyone expected to be compensated for their what at least starts out as their hobby, I'd guess the amount of people doing it drop drastically.
Of course it sucks if your project gets popular and you feel obligated to keep spending time on it but you can always walk away.
Otherwise my compensation is the feeling I get from helping. This is no different then volunteering. I don't go to the soup kitchen and demand a salary for helping out. I also feel compensated from everyone else's contributions. That companies like Apple (clang, llvm, swift, webkit), Google (android, chrome, angular, dart, flutter), Facebook (react, graphql), Microsoft (.net, vs code), etc...
They are paying me back by offering all of that. I'm sure you can name some rich company not contributing but I guess I really don't care.
I'd actually say it's one of the primary motivations, but then I think that's the reason most people do most things. On the second point freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum and exercising ones freedoms almost always involves impinging on the freedoms of others. Therefore there is a constant negotiation going on that involves the balancing of freedoms of different individuals, not to mention the balancing of freedoms with other ethical goods that people value (like equality, happiness etc.) There is very little recognition in the fsf / open source world that adopting a maximalist approach to a specific set of freedoms - those that fit into the free software / open source ideology - necessarily impinges on other freedoms that many people also value - like the freedom to own and profit from one's labour without further enriching google et. al (Yes there are differences between the fsf and open source camps but they're largely of the peoples front of Judea / judean people's front variety.)
Free Software and Open Source software are not the same thing. Open Source was entirely conceived in order to subvert Free Software through making it even cheaper.
So "free software cheerleaders" are not trying to defend Open Source. If you don't want large corporations, or any corporations, ripping off your work, make it AGPL and sell them licenses.
As it is, most of this type of thing seems to be a complaint that the commons is crowding out the small businessman i.e. "There are too many public parks, and they're keeping people from visiting my nature resort."
IMO there is one more factor in play: pricing inertia once “market prices” are set
ie why are upfront mobile app prices free or peanuts? A big reason is cause they started that way. If mobile app prices started at closer to desktop app prices at the beginning, we’d probably have a much different mobile app marketplace today.
Another example: developer salaries in the US compared to rest of world, where they’re much lower even after normalization. I posit that a key reason was the easy money VC years around 2010, and they just stayed high ever since.
I’m sure there’s a proper economic term for this phenomenon :)
Netscape tried it. GetRight tried it; darn, even winzip tried it but people just wont pay for it. On the other hand, once you start adding copy protection mechanisms that work, we all start whining.
Corollary law: once a good enough product is released in a consumer categoryfor free, nobody will ever want to pay for anything in that category again, even if they could easily afford it :)
Years ago I worked for a company called Redgate. We bought a widely used free tool called .NET Reflector from its original author. The idea was that the recognition we received from owning and continuing to provide .NET Reflector for free would translate into additional sales of our other tools.
It didn't work.
For other related examples see the numerous social media stars/influencers who have moderate to large followings, but don't necessarily make that much money. The majority don't make enough to give up their day jobs.
Recognition often isn't worth that much. The real test of how much people value something is whether they'll pay for it.
A good example of how little recognition is worth, thought I’m slightly surprised I never heard about that purchase given I did hear about your flying sharks.
It’s a shame the sponsored spaceflight never worked out; but I guess even though Virgin Galactic still isn’t flying customers, that scheme brought more recognition than Reflector.
Indeed: it's frustrating that we were legally obligated to offer a cash alternative. It would have been cool to send someone into space regardless of any other benefits, real or imagined.
Anyway, I wasn't involved at all, so you have to understand that this is my personal viewpoint and not the view of the company but, again, the idea was that the recognition from that contest would translate into additional sales of our tools.
I remember that! I think it actually hurt the brand of Redgate. I just remember .NET Reflector being a free shareware tool which everybody used, and suddenly Redgate bought it and made it cost money.
Is there such a cult? I keep reading arguments like "nobody would pay for Google search, therefore they must track everyone and push ads", but I'd happily pay for search if it aligned their interests with mine ("high quality search results").
I'd also happily pay for a browser, but I'm not a big fan of "donate because it's the right thing to do", I prefer "pay because the product is worth it".
As far as I understand, donations to the Mozilla Foundation won't go into development anyway because of the way they're structured.
Don't ask for donations in the browser. Offer a product that people want and sell it to them. My personal approach: focus initially on developers. They're somewhat easy to understand (you have developers on the team), they have more money than the average user, their requirements and desires are clear and a little effort goes a long way, they already pay for tools that do some jobs that could be done in the browser (e.g. Fiddler).
But Mozilla isn't either. That's the trouble. They make plenty of money from Firefox but then don't spend it on Firefox, so Firefox market share declines, so they make less money from Firefox. Maybe they should try turning that wheel the opposite way.
From where I sit, it looks like there has been a lot of technical effort going into Firefox in the last few years - like 'Electrolyis' and 'Quantum'. 'Quantum' in particular has been translating the more experimental work (Rust & Servo) into improvements in Firefox.
So it seems more like they've been losing marketshare despite investing in Firefox. Google has much more money to spend on development, and can potentially also make popular sites like Youtube or GMail work best in Chrome.
I use Firefox and I hope it will get more popular again. But I'm baffled how many people seem to think that if only Mozilla tried properly, the users would come flocking back. All the evidence suggests that most users go to Chrome no matter what they do.
MS switched to a Chromium base because they couldn't keep pace with Google's ever shifting web tech. Apple goes at its own pace, sometimes not implementing Google's standards at all.
Mozilla wants to have a say in how Google makes web standards. To do that effectively they need to keep up with Chrome. Admittedly even then Chrome's massive market share makes arguing against Google difficult. Apple sometimes joins the conversation but only when it directly affects something they're currently interested in.
Which is why they aren’t. The amount of money was one of the big reasons they founded the Mozilla corporation, which is owned by the non-profit Mozilla foundation.
Mozilla Foundation holds 100% of M.Corp. and no one is allowed to purchase part of it. Essentially, this means Foundation owns all those earnings fully in some way (sans taxes); they need some legal channels to funnel it.
Having all of your products that are absolutely free for everyone just promotes a culture of "gimmie dat opun sauce warez 4 free" cult and relying on donations for supporting 1,000 employees, doesn't make any sense for sustainability for them.
So what's the next step for Mozilla's mission for protecting your privacy? Re-new that contract with your #1 anti-privacy competitor [0] and continue selling free things.
Open source is not "warez", and "supporting 1,000 employees" to work on an open source project makes zero sense. The best model for developer monetary support comes from individual crowdfunding campaigns by prominent devs, as is common, e.g. in the Rust community.
The most important software is the least visible. See OpenSSL. If you have individual developers doing crowdfunding, the most visible ones - the ones making GUI applications everyone uses - win, and all the critical infrastructure gets neglected because it is boring and 99% of people never think about it.
Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this.
Oh, and I would happily pay/donate to Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird, but not for all the other "adventures" they went after. VPN service... As if there were not enough of those already...
Mission creep has been a fundamental Mozilla flaw for too long.
And are they a corporate, a charity, or a corporate non-profit? Charities very often pay substantially lower salaries, the tradeoff being you feel you contribute to a greater good. That's how I thought of them, but the wage bill doesn't match up.
there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise...
