203
Firefox plan to show ads and shopping in the near future in the browser as an opt-out
(bugzilla.mozilla.org)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
203 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37730 readers
618 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's hard because Mozilla need money to survive, and the world needs Mozilla, but it's been hard for them to find a stable source of funding. Mozilla relying on their main competitor (Google) for most of their income is a massive risk. I can understand why they're trying approaches like this, even if the users don't like it.
Does anyone here have a suggestion as to a better way for them to increase their income?
I think they should move firefox development back from mozilla corp to mozilla org, so the development process can be funded with donation again.
For example, wikipedia development and operation are funded by donations to wikimedia foundation, there is a commercial corp (wikimedia enterprise) but they're not in charge of development and operation of wikipedia.
Firefox, on the other hand, is entirely funded by mozilla corp. Any money donated to mozilla foundation is not used to fund firefox development. Instead, firefox development must be funded from search engine deals and ads. Why can't the community chip in to keep firefox alive?
To my knowledge, the community donations are just laughably too low to fund a development team of hundreds of devs. The Mozilla Corporation is a subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, so transferring money in that way is possible, they just choose to not do it.
Well, and another aspect is that donations can falter. All it needs is one scandal (whether true/deserved or not). You can't plan with that, and you can't promise hundreds of devs to pay their livelihood on such a basis. You need other, stable sources of income anyways.
That's because mozilla foundation never actually taking donation drive seriously.
Let's consider current situation: currently, mozilla corp allocates significant engineering resource to develop revenue-generating services such as pocket, vpn, and now, AI stuff. What if mozilla never need to try to chase revenue, and instead focus on being an actual foundation, funded by grants and donations? Their expense would be significantly lower.
Let's say mozilla able to refocus development back to firefox and retain 250 highly paid engineers, with yearly expense for salary, benefits and other overhead at ~$100 million per year. That's less than 1/4 of search royalties they got from google in 2020. Now put those $300 million extra money into an endowment instead of wasting it on marketing and other revenue-chasing activities, and start to seriously looking into grants and collecting donations like wikimedia foundation, and in a few years mozilla might be able to amass a huge fund to guarantee independent firefox development for years, or even in perpetuity with huge enough endowment.
Why does the firefox browser need a hundred devs?
Browsers are huge these days. Firefox is well over 20 million lines of code.
The Linux kernel is 26 million source lines of code without comments and empty lines
The list of features modern web browsers have is incomprehensibly huge! Not to mention chrome keep proposing new api all the time, then use them on their products like google meets, then blame firefox for not supporting them when firefox users use those products.
Building anti-features is a lot of work!
Wikipedia gets something like $150 million in donations annually. Firefox absolutely could have done similar numbers back when they had a massive userbase, and it would have given the users a feeling of ownership. Instead they decided to be funded almost entirely by the technology monopolist.
I'll happily donate 5 bucks now and again to Firefox development, but I don't want my donation to go to a 5-6 million dollar CEO salary.
...and there is no way to do that, currently.
Which is why I'm not donating right now, even as a satisfied user of Firefox for 15+ years.
Become a donation gateway for other opens ourselves projects.
Edit: opensource projects
Tell me about some cool opensource project on my new tab page, optional 1 click donation. Skim a few percent.
This way everyone else will promote firefox.
That's not something that'd likely scale enough to bring any meaningful sum of money.
Even then it targets a tiny, tiny minority of their even current userbase, let alone if they want to approach more "average" users.
Why wouldn't it scale?
The percentage of users that donate to open source projects they use is very low, and I'm not sure that'd significantly change just because Mozilla start asking people to do it.
Firstly, that's not a scaling problem, you're talking about poor uptake.
Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters. That's why a sophisticated organisation like Mozilla is so well placed to sell the stories behind some of these projects.
Thirdly, the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low. Particularly amongst more technical users.
Fourthly, this plan would actually drive users to Firefox. If Firefox is promoting donations for say, LibreOffice, then they would naturally have an interest in promoting Firefox.
With the advent of enshittification, free-as-in-beer tech is dead. I think people are realising that things need to be paid for. It's very defeatist to just say "no one contributes to open source". Why not try to find the format within which people might contribute?
This is definitely a good point.
You'd be surprised. I've worked in ad tech. Retargeting ads (where you see ads for items you've viewed in the past) and abandoned cart ads (which you see if you add items to your cart but never check out, sometimes with a discount coupon attached) have very good clickthrough rates. Targeting based on customer list performs pretty well too.
In any case, I really doubt they could make even 1% of what they currently make with the Google deal. AFAIK they make around $400 million per year from that deal: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox
That is a huge assumption to make without data to back that up. Do you have a list of open source projects with high numbers of user donations, with evidence that the numbers are due to marketing? Barring that, I think this is pure speculation.
Of course it is.
That said, do you think it's unrealistic to suppose that marketing might improve revenue? I do not.
Do I think that better reach could have an impact on donations? Sure.
Do I think that lack of marketing is the reason for FOSS donations lagging behind other donation causes? Not at all; I think they are actually losing out on impacts, in most cases.
FOSS project donations are usually done by people who use the tool, and are interested in seeing it get improved. It's not a "good cause" donation, like feeding kids. If you are collecting money to help people, donors don't expect to receive something in return for giving. But I think it's incredibly unrealistic to think that people will see someone building a software tool, not have interest in using it themselves, but still donate money to support the project anyways.
Marketing a tool that isn't garnering much interest already probably isn't going to see the tool get much additional uptake, especially with how much free marketing already exists in the FOSS space. If you post your software on Reddit and Hackernews and ArsTechnica (all free to do) and aren't seeing interest, you're probably not going to be massively helped by a marketing org stepping in.
Wasn’t firefox a volunteer open source project at one point?
Mozilla has been a non profit for as long as I can remember, but they were never fully backed by volunteers. They managed to drag Firefox out of Netscape before that collapsed and worked on it, together with Thunderbird, but they have always paid at least a few people to do the work.
You can still work on Firefox as a volunteer, though.
Firefox is developed by a for-profit subsidiary.
That company actually abandoned Thunderbird years ago, within the past two years Thunderbird moved to its own (for profit) subsidiary.
No.
MozillaCoin /s
Hey what if instead of free adblock, we charged people for it? Also I'll use a little bit of the profits to try banning gay marriage.
Nah, I think it'd be called something like... Mozilla Attention Token.
Firefox Monitor and Firefox Relay are good ideas for subscription services that may be useful to users and hopefully get revenue.
When I looked closely at Firefox Relay, the email feature was redundant because I also have a service which does this, and the phone feature isn't available yet. Looking at Firefox Monitor and the list of companies/brokers it monitors, these appear focused on the US which isn't where I live.
I hope they can get revenue by promoting these services and making them useful for more people. This would be better than showing ads. I'd pay for a useful service, not to have an-free experience for something which is freely available with ads.
It’s hard for them to find a stable source of funding for the massive size of their org, correct.
But how many developers do you need to create a great browser? They don’t need 1100 people, that’s for sure.
1100 people does sound like a lot, but some of those employees are probably working on things other than the browser. I wonder how many people work on Google Chrome in comparison.
I'd assume <100 devs.