Comment by rich_sasha
1 year ago
It's all so strange. I would happily buy Firefox, either as a one off, or as an annual license, and be done with all the weird license nonsense - presumably they want to sell data to pay the bills.
But instead the choice, realistically, seems to be between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla. And Chrome works marginally better... :/
I would wager most people that offer to buy software "one off" typically underestimate their lifetime worth earned through other means like ads and data sales.
Would you pay a one-time $10 for a lifetime Firefox license? $100? $1,000? $10,000?
Last time I checked, Mozilla's ARPU was less than $5 pa. I think many of us would pay a multiple of that per annum _iff_ it went towards Firefox and not whatever project/cause of the week that Mozilla has undertaken.
You're overestimating people's willingness to pay for software when free and arguably better alternatives are available. Preferring Firefox to free Chromium alternatives requires a level of nuance and tech literacy that most people will never have, and even with that tech literacy, people may still prefer Chromium.
You're basically talking about asking for donations from people that prefer to ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
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ARPU isn't a great metric here since it's revenue averaged across all users. In my experience, the vast majority of free software users sit below ARPU and are hoisted up by whales -- who are also the main reason one-off pricing like this doesn't typically exist: Mozilla would be fine if most users just paid ARPU (in fact, they'd probably make a slight profit if they could get a higher-than-industry-average free->paid conversion rate...), but they'd quickly lose their cash cows when their whales suddenly only paid ARPU instead of the 10x, 100x, 1000x, etc they already "pay".
Without thinking much about it, $60 / yr seems reasonable to me.
I never click on any ads, so while I'm sure I contribute to Firefox's revenue as another pair of eyeballs, I don't deliver any end value to their ad-biz end customers.
> I never click on any ads [snip] I don't deliver any end value to their ad-biz end customers
This is a complete misunderstanding of the value of ads. Clicks are of course the most valuable signal, but any ad seen is valuable. If clicks were all that mattered TV would never had ads, nor would newspapers.
Many ads are about awareness not buy now. Ford/Toyota... doesn't expect you to buy a car the day/week you see an ad, they just want you to think of them when you buy a car. They also want to slowly drive discomfort with whatever car you already drive so that eventually you do buy a new one despite having on that works. (or if you don't have a car they want to be sure you are reminded how much freedom to go places you are giving up - without concern for the costs of having a car)
This logic applies more to Google than Mozilla. Their mission is (or ought to be) to cover development and hosting costs associated with Firefox, not to milk users for all they are worth on the ad market.
Firefox is open source. You can take the source code and strip out all of the malware, spying, telemetry and corporate harm leaving a safe and private browser (to the extent any modern browser can be).
There are multiple forks that do that. Download one of them instead. Mozilla Corporation has no control over those, so if you don't like what Mozilla make, exercise your software freedom.
The problem with Mozilla, as far as I can see, is not the the compromises they make for obtaining money (everyone suffers that), its that they're deceptive and underhand about it. That makes them unethical. I wrote plenty regarding that here [0]
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
The problem with these privacy-first Firefox forks is none have the resources to match FF.
If Firefox dies, eventually so will they, as the code stagnates relative to better-funded browsers.
Saying "switch to a privacy-first fork" is not a long-term solution.
The internet doesn’t actually need any more new features anyway, and most sites reflect this and just serve HTML.
Some sites will need new features. But I guess it is fine to have a data-collecting version of Firefox or even some moderately well behaved malware like Chrome, as long as most browsing doesn’t happen through it. So, I guess I’ll look at moving most of my browsing to a privacy respecting form and keeping the a browser around for faulty sites…
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> Saying "switch to a privacy-first fork" is not a long-term solution.
You're 100% right while operating in an environment that is hostile to privacy. In these conditions security/privacy remains mostly tactical, not strategic. In fact, against a predominant tyranny it is insurrectional. Free Software will have to learn to adapt with more intelligence-sharing and opportunistic manoeuvres.