The Foundation is also the sole shareholder in the Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox and other open source tools. Mozilla Corporation functions as a self-sustaining social enterprise – money earned through its products is reinvested into the organization.
With over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide, Mozilla Corporation employee compensation is benchmarked to market by role and level balancing total compensation between individual and company performance with a pay-for-performance compensation model...
For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations.
Also:
Mozilla Foundation non-profit programs are carried out by 80 employees and thousands of volunteers around the world.
Wikipedia explains a bit more:
Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue.
A tax-paying entity is a regular for-profit company. It's a basically a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Foundation, confusingly.
More information about revenue:
Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath
And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
I was aware there was more complexity than I mentioned, I somehow missed that they mentioned a non-profit.
>And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
Google paid most of their corporate revenue. The last reported year, 2018, was the first under the new contract, and looking at revenues you can guess how much smaller it was then the Yahoo one. If I remember correctly, the contract information will be on the detailed financial report released this year.
>Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this.
To build a browser capable of taking any market share away from Google and Microsoft, available in 90 languages with regular updates, you probably do need numbers around there.
This sounded like a lot to me, so I looked through the last 4096 chromium commits and counted committer names. That is back until the beginning of August. In that time, remarkably, Chromium has indeed had 856 committers, most of which only made a few commits in that timespan. That is very much not what I would have expected.
For comparison, I repeated the experiment with Mozilla's gecko-dev repo, and got 480 people committing - still a lot more than I'd thought. I guess I'll see how this holds up with the downsizing in a month.
[edit] Though - only 199 with a Mozilla email address. Though I don't have a Chromium comparison here.
Someone did that 10–15 years ago, and they did it with a staff 1/10 the size and on a budget 10–20% the one that the current generation of executives are working with.
The job was also different. Compare someone trying to get into shape with someone trying to maintain their current body weight.
Early Mozilla did a lot of good work. Leadership during the 2010s undid almost all of it in ways that were predictable.
The VPN service was created to make money, not to spend it. They've been fishing for a new source of income for a long time, so far without much success. Pocket brings in some money but it can't sustain Firefox development on its own.
Mission creep is certainly a thing, but a fully featured web browser is a massively complex piece of software and most definitely not something you can do with a bunch of volounteers in their free time.
It may not require 1000 employees, but 100 is probably not enough. And that is still not easy to fund with volountary donations.
Then take 300 developers, if you need them. Financing would probably be sufficient, if it wasn't spread amongst three times the employees and would have to take care of several other projects.
All the existing VPN providers are shady. I'd much sooner trust one from Mozilla. I don't think this is a priori a bad market for them to get into at all. It could even be a decent money maker for them, especially with seamless integration into Firefox. Unlike browsers, people are willing to pay for VPNs, so there's a good potential additional revenue source there.
Yeah, so just get your own VPN up and running in half an hour. Invite your family to use it, too. That's probably around 5-10 $/month with some cloud VPS thingy for everybody in your house. Did it myself, combined with a PiHole, and it worked like a charm. In regards of trust: Mozilla is just another big corporation, a VPN from some other big tech company (one that isn't into advertising - how about Apple?) would just be as trustworthy.
(1) Where is your Internet traffic actually hitting the Internet? Is it emanating from your house? If so, that's not why most people get VPNs. If not, how many different countries can your endpoint be located in? Again, if you can't choose from a large list of arbitrary countries, then this doesn't satisfy many people's VPN use case.
(2) You are assuming a technical level of competence that most people don't have. Even if they do, they often would rather just pay for something simple that works rather than have yet another thing to maintain.
(3) Yeah, Apple would be as trustworthy to most people. But they aren't doing it. A service that doesn't exist isn't a real competitor. I think there's a real potential in this space for a non-shady company, and Mozilla seems like the best candidate.
From my understanding Mozilla VPN is just rebranded mullvad VPN.
So what benefit do you get by purchasing VPN access from Mozilla vs. directly from mullvad? I don´t see any from a security/trust perspective.
Also everyone is writing Mozilla wrong around here.
It´s not Mozilla. They changed it to Moz://a. How much did that rebranding cost? Was that money well spent?
So many bad decisions.
I doubt very much that when Sony uses that forked clang compiler, where they only upstream non-PS4 specific optimizations there is any user right to care about.
In this case Sony is the user and they care very much that they can freely change the compiler as needed without having to ask someone else for permission. Price is a secondary consideration here.
Benefits of strong copyleft or BSD-style copyright is another matter of discussion.
> So allow me to make a modest proposal: build in a donations function in Firefox itself — for instance by adding a simple “Please support us” message to the update page you get to see whenever you update the browser, and by adding a Donations item to the main menu.
Agreed. We need a way to directly fund Firefox development, and Mozilla is not currently providing this.
The author suggests getting donations to (partially) finance Firefox. That would never work without changing the culture of Mozilla Corporation in a huge way: Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs. People would be very quick to cease donating if they are being annoyed in such a way. The only reason people currently put up with Mozilla's behaviour is because they didn't pay for the product.
Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.
It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on. Currently, they probably don't accept such donations (as far as I can tell), but that's on Mozilla.
Money is the ultimate fungible asset, any restricted funds going to development frees up money that would have gone to development otherwise to go to something else instead. The only way this works is if the restricted fund donations exceed what the dev investment would have been otherwise, then it starts making a difference.
As a donor I don’t like this method because unless all donations were like this, since funds are fungible, budgets would still shift around.
For example, consider two features:
AwesomeFeature - budget has $100
DumdumFeature - budget has $200
They currently receive $300 in donations, $50 of which have no strings attached. So there’s donation stream A with strings and $250, and donation stream B with no strings and $50.
Allocation looks like this:
AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$75, B$25
DumdumFeature - budget has $200, funded with A$175, B$25.
If I donate $25 and say “this can only go to awesome feature” the budgets after my donation end up as.
AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$100
DumdumFeature - budget has $225, funded with A$175, B$50.
In the case of Mozilla, it's more than the money can go to one of two places: Firefox development, or the black-hole of Mozilla's other projects and expenditures, including their overpaid leadership.
Technically yes, they could shift spending like that, but it would look bad enough, I think at least some would help where you want. Either way, asking for them not to shift funding as appropriate would be asking to control other finances not your own.
If they allowed targeted donations to firefox/quantum/rust/MDN I would donate, as I'm sure many other will. As it is, I don't and won't even if firefox were to fail.
Just go through https://github.com/mozilla and I bet you didn't hear about 90% of them. If you paginate further, you'll see most of them aren't maintained much anymore.
WebThings ? There are OSS projects in this space and I don't see how they plan on capturing value for the organisation or provide value to the community by building yet another solution that currently has very weak integration with 3rd party devices.
The new crappy address bar that nobody asked for, pocket, hubs, three different mobile browsers, some useless award and probably more that I don't remember.
Also annoying is how they constantly kill useful features like RSS or bookmark descriptions.
I use Firefox because I still like it better than Chrome and I like to support free software, but it's obvious to me that Mozilla doesn't really care about their users and they're too busy chasing shiny things. I expect they'll keep losing market share until they become irrelevant and disappear.
Pocket was a third party service when it became a default Firefox feature in 2015. Mozilla acquired it in 2017.[0] I could not find any data on what they paid.
> Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.
Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero).
Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN).
Now they spend nearly $100m per year.
So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.
