Would you fund Mozilla to become independent of Google?

The only way I would donate to Mozilla is if the corporation is shuttered and the non-profit is disentangled from it.

Any donations you send to Mozilla today