this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 243 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Maybe that's not bad for firefox.

Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects and just focus on delivering a good browser.

Algo the lack of google as financial support means they'll rely more on donations, which would mean that they really need to focus on offering a good browser.

I'll gladly donate to firefox if I would see they are really focusing on it.

[–] [email protected] 169 points 1 month ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I donate around 5 dollars to Wikipedia every month. Another 5 to Mozilla isn't an issue for me.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 month ago

I donate to lemmy and mastodon instances. As I do believe they are using my money for good things.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago

I have donated in the past while still living in a third world country. I stopped when I realized how my donation was squandered.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think in the future I will try to donate like 10 dollars a month for free software that I use, including Firefox, KDE, Thunderbird, Wikipedia, Lemmy, etc.

I think it's very important to support open source financially, because without it we would all be fucked by huge corporations. And I might sound overly anti-capitalist, but I think that most of them should be broken up.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If I had the money, an extra $5 or so would definitely be something I'd spend monthly on donating to Mozilla/Firefox.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 month ago

If I had the money, an extra $N or so would definitely be something I’d spend monthly on X

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

The moment that it's possible to donate directly towards the development of firefox, there's roughly 10€/yr with their name on it. As it stands however, Mozilla is not funding FF at all, but rather extracting money from the project.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Mozilla (not Google) got rid of the side projects, increased the CEO's salary, and laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic. It basically got rid of the innovation that could have made Firefox a faster, more secure, and pleasant experience. Rust and Rust-based Servo, as a replacement for Gecko, were two of those side projects. These are the things Mozilla needs to invest in.

Also, I think Mozilla needs to ask the user upon install what the default search engine should be from a list of search engines including Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Yahoo. Maybe the order of those could be arranged based on how much they're able to finagle from the search engines.

The real monopoly is their control over Chrome. That's what they should be forced to split from the company that owns the search engine. Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Google got rid of the side projects, increased the CEO's salary, and laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic.

How did Google do any of that? Wasn't that all Mozilla Corp?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Major brain fart/typo, haha.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Not saying they did, if you're paying for a thing, you a lot of control of that thing.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.

I'd go so far as to argue the exact same for development of: Operating systems, automotive, smartphones, residential fiber...

The ulterior motive is simply never in a user's best interest when every function ultimately becomes part of the "influence towards the purchase of goods and services" funnel.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

While I find your assertion inspiring and very worthy of consideration, I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development. Apple sells the hardware that goes with its OS(es), so they get the hardware revenue (not to mention the App Store and iCloud subscription revenues). They would have to start charging devices to use their operating system or something, and I have to wonder if that would be possible under open source licenses.

I would love an open, sustained, and even open source, secure operating system for phones that's the target of app development. I think the Linux stack should should develop an NPR/PBS type ecosystem public funding of development (with maybe the corporate underwriting of those networks being equivalent to contributions from corporate employed developers to the open source code) and I'd love for it to be a real competitor in the smart phone market (knowing the Android stack modifies and sits on top of Linux).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development

Cuts from app purchases and in-app purchases. Of course, developers can implement their own payment gateways and distribute their apps in third party stores, but nobody would do this at risk of being removed from play store.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe the order of those could be arranged based on how much they're able to finagle from the search engines.

That's the issue that caused this. Google was paying Mozilla to be the default search engine at the top of the list in Firefox and other browsers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)
  1. Right now it's already set as the default search engine and you have to work to change it to something else as I understand it. I'm proposing that no default is set and that the user is asked to select one upon first installing Firefox from an ordered list of search engines. If that's already the case (it's been a while since I installed Firefox from scratch), then I'd argue that's fine. And it allows other search engines to contribute to be higher up in the rankings.

  2. I can't think of anything that would replace the revenue that Google pays Mozilla that sustains the development salaries to hopefully keep Mozilla competitive and hopefully making it the best performing, convenient and private browser.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects

Like Rust?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago

For userland code that basically fingerbangs every server on the web, some forced memory-safety might not be a bad idea

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

I really hope that's sarcastic, because Rust is one of the most valuable additions to the whole IT field in a good while.

Entire industries have been stuck on C/C++ for decades. Industries, which are normally extremely late to any form of modern software development, are now practically jolting to get Rust integrated into their toolchains.

Similarly, languages without runtimes allow for building libraries that can be called from other programming languages, which so far meant C/C++. That's a big reason why many widely used open-source projects like OpenSSL, SQLite, OpenGL etc. are written in those.
Even if, for whatever reason, you think Rust is awful, getting a third language into the mix will allow many more people to build similar libraries, which is again really good for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects

Like Firefox?

It really seemed like it's been a bit of a side project those last few years...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They are throwing things at the wall hoping something sticks.

For some reason people don't want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.

By their own account, it's not meant to be lucrative.

"Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.

Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."

Straight from Mozilla's About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users' privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don't actually want.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

You're right of course, but you're also wasting your breath.

In 2024 the business sociopaths have so many people so twisted and screwed up in the head that they can't even CONCEIVE of the idea of a person or organization focused on delivering a product sustainably rather than "MONEY MONEY MONEY, NOM NOM NOM!" for eternity.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In reality it means they'll have to focus more on monetization, which will create more enshittification and not less.

[–] possiblylinux127 1 points 1 month ago

What they need is to focus on enterprise functionality and privacy services. Maybe they could even do some sort of consulting

[–] possiblylinux127 9 points 1 month ago

The problem is that building a plain simple browser doesn't pay.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Maybe you have noticed it, but they try to widem their portfolio with paid services in the last couple of years. They have seen it coming.

I pay for at least one of their new services.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

true true. good point