Donations to Wikipedia more than pay for the technical infrastructure, they do have lots of money to waste. Mozilla obviously doesn't. So as a donor, Mozilla wasting money is more of a problem, because as a donor I see it is actually not keeping Mozilla running and if I stop donating it will hurt far worse.
There's either a misconception in this comment or a misreading of it on this side.
Compare the Wikimedia numbers given (nearly $100m per year to keep running) to Mozilla's, who last reported spending much more than that (over $173m) just in their non-software development spending.
It looks like the misreading part was the right one, then. The intent of your original comment is clearer now, in light of this response.
You're saying that Wikimedia's spending is somewhat rational, whereas Mozilla's revenue might disappear as the result of a single party making a decision to walk away. You're not saying that Mozilla is a ragtag group of browser developers with barely any money. (There was too much focus on "Mozilla obviously doesn't [have the money to waste]" in the earlier reading.)
I'm seeing lots of successful developments from the Wikimedia folks. Their latest project, namely Wikidata is already bigger than Wikipedia ever was; not to mention the projects they launched before that. (Wikimedia Commons free media repository, Wikivoyage travel guide etc.)
> Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes.
I just use Firefox with some extensions and have seen nothing like this. I also used Thunderbird briefly (like a month). What am I missing? Do you have specific examples?
If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? The browser starts, I get to work, end of story. I get that Firefox has made some decisions people don’t like (Pocket and the suggested links on new tab) but that doesn’t mean they are annoying users on every chance or breaking my ability to work.
If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it?
People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.
Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".
> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.
As someone who is annoyed now:
Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead.
There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago.
And here I sit, wondering if
- it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time
- if I changed
- if Mozilla changed
- or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla
I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/
> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about.
No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.
> People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008.
Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance.
Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.
> FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab
It's something more complicated, to balance resources with stability. I don't know the rules, but for example I have 3 windows with ~700 tabs split across them, which appear to be using 6 processes with 193 threads. (Also I use Auto Tab Suspender, so that probably influences it as well)
You are right. After they ousted the inventor of Javascript, the woke crowd there set about making Firefox into a chrome clone. They also annoyed the users with everything else that was not a chrome feature. I knew this day would come.
https://www.opensourceforu.com/2016/08/firefox-past-present-...
It's a very "loud" piece of software. Messages about various things they want me to try (ads), tabs popping up with a fancy page telling me the browser updated (this might be OK if it happened like twice a year, but it's more like every week or two), and a busy, distracting default page.
This stuff bugs power users, but if you watch people who aren't in the power-user set, it's pure usability poison to them. Ditto UI elements moving around after an auto-update. Confuses the living hell out of them. It's about as far from good UX as you can get—a mediocre UI that never changes is far better UX than a good one that behaves unpredictably, and I mean from the perspective of normal people, not HN nerds.
When they broke almost all existing Addons (some are gone to this day, like Classic Theme Restorer) with the Quantum Update for instance. Or when they decided to ditch Thunderbird for no reason at all. And then sort of undecided.
AIUI, Classic Theme Restorer has become redundant since Quantum brought back the "classic" look anyway. Of course there are many other examples of broken extensions.
I've used Firefox for decades now, and I have never understood the shear amount of vitriol that gets thrown at Mozilla when they change Firefox.
Sure, workflows I'm used to change, and sure they add in the odd experiment from time to time that is later abandoned, but it's at nowhere near the frequency Google does the same thing. Yes, Google cops a lot of criticism for this, but language used to criticise Google pales compared to level of vindictiveness I see thrown at Mozilla just in the comments here. It's like they been betrayed by their own mother.
It's even harder to explain given Firefox has clearly gotten better over the years. It's a bumpy ride like all software changes, but it's faster, more reliable, and more standards compliant than ever before. Yes, addon compatibility has been sacrificed to make that happen, but happened for a pretty good reason unlike say Google removing the interfaces that allow ad blockers to work effectively.
In the process they've made some hard core advances in the art, like Rust, and like WASM. From where I sit they've been more effective at this recently than Google. And yet what we hear about here is how Pocket doesn't work as they like. Really - does it matter, compared to the amount of good work that comes out of Mozilla?
Mozilla broke features that did not need fixing. They also removed features such as RSS support. RSS supports anonymity and does not add dollars to Google's kitty. So, Mozilla's policy was lockstep with Google's.
> Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs.
Isn't this a symptom of being detached from reality? In a sense that they are in their bubble, and didn't had the need to look outside of it?
Maybe that's the problem, they didn't have to make it work because the money was already there.
I think this comes down to the old socialism vs capitalism debate. Industries gain a lot at relying on 'free products' that are most of the time financed by states (think roads, infrastructure, etc...), but you can find counter examples where privately owned & sold products work better.
Concerning software, I agree the situation is a bit different as states are hardly strong players there. But I would disagree on the fact that the 'clut of free' is a sin. The whole industry gained a lot in terms of openness, sharing of best-practices and just innovation. Try finding how to build a washing-machine from scratch or just getting the PCB layout of your radio, it's a really painful process.
But I would agree that I'm worried too on the future of software, but I would rather push for more financing of open source (& free) projects - by states or NGOs - rather than pushing the whole industry to go sales first.
Why "states or NGO's" rather than nimble, grassroots campaigns via crowdfunding? The latter seems to be working quite well for a bunch of projects, while "institutional", politicized funding is a lot harder to come by and brings its own unwanted distortions.
You're right I think crowdfunding campaigns can be a really useful tool for such financing. Altought, I think recently, crowdfunding have a bit diverted from their original purpose to become marketing tools for some companies.
I think the ideal solution is hard to find, but I doubt we will come to something stable without a bit of regulation.
Who is going to pay for Firefox if they fired the people pushing the tech forward (i.e. the servo team)?
If anybody is going to pay for a browser it must be better than its competition.
I would pay for better privacy, adblocking, higher speed, better dev tools and what not.
But Firefox is not so much better than Chromium in any of these points to warrant payment.
> But Firefox is not so much better than Chromium in any of these points to warrant payment.
I vastly prefer Firefox and always did for some reason (I keep testing Opera, Vivalidi, Chromium and what not but none of them clicked with me) but I still see you point, it would be hard for many to justify a high price even if they prefer it.
I'd still happily pay for Firefox (not Mozilla) but I'd consider it an insurance more than an investment at the moment.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like a giant branding error.
Individually, all their paid offerings aren't that interesting. Scroll, Pocket, and privacy VPN's are all fine little niche products, but bundled together and called Firefox Pro, it gives you vision of what a premium browser might look like: the browser is free, paid users get a collection of services and support the open web.
No amount of requesting donations will ever support an organization the size of Mozilla. It's annual budget is half a billion dollars.
I also consider reverting to "nagware" a huge step back. Either you sell a product, monetize part of it, or offer it for free - giving it away "for free" while sneaking in a shower of requests for money is the worst possible outcome.
What's there really to improve? I don't think the experience with Firefox is fundamentally different, nor could it be made fundamentally better. It's a browser. People don't care about browsers, they care about websites. Even if Firefox were to implement some fancy feature, websites aren't going to adopt it until Chrome has it too.
Sure, you could argue that Firefox doesn't track you like Chrome does. That's basically their whole marketing message. People who care about this already use Firefox, the rest just doesn't care.