As an aside though, one might generalise to say there are no long term solutions in tech, period. And therefore advocates of freedom and privacy are at no particular disadvantage relative to any opponents.
Anyone can fork. However you need to keep your fork updated as firefox does new releases which means repeating that work often. Either that you are need to support all the security fixes yourself.
Rather than downloading random binaries from random forks (or clamour for governance at the sidelines), you can take back more control by building your own fork.
Librewolf and Waterfox are two fine choices to use for upstream sincr they have saner defaults and make the forking and building easier to wire up.
Ive been running my own FF fork for a few years like this now.
> presumably they want to sell data to pay the bills.
Can't the EU just sponsor Firefox?
That's the surest way to kill it, and that is before taking their recent anti-privacy policies into consideration.
That feels like a witty thing to say without much basis in reality. If the EU got their act together and gave Firefox funding, it would be more of a pain in the neck for them to stop doing that than it would for them to threaten Mozilla over e.g. anti privacy policies. Even Germany, a single nation with a lot less difficulty in passing laws, hasn't used their Sovereign Tech Fund (https://sovereign.tech) in such a manner.
And even if they did, it would have to be a world in which they've lost all funding from Google and becoming dependent only on the EU. Perhaps such a thing might happen, but it wouldn't happen overnight — in the meantime it would be more money, from more diversified sources.
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Personally I don't think it's about the money, I think it's about what they actually want to do. I think they like their plan and are happy with it.
Sigh. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Mozilla's situation. The "weird license nonsense" you're vaguely gesturing at doesn't even make sense in context. Firefox is open source under MPL 2.0.
Your framing that "the choice is between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla" creates a false equivalence. Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
And "Chrome works marginally better"? By what metric? Firefox has better memory usage, stronger privacy protections, and doesn't exist primarily as a data collection tool for the world's largest advertising company.
The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web. This kind of uninformed take that ignores the nuances of browser economics is exactly why we can't have nice things on the open web.
Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
>This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy.
>It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30715947
If only people cared as much about privacy as vegetarians do about not eating meat...
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> "Chrome works marginally better"
Performance, compatibility, security. Chromium runs faster, it works with more websites, it's sandbox is better, particularly on Android. I don't care much about memory usage as I don't need a billion tabs open at once (does anyone). There's options available beyond Chrome that offer most of the same privacy benefits as Firefox does.
I think marginal is an understatement. As for Mozilla's business model, what business model? They're throwing everything at the wall to see if it sticks and virtually nothing has, all the while their browser has languished. Going full cynic, at this point the only reason it is allowed to exist is because Google deem it useful to have it around as a counterpoint to accusations that they have a monopoly.
> (does anyone)
Oh yes. And you don't even need that many tabs open for Chrome to eat half of your RAM.
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> Firefox has better memory usage
At the cost of a subpar cache; it's not like Chromium is leaking memory, & its memory pressure effects are both well-studied and well-understood. Yet, Firefox stans keep touting lack of comprehensive caching as some kind of advantage. I'm sorry, this is not 2005. It took Mozilla two years to implement some kind of JIT pipelining, and guess what, Chromium had V8 all along: an engine that can benefit from "open web" cooperation courtesy of Nodejs and the vast ecosystem around it. SpiderMonkey? Please. This is the crux of the issue.
> The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web.
The idea that the web—chaperoned by the likes of Mozilla, can be "open"—is the crazy, unsustainable one. OP is being pragmatic, and considering their privacy carefully. Mozilla's track record is that of a gravely mismanaged, disoriented, and subservient (Google) organisation. Firefox codebase is arcane, was already showing age even ten years ago, & now there's a whole ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers that can benefit from "open web" cooperation.
Firefox has zero moral high-ground, & pretending like it possesses some kind of virtue is a crime against semantics.
I think it's just as well not to have a monoculture (i.e. chomium-based-browsers).
Just being different and capable of rendering websites makes the web a place where standards matter. It doesn't have to be noble to make this happen.
Firefox is just standing in there like a marker - as long as there's AN alternative, there's a chance for ANOTHER alternative.
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