202

Firefox plan to show ads and shopping in the near future in the browser as an opt-out (bugzilla.mozilla.org)

submitted 3 months ago by jherazob@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

First focusing on AI and now this, already cancelled my donations, do we have a good fork to move to?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 60 points 3 months ago

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?

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 28 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 24 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 8 points 3 months ago

Why does the firefox browser need a hundred devs?

[-] Anafabula@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 3 months ago

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

[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] seang96@spgrn.com 7 points 3 months ago

Building anti-features is a lot of work!

[-] anachronist@midwest.social 2 points 3 months ago

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.