If you mean in about:config 1: they change it and add hidden options all the time (you have to browse the code to find them) and 2: this is about the first run, all of that data will be sent before you have the chance to open about:config.
> The code is all yours.
So is the Chromium code.
Regardless, considering Mozilla's trademark policy it can't technically be disabled in firefox.
> Seeing as your original comment said Chrome ...
Firefox contains proprietary components too (such as EME) that you can't modify. The code is all yours in Chrome as much as it is for firefox.
I personally do not buy that argument, it is like saying that firefox has an integrated emacs in it because "the code is all yours".
I personally would like to distinguish between donations to the Firefox product and Mozilla as a company. I donated every month for a year, but eventually didn't feel that my contributions were making it to the actual devs making a difference. Or even balancing the books. I cannot explain why, but something feels off about Mozilla. I'm not being conspiratorial, but is Mozilla really one of the "good guys"?
I feel like Mozilla does not understand the "old-internet" which it prostitutes to sell itself to users. Lawyers, Amazon extensions, this is how we are fighting Fake News!
I remember when free access to the web and its technologies was something good. From having a free browser, free web server (as in Apache/Linux, not the hardware/connection) to being able to read the very HTML code that's used to send you that stuff.
Now it's paywalls, gated communities and Valley technologists crying about moochers from the steering wheels of their Teslas.
I value time the further into my professional life I get. So for me, paying for good quality documentation, wether it comes in form of a website or a book, is a better bargain than me trying to read up on 10 blog posts and going down the rabbit hole of the source code.
I recommend Michael Widenius's video[1] about "Doing business with Open Source" it goes trough different models, and explains the reasoning behind MySQL license model, although I'm aware how different is a browser from a database it might help to think about this problem from different angles.
In the case of Firefox, if I'm not mistaken they do only consumer focus products, maybe they could release something that companies are willing to pay for.
They could captilize on the good reputation while it lasts, and maybe employees that resonate with Mozilla history will promote their products to their bosses for free.
This makes a lot of sense. I would rather they either built amazing orthoganal SaaS products and charged me for them, or had some >$100k ACV enterprise plays.
On the former, it's of course a massive shift off of their current focus and they'd get a lot of kickback from the community, but you could imagine a world where they had a model like 37 Signals/Basecamp/Hey etc. On the latter, I don't know anything about the browser market in proper enterprise and if there are many opportunities for products there - you would presume there could be some value capture though.
That's essentially my problem with the open source.
I was an open source apologist some time ago, but since I quit full-time job
and started to freelance/working on my own personal projects I began to
realize, that I as an independent developer can't actually profit from it.
In fact, it takes a lot of my time to contribute to something and I get nothing
in return.
From my perspective:
* Behind every popular open source project there is a company (typically big),
which pays core team salary to maintain open source project.
Community is typically do work for free. The bigger the project, the better
for the company public image.
* Open source projects end up to be designed by committee, which inevitably
turns projects to bloatware, which are hard to maintain and hard to use.
* Increase in technology turn-over. Projects become hyped and die faster that
* Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment
manager if there's Kubernetes?
* En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to projects while
doing a lot of work for free. One may argue that in return they get polished
product, but in reality that's far from true.
> At the same time, you can also study how Kubernetes does the job, and come up with radical superior solutions.
I feel that's a bit of a reach. A small team will magically come up with something better than hundreds/thousands of developers that thought/developed k8s?
It's nice to think anyone can do that, but I believe only another company (and probably not a small one) could try and do that. I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
But that's a different discussion regardless if open source or closed, big companies vs small teams issue will ever exists.
What I'm saying is that the product being open source allows you to study it, let's say you want to do something as fast as Redis, you have all that previous work open.
I don't imagine a single person in a room going line by line studying it, what usually happen is that many people study particular aspects and write about it the problems they had, improvements and so on.
> I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
Well it depends a "bunch" of open source contributors can organise themselves and grow into organizations, there are many examples.
yes, that's what happen with MongoDB and AWS, right?
The ugly thing is that they take advantage from the brand too just saying "X brand compatible" they can use the brand reputation and re-package it, I agree on that point being an issue.
Thought doesn’t scale. A solid design/architecture can only come from a handful of minds. The hundreds/thousands of developers than can provide volume of features, not necessarily quality. This is why one person (or small team) can still be disruptive.
I don't think "open source" needs to apologize for anything. Making profit from it wasn't ever the goal for most projects. That you cannot derive profit from it may have to do with your business model.
You could offer support for the product you are offering or maybe you can just write proprietary software. To think that there is a problem with open source as a concept sound like a pretty alien conclusion to be honest.
Most open source projects don't have corporate backing obviously. The large ones that are heavily in use? Sure, because their developers use it too.
> Open source projects end up to be designed by committee [..]
I can agree on that point, but again, that is a minority of project that have become very successful.
> En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to project
That is the point of any free contribution. I know that can get exhausting and that there are ungrateful users that can ruin it for you, but I still don't see how open source is the problem and not your disposition to it.
I think the article overall is not convincing. Maybe our expectations are too high, but whose aren't in todays software world. Without open source it just isn't possible to let developers teach themselves as efficient as they can do now. That these costs are externalized by companies and that they might not give back enough is the nature of voluntary work. But it certainly not undercutting some imagined market.
The problem with open source is not that the source is available, that you can modify it to your own needs, or that you can contribute back, it is that anyone can redistribute your software for free, and that you can't discriminate between e.g. small businesses or personal use and Google in your license terms. This cuts off the possibility of actually supporting yourself financially as an open source developer in many cases and is an ideological commitment that mostly benefits large corporations at the expense of individual developers.
Then someone can dual license the code. Something like AGPL for general development and commercial licenses via request. This way the source is open at all times and companies that want to use it and modify it for commercial purposes can get a commercial license for that. In this case the biggest issue is copyright assignment. In order to dual license you require everyone who's contributed to agree. In large projects that's difficult. In a company, copyright can be handed over to the company, but anyone outside the company who contributes has to either sign over copyright or agree to letting their contributions be dual licensed.
The best option looks like a tight copyleft license combined with a contract for copyright assignment and revenue sharing for contributors and dual licensed for commercial use. The most difficult part of this would be gauging developer worth based on contributions, but that's something that happens in every company anyways.
> * En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to projects while doing a lot of work for free. One may argue that in return they get polished product, but in reality that's far from true.
If you frame it like that, sounds like people are forced to work for free, think about other open source advantages, for example the freedom to customise the software to your needs without questions asked.
You can fix a bug that is blocking you for doing something, instead of waiting a big company to prioritise your little problem.
And that's just the first that comes to my mind, there are much more.
But I understand that your statment seems to come from a frustating experience, I'm curious about what was that product.
Similar experience, that is how I changed from an advocate with Linux Journal subscription and stuff like M$ on my email signature, to work again mostly with commercial software.
> That's essentially my problem with the open source.
And that's my problem with the moniker 'open source' - it gives people the wrong idea. Free software is all about freedom, and surprisingly that often turns out to be easier to explain than the nebulous appellation 'open'.
Amusingly, each of your five dot points applies entirely to non-free software (behind non-free software there's a commercial entity, their products often end up getting designed by committee and are the worse for it, projects die as soon as they (product or company) cease being commercially viable, competition is discouraging and leads to similar but worse in slightly different ways products, and people contributing via bug reports or plugins or code contributions or blogs on how to use the product are doing it 'for free').
You said behind every popular open source project there's a big company -- what would that be for the Linux kernel, Apache, KDE, Python, VLC, gimp?
Btw, don't tell Hashicorp that it's pointless trying to write a better orchestrator than K8s. : )
> "Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment manager if there's Kubernetes?"
Open source projects are there as common heritage of mankind that addresses a major need. To me they are similar to roads ans railways. Where is competition to a road? Is there real competition to tcp/ip?
There are well maintained Open Source projects that have effectively a BDFL and don't lose focus. Go language or Lua come to mind.
But people like to complain "Go is Google's language" because it's authors rejected some fringe proposal. Not that I like Go, but there are many ways of doing open source.
Micropayments are proven to work but everyone seems to hates micropayments. Software is good when regularly updated but everyone hates on subscriptions, claiming to be OK with one time payment but that business model got almost wiped out because people actually don’t like to pay one the (sustainable) one time fee too.
Pay with your data and liberties business model seems to be the darling of the masses.
Cult of free is actually just that and Mozilla is also part of it as it is making its revenue from Google.
Fund the business. Yes, everyone hates on them but there's a reason why every game and every software is switching to "pay for the extra feature or resource or pay monthly" model. I also find it far less fun-killing than the ad-supported ones. The ad-supported games and software(I will count the websites also in this) has terrible user experience as it is geared to interrupt you and make you do something else.
Free(as in beer) software has become a bait to direct you to something else. You want to drive a virtual car? Here is your virtual car but why don't you check the bubble popping game first? Here are your bubbles to pop but why don't you try jumping over hops instead? Here are the hops you may want to jump but wouldn't you not like to get angry for this political issue first?
This endless ad-supported stream of offers, I believe, is taking the oxygen of truly high quality works. Why would you buy the 0.99$ app or game when you can use the free version, right?
I see in-app purchases and subscription models as quite different from micropayments. Micropayments would mean something like Spotify - you pay some amount up front, and the company pays artists a tiny amount for each time someone listens to their work.
A quick search suggests that that amount is on average less than half a US cent per play on Spotify, and similar services range from about 1/10 to 2 cents per play. It's not a system that the artists are very happy with.
It’s the same thing but they pay programmers and designers instead of musicians. It’s actually better because most of these programmers and designers make decent amount of money - unlike Spotify.
I am not big fan of the series so I would not know what is the current situation(maybe now they also do annoying ads? I wouldn't know), but essentially if you want to play all day long you need to chip in, otherwise you wait for life refills. There are also pay-to-win options(consumable power ups) but you don't have to use it. It is a delight for the people who are into the genre, my mother plays the game since years and she is loving it.
What I liked was that, the deal is sipmle: We will give you a game that you like but if you want to play it a lot or be given an easy time you will have to pay. This is in contrast of all the ad-based software out there where the deal is "We made something that you want however we would like you to consider doing something else by clicking on our ads, we insist".
I myself play a lot of PUBG Mobile and it's also an excellent experience. It's free to play, ads's don't interrupt and I can play as much as I would like but If I like to customise my characters appearance, then I need to pay.
I would gladly pay for MDN access. Mozilla has done a wonderful work with that, it's a goto place for any kind of web related documentation (and I'm probably not the only one).
5 years ago it would have been worse because the community was smaller back then. But it's grown since and more companies have adopted Rust, contributing back by maintaining own open source projects.
I agree with the author that this expectation everyone has that things are actually free hurts everyone.
Some people say they'd pay for Firefox. Some say they'd support it, but nothing outside of the main browser. But are there really enough people to fund something as big as Mozilla?
Sure there might be some excesses (like I keep reading about the CEO's salary every other comment), but it seems few realize that the commercial ventures were created for a reason: to bring money in.
If Mozilla only ever worked on the browser, would they have survived up until now? I reckon no.
I do think they should create some sort of recurring donation system in a Patreon style (even without rewards, maybe with nice lists for the biggest donors) and test the waters. Are there really a lot of people willing to put money where their mouth is? I hope so, but my gut feeling also says no.
> But are there really enough people to fund something as big as Mozilla?
I believe so. My favorite example is JetBrains. They're making about half of what Mozilla is Making (if you include the other commercial competitors, it's much probably closer, and they're competing with Microsoft giving a free IDE away), people are happy to pay. JetBrains' products are significantly better than the free alternatives though.
I am SO waiting for Mozilla to give my ANY endpoint to throw my money at, and I bet I am not alone. Why cannot I have an Firefox mug? Or get that VPN running in Europe finally?
382 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadAlternatively: Small company sells software, large company gives away the same kind of software for free. Small company loses, again.
You're not going to fix market forces artificially. We pay what we pay because that's what someone's willing to offer it for. Also, not all value is in dollars.
In the current business model, there’s absolutely no competing with them long term. You’d have to either break them up or create some weird funding schemes driven by govs and users that don’t care (public good or some other utilitarian argument).
You're thinking of predatory pricing, but he market price for a browser has been zero for a long time.
Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product. That's competition at work. The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants.
If tomorrow Google decided to do something to Chrome, that isn't in the consumer's interest, immediately the opportunity arises for competitors to outdo them - with their own code even.
> ...or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.
Isn't that the point of most free products? I doubt there's an anti-trust case to be made there.
Surely Google wouldn't allocate ad-space preferentially to their own products, right?
And surely they wouldn't bug me for five plus years about how the internet is faster with Chrome?
Nah, that would never happen ;)
I don't think your definition of anti-trust is accurate. Protect consumers by creating a competitive market. To promote and protect competition because consumers and the economy as a whole benefits when we have more competition in the market.
This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular.
These massive, unregulated companies can lose an enormous amount of money on products indefinitely, either choosing to sink cash into them quickly in order to follow (or drive) the market into rapid change that a company that is required to bring in revenue can't keep up with, or in a slower market just park the product at an adequate quality, and wait for the competition to stumble.
After the competition dies, then you can squeeze the customer for all they're worth.
Lets not oversimplify things. "Product competition" and "google doing nothing wrong" do not need to be, and are not, synonymous. These attributes are separated by at least a decade though.
I'm pretty sure enough of us in this thread were using the web when chrome was emerging, it _did_ offer a compelling alternative to the pretty dire alternatives at the time whatever your platform, and all on it's own merrits. For such complex beasts it's hard to quantize into best, and browsers wax an wayne in terms of keeping up with web standards and performance expectations... never the less at the time, chrome was a breath of fresh air in the context of the very stale state of browser development.
At the time it really didn't matter what Google's motives were, browsers sucked and this was good competition... But in the context of a monopoly in browser share (which lets face it chrome has become)... Motive is very important.
I agree with you though, the parent comment is wrong that the competition is still alive, it's merely historic at this point.
The underlying theme is motives vs competition - in the right context (competition), ulterior motives are neutralized due to market forces. However once overcome, those true motives take over.
I never said that "Google did nothing wrong". I'm saying that if Google were to do something wrong that users actually care about, that would open the opportunity for competition to gain traction by offering a better product - based on their own codebase even!
That situation is what limits Google's options and that's what differentiates it from an actual monopoly. If you have a monopoly, your users are forced to use your services, because nobody else is able to compete. Nothing forces me to use Google's browser.
If you're making an anti-trust case, it has to be solid. If you just don't like the situation or making some sort of moral case, that's a different story.
You need to offer some value added services (like privacy, less ads) to be able to charge for the browser.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/08/13/0012243/mozilla-ext...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
Fucking suits.
I don't currently get paid for all the open source work I do nor do I expect to be but if that expectation changed, if everyone expected to be compensated for their what at least starts out as their hobby, I'd guess the amount of people doing it drop drastically.
Of course it sucks if your project gets popular and you feel obligated to keep spending time on it but you can always walk away.
Otherwise my compensation is the feeling I get from helping. This is no different then volunteering. I don't go to the soup kitchen and demand a salary for helping out. I also feel compensated from everyone else's contributions. That companies like Apple (clang, llvm, swift, webkit), Google (android, chrome, angular, dart, flutter), Facebook (react, graphql), Microsoft (.net, vs code), etc...
They are paying me back by offering all of that. I'm sure you can name some rich company not contributing but I guess I really don't care.
I hope you are not implying that that is the main or even only reason to release free software.
> Anyone who [...]
IME people get shouted down for suggesting to "fix" free software by removing freedoms.
And OSS is more attractive to those companies in terms of not being vendor locked-in.
People who are annoyed that age of commercial smalltalks is over, or shilling for oracle, never understand this.
So "free software cheerleaders" are not trying to defend Open Source. If you don't want large corporations, or any corporations, ripping off your work, make it AGPL and sell them licenses.
As it is, most of this type of thing seems to be a complaint that the commons is crowding out the small businessman i.e. "There are too many public parks, and they're keeping people from visiting my nature resort."
ie why are upfront mobile app prices free or peanuts? A big reason is cause they started that way. If mobile app prices started at closer to desktop app prices at the beginning, we’d probably have a much different mobile app marketplace today.
Another example: developer salaries in the US compared to rest of world, where they’re much lower even after normalization. I posit that a key reason was the easy money VC years around 2010, and they just stayed high ever since.
I’m sure there’s a proper economic term for this phenomenon :)
It didn't work.
For other related examples see the numerous social media stars/influencers who have moderate to large followings, but don't necessarily make that much money. The majority don't make enough to give up their day jobs.
Recognition often isn't worth that much. The real test of how much people value something is whether they'll pay for it.
It’s a shame the sponsored spaceflight never worked out; but I guess even though Virgin Galactic still isn’t flying customers, that scheme brought more recognition than Reflector.
Anyway, I wasn't involved at all, so you have to understand that this is my personal viewpoint and not the view of the company but, again, the idea was that the recognition from that contest would translate into additional sales of our tools.
It didn't work.
I'd also happily pay for a browser, but I'm not a big fan of "donate because it's the right thing to do", I prefer "pay because the product is worth it".
As far as I understand, donations to the Mozilla Foundation won't go into development anyway because of the way they're structured.
Don't ask for donations in the browser. Offer a product that people want and sell it to them. My personal approach: focus initially on developers. They're somewhat easy to understand (you have developers on the team), they have more money than the average user, their requirements and desires are clear and a little effort goes a long way, they already pay for tools that do some jobs that could be done in the browser (e.g. Fiddler).
They have had years of ~$500M of revenue. I don't consider this small.
So it seems more like they've been losing marketshare despite investing in Firefox. Google has much more money to spend on development, and can potentially also make popular sites like Youtube or GMail work best in Chrome.
I use Firefox and I hope it will get more popular again. But I'm baffled how many people seem to think that if only Mozilla tried properly, the users would come flocking back. All the evidence suggests that most users go to Chrome no matter what they do.
Mozilla wants to have a say in how Google makes web standards. To do that effectively they need to keep up with Chrome. Admittedly even then Chrome's massive market share makes arguing against Google difficult. Apple sometimes joins the conversation but only when it directly affects something they're currently interested in.
So what's the next step for Mozilla's mission for protecting your privacy? Re-new that contract with your #1 anti-privacy competitor [0] and continue selling free things.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla...
Oh, and I would happily pay/donate to Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird, but not for all the other "adventures" they went after. VPN service... As if there were not enough of those already...
And are they a corporate, a charity, or a corporate non-profit? Charities very often pay substantially lower salaries, the tradeoff being you feel you contribute to a greater good. That's how I thought of them, but the wage bill doesn't match up.
They started with Firefox, and they should have stopped with Thunderbird.
Plus, their main competitors are Google, Microsoft, and Apple. They do pay their executives a substantially lower salary.
How much does the team lead for Safari or Edge make? They're competing with a team in Google, Microsoft, and Apple, not with the company as a whole.
not-for-profit organization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
and the Mozilla Corporation, "established on August 3, 2005, to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
No they are not. People seem to not understand that there is Mozilla Corporation, the one who pays the salaries, and Mozilla Foundation.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ puts it like this:
This page (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/) says that: Also: Wikipedia explains a bit more: A tax-paying entity is a regular for-profit company. It's a basically a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Foundation, confusingly.More information about revenue:
Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/And:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_FoundationAnd Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
>And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
Google paid most of their corporate revenue. The last reported year, 2018, was the first under the new contract, and looking at revenues you can guess how much smaller it was then the Yahoo one. If I remember correctly, the contract information will be on the detailed financial report released this year.
To build a browser capable of taking any market share away from Google and Microsoft, available in 90 languages with regular updates, you probably do need numbers around there.
For comparison, I repeated the experiment with Mozilla's gecko-dev repo, and got 480 people committing - still a lot more than I'd thought. I guess I'll see how this holds up with the downsizing in a month.
[edit] Though - only 199 with a Mozilla email address. Though I don't have a Chromium comparison here.
The job was also different. Compare someone trying to get into shape with someone trying to maintain their current body weight.
Early Mozilla did a lot of good work. Leadership during the 2010s undid almost all of it in ways that were predictable.
It may not require 1000 employees, but 100 is probably not enough. And that is still not easy to fund with volountary donations.
(2) You are assuming a technical level of competence that most people don't have. Even if they do, they often would rather just pay for something simple that works rather than have yet another thing to maintain.
(3) Yeah, Apple would be as trustworthy to most people. But they aren't doing it. A service that doesn't exist isn't a real competitor. I think there's a real potential in this space for a non-shady company, and Mozilla seems like the best candidate.
So what benefit do you get by purchasing VPN access from Mozilla vs. directly from mullvad? I don´t see any from a security/trust perspective.
Also everyone is writing Mozilla wrong around here. It´s not Mozilla. They changed it to Moz://a. How much did that rebranding cost? Was that money well spent? So many bad decisions.
- warez: piracy (or copyright infringement if not on the sea)
- open source: cares about user's rights, not price.
- "4 free": freeware. Does not care about rights, only price.
Relatedly, you are very much encouraged to sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html and free speech does not mean cellphone contracts with voice for $0/month.
Benefits of strong copyleft or BSD-style copyright is another matter of discussion.
Agreed. We need a way to directly fund Firefox development, and Mozilla is not currently providing this.
Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.
We discussed this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794
For example, consider two features: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100 DumdumFeature - budget has $200
They currently receive $300 in donations, $50 of which have no strings attached. So there’s donation stream A with strings and $250, and donation stream B with no strings and $50.
Allocation looks like this: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$75, B$25 DumdumFeature - budget has $200, funded with A$175, B$25.
If I donate $25 and say “this can only go to awesome feature” the budgets after my donation end up as.
AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$100 DumdumFeature - budget has $225, funded with A$175, B$50.
I’m not mad at anyone, I just want my donations to do as much good as I think they can do.
If they allowed targeted donations to firefox/quantum/rust/MDN I would donate, as I'm sure many other will. As it is, I don't and won't even if firefox were to fail.
Best Practical, the company that does most of the work on the open source RT ticketing system, allows for sponsoring specific features or fixes:
* https://rt.bestpractical.com/NoAuth/Featured
I’m curious, what unneeded side-projects do they have?
Also annoying is how they constantly kill useful features like RSS or bookmark descriptions.
I use Firefox because I still like it better than Chrome and I like to support free software, but it's obvious to me that Mozilla doesn't really care about their users and they're too busy chasing shiny things. I expect they'll keep losing market share until they become irrelevant and disappear.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service)
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...
Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero).
Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN).
Now they spend nearly $100m per year.
So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.
Compare the Wikimedia numbers given (nearly $100m per year to keep running) to Mozilla's, who last reported spending much more than that (over $173m) just in their non-software development spending.
Wikipedia raises more than it can spend, resulting in rising assets: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...
You're saying that Wikimedia's spending is somewhat rational, whereas Mozilla's revenue might disappear as the result of a single party making a decision to walk away. You're not saying that Mozilla is a ragtag group of browser developers with barely any money. (There was too much focus on "Mozilla obviously doesn't [have the money to waste]" in the earlier reading.)
I just use Firefox with some extensions and have seen nothing like this. I also used Thunderbird briefly (like a month). What am I missing? Do you have specific examples?
If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? The browser starts, I get to work, end of story. I get that Firefox has made some decisions people don’t like (Pocket and the suggested links on new tab) but that doesn’t mean they are annoying users on every chance or breaking my ability to work.
People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.
Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".
As someone who is annoyed now:
Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead.
There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago.
And here I sit, wondering if
- it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time
- if I changed
- if Mozilla changed
- or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla
I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/
No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.
Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008.
Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance.
Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.
It's something more complicated, to balance resources with stability. I don't know the rules, but for example I have 3 windows with ~700 tabs split across them, which appear to be using 6 processes with 193 threads. (Also I use Auto Tab Suspender, so that probably influences it as well)
This stuff bugs power users, but if you watch people who aren't in the power-user set, it's pure usability poison to them. Ditto UI elements moving around after an auto-update. Confuses the living hell out of them. It's about as far from good UX as you can get—a mediocre UI that never changes is far better UX than a good one that behaves unpredictably, and I mean from the perspective of normal people, not HN nerds.
Sure, workflows I'm used to change, and sure they add in the odd experiment from time to time that is later abandoned, but it's at nowhere near the frequency Google does the same thing. Yes, Google cops a lot of criticism for this, but language used to criticise Google pales compared to level of vindictiveness I see thrown at Mozilla just in the comments here. It's like they been betrayed by their own mother.
It's even harder to explain given Firefox has clearly gotten better over the years. It's a bumpy ride like all software changes, but it's faster, more reliable, and more standards compliant than ever before. Yes, addon compatibility has been sacrificed to make that happen, but happened for a pretty good reason unlike say Google removing the interfaces that allow ad blockers to work effectively.
In the process they've made some hard core advances in the art, like Rust, and like WASM. From where I sit they've been more effective at this recently than Google. And yet what we hear about here is how Pocket doesn't work as they like. Really - does it matter, compared to the amount of good work that comes out of Mozilla?
Isn't this a symptom of being detached from reality? In a sense that they are in their bubble, and didn't had the need to look outside of it?
Maybe that's the problem, they didn't have to make it work because the money was already there.
Concerning software, I agree the situation is a bit different as states are hardly strong players there. But I would disagree on the fact that the 'clut of free' is a sin. The whole industry gained a lot in terms of openness, sharing of best-practices and just innovation. Try finding how to build a washing-machine from scratch or just getting the PCB layout of your radio, it's a really painful process.
But I would agree that I'm worried too on the future of software, but I would rather push for more financing of open source (& free) projects - by states or NGOs - rather than pushing the whole industry to go sales first.
I think the ideal solution is hard to find, but I doubt we will come to something stable without a bit of regulation.
If anybody is going to pay for a browser it must be better than its competition.
I would pay for better privacy, adblocking, higher speed, better dev tools and what not. But Firefox is not so much better than Chromium in any of these points to warrant payment.
I vastly prefer Firefox and always did for some reason (I keep testing Opera, Vivalidi, Chromium and what not but none of them clicked with me) but I still see you point, it would be hard for many to justify a high price even if they prefer it.
I'd still happily pay for Firefox (not Mozilla) but I'd consider it an insurance more than an investment at the moment.
[0] https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575
Individually, all their paid offerings aren't that interesting. Scroll, Pocket, and privacy VPN's are all fine little niche products, but bundled together and called Firefox Pro, it gives you vision of what a premium browser might look like: the browser is free, paid users get a collection of services and support the open web.
I also consider reverting to "nagware" a huge step back. Either you sell a product, monetize part of it, or offer it for free - giving it away "for free" while sneaking in a shower of requests for money is the worst possible outcome.
Sure, you could argue that Firefox doesn't track you like Chrome does. That's basically their whole marketing message. People who care about this already use Firefox, the rest just doesn't care.
Ask any power user that used Firefox 5 years ago:
- fix the extension API
- re-enable styling
- hire someone to look after the ux-team :-D (yes, I'm also one of those who dislike the moving awesomebar ;-)
Yeah, it tracks you more: https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...
If you mean in about:config 1: they change it and add hidden options all the time (you have to browse the code to find them) and 2: this is about the first run, all of that data will be sent before you have the chance to open about:config.
> The code is all yours.
So is the Chromium code.
Regardless, considering Mozilla's trademark policy it can't technically be disabled in firefox.
> Seeing as your original comment said Chrome ...
Firefox contains proprietary components too (such as EME) that you can't modify. The code is all yours in Chrome as much as it is for firefox.
I personally do not buy that argument, it is like saying that firefox has an integrated emacs in it because "the code is all yours".
Seeing as your original comment said Chrome, that's what I'm contrasting it with.
I feel like Mozilla does not understand the "old-internet" which it prostitutes to sell itself to users. Lawyers, Amazon extensions, this is how we are fighting Fake News!
Now it's paywalls, gated communities and Valley technologists crying about moochers from the steering wheels of their Teslas.
What would be great from Mozilla is a subscription model.
In the case of Firefox, if I'm not mistaken they do only consumer focus products, maybe they could release something that companies are willing to pay for.
They could captilize on the good reputation while it lasts, and maybe employees that resonate with Mozilla history will promote their products to their bosses for free.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcKkiKBKms
On the former, it's of course a massive shift off of their current focus and they'd get a lot of kickback from the community, but you could imagine a world where they had a model like 37 Signals/Basecamp/Hey etc. On the latter, I don't know anything about the browser market in proper enterprise and if there are many opportunities for products there - you would presume there could be some value capture though.
I was an open source apologist some time ago, but since I quit full-time job and started to freelance/working on my own personal projects I began to realize, that I as an independent developer can't actually profit from it. In fact, it takes a lot of my time to contribute to something and I get nothing in return.
From my perspective:
* Behind every popular open source project there is a company (typically big), which pays core team salary to maintain open source project. Community is typically do work for free. The bigger the project, the better for the company public image.
* Open source projects end up to be designed by committee, which inevitably turns projects to bloatware, which are hard to maintain and hard to use.
* Increase in technology turn-over. Projects become hyped and die faster that
* Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment manager if there's Kubernetes?
* En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to projects while doing a lot of work for free. One may argue that in return they get polished product, but in reality that's far from true.
That's a concer of mine too and that's why I'm in favor of the BDFL[1] figure.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
> * Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment manager if there's Kubernetes?
At the same time, you can also study how Kubernetes does the job, and come up with radical superior solutions.
I feel that's a bit of a reach. A small team will magically come up with something better than hundreds/thousands of developers that thought/developed k8s?
It's nice to think anyone can do that, but I believe only another company (and probably not a small one) could try and do that. I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
What I'm saying is that the product being open source allows you to study it, let's say you want to do something as fast as Redis, you have all that previous work open. I don't imagine a single person in a room going line by line studying it, what usually happen is that many people study particular aspects and write about it the problems they had, improvements and so on.
> I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
Well it depends a "bunch" of open source contributors can organise themselves and grow into organizations, there are many examples.
Although this does open another hole for companies like Amazon/Google to, for example, repackage Redis as their "product" and sell it too.
But as you said, these are different discussions altogether :)
The ugly thing is that they take advantage from the brand too just saying "X brand compatible" they can use the brand reputation and re-package it, I agree on that point being an issue.
You could offer support for the product you are offering or maybe you can just write proprietary software. To think that there is a problem with open source as a concept sound like a pretty alien conclusion to be honest.
Most open source projects don't have corporate backing obviously. The large ones that are heavily in use? Sure, because their developers use it too.
> Open source projects end up to be designed by committee [..]
I can agree on that point, but again, that is a minority of project that have become very successful.
> En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to project
That is the point of any free contribution. I know that can get exhausting and that there are ungrateful users that can ruin it for you, but I still don't see how open source is the problem and not your disposition to it.
I think the article overall is not convincing. Maybe our expectations are too high, but whose aren't in todays software world. Without open source it just isn't possible to let developers teach themselves as efficient as they can do now. That these costs are externalized by companies and that they might not give back enough is the nature of voluntary work. But it certainly not undercutting some imagined market.
The best option looks like a tight copyleft license combined with a contract for copyright assignment and revenue sharing for contributors and dual licensed for commercial use. The most difficult part of this would be gauging developer worth based on contributions, but that's something that happens in every company anyways.
a·pol·o·gist /əˈpäləjəst/
noun: a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial.
edit: Added more context.
If you frame it like that, sounds like people are forced to work for free, think about other open source advantages, for example the freedom to customise the software to your needs without questions asked. You can fix a bug that is blocking you for doing something, instead of waiting a big company to prioritise your little problem. And that's just the first that comes to my mind, there are much more.
But I understand that your statment seems to come from a frustating experience, I'm curious about what was that product.
And that's my problem with the moniker 'open source' - it gives people the wrong idea. Free software is all about freedom, and surprisingly that often turns out to be easier to explain than the nebulous appellation 'open'.
Amusingly, each of your five dot points applies entirely to non-free software (behind non-free software there's a commercial entity, their products often end up getting designed by committee and are the worse for it, projects die as soon as they (product or company) cease being commercially viable, competition is discouraging and leads to similar but worse in slightly different ways products, and people contributing via bug reports or plugins or code contributions or blogs on how to use the product are doing it 'for free').
You said behind every popular open source project there's a big company -- what would that be for the Linux kernel, Apache, KDE, Python, VLC, gimp?
Btw, don't tell Hashicorp that it's pointless trying to write a better orchestrator than K8s. : )
Or English lacks a nice sounding word for the meaning we want to convey. Branding is hard.
Open source projects are there as common heritage of mankind that addresses a major need. To me they are similar to roads ans railways. Where is competition to a road? Is there real competition to tcp/ip?
There are well maintained Open Source projects that have effectively a BDFL and don't lose focus. Go language or Lua come to mind.
But people like to complain "Go is Google's language" because it's authors rejected some fringe proposal. Not that I like Go, but there are many ways of doing open source.
Pay with your data and liberties business model seems to be the darling of the masses.
Cult of free is actually just that and Mozilla is also part of it as it is making its revenue from Google.
Do you mean that it's technically feasible to implement them, or that they actually work economically to fund viable, competitive businesses.
Free(as in beer) software has become a bait to direct you to something else. You want to drive a virtual car? Here is your virtual car but why don't you check the bubble popping game first? Here are your bubbles to pop but why don't you try jumping over hops instead? Here are the hops you may want to jump but wouldn't you not like to get angry for this political issue first?
This endless ad-supported stream of offers, I believe, is taking the oxygen of truly high quality works. Why would you buy the 0.99$ app or game when you can use the free version, right?
A quick search suggests that that amount is on average less than half a US cent per play on Spotify, and similar services range from about 1/10 to 2 cents per play. It's not a system that the artists are very happy with.
They made $1.5B of it reportedly. https://www.eteknix.com/candy-crush-series-made-1-5b-2018-vi...
I am not big fan of the series so I would not know what is the current situation(maybe now they also do annoying ads? I wouldn't know), but essentially if you want to play all day long you need to chip in, otherwise you wait for life refills. There are also pay-to-win options(consumable power ups) but you don't have to use it. It is a delight for the people who are into the genre, my mother plays the game since years and she is loving it.
What I liked was that, the deal is sipmle: We will give you a game that you like but if you want to play it a lot or be given an easy time you will have to pay. This is in contrast of all the ad-based software out there where the deal is "We made something that you want however we would like you to consider doing something else by clicking on our ads, we insist".
I myself play a lot of PUBG Mobile and it's also an excellent experience. It's free to play, ads's don't interrupt and I can play as much as I would like but If I like to customise my characters appearance, then I need to pay.
Donations are a bad idea. Companies can't make donations (usually). But they can buy software licenses.
They should sell something. Not sure what, though.
I am not the same thing as Google and pretending that is true in any sense is how we got in this mess.
Firefox should require licenses to run when you're using your corporate computer, it shouldn't when you're running it at home.
Some people say they'd pay for Firefox. Some say they'd support it, but nothing outside of the main browser. But are there really enough people to fund something as big as Mozilla?
Sure there might be some excesses (like I keep reading about the CEO's salary every other comment), but it seems few realize that the commercial ventures were created for a reason: to bring money in.
If Mozilla only ever worked on the browser, would they have survived up until now? I reckon no.
I do think they should create some sort of recurring donation system in a Patreon style (even without rewards, maybe with nice lists for the biggest donors) and test the waters. Are there really a lot of people willing to put money where their mouth is? I hope so, but my gut feeling also says no.
I believe so. My favorite example is JetBrains. They're making about half of what Mozilla is Making (if you include the other commercial competitors, it's much probably closer, and they're competing with Microsoft giving a free IDE away), people are happy to pay. JetBrains' products are significantly better than the free alternatives though.