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How Mozilla lost the Internet (& what's next)
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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... or, hear me out, that one is crazy ... or ... they could focus on the browser alone and make a good product, instead of running a giant for-profit corporation sinking money into AI bullshit and other non-browser crap projects no-one really wants or needs.
That's why Firefox should be relinquished to a non-profit which is not associated with a for-profit company in any way.
Think about it logically. A non-trivial proportion of Firefox users are power users. We're talking about millions of well paid IT professionals, programmers, academics, etc who trend older and wealthier. I don't know about you, but if Firefox was truly non-profit and focused development on user-voted features, instead of for-profit SaaS services, I'd be willing to donate $100+ a year for the rest of my life out of principle. We're not talking about some hidden open source library here. We're talking about the only viable browser alternative to big tech. We're talking about a product equivalent to Wikipedia or the internet archive in importance (both of which I donate to annually, and will likely continue to forever).
I do not donate to Firefox because of the Mozilla corporation and their for-profit influence over Firefox, and I never will as long as they are involved.
What incentives does the for-profit (that's owned by the non-profit) have that a non-profit without a for-profit subsidiary wouldn't have? Both aren't able to maximise revenue for shareholders, and both will always have the option to pay their leaders extravagantly.
And as a well-paid programmer, I haven't more market sharebeen known to donate $100 a year to software projects. As a conservative estimate, let's say Mozilla could run Firefox at one-fifth the current budget, that would still mean we'd need a million people like you that would continue to do so even if, say, the most-often-voted-for feature request is misinterpreted, or changing a "view all tabs" icon suddenly pisses off a significant portion of them enough to stop their donations.
And even if that happened, it's not clear that that would necessarily lead to gaining market share on default browsers or ones that get heavily promoted through search engine homepages or shadily bundled with installers. Which would still mean more and more websites would start to ignore it, which would mean web compatibility would continue to get worse and worse.
Just make a self-sustaining good product.
Ah, that's the secret? Why didn't anyone tell me this before?! All this slaving away at my day job, when I could just have built a self-sustaining good product - it's that easy!
You’re not getting it, but that’s okay.
I think I'm getting it, I'm just trying to say that I think you're underestimating how hard it is to fund web browser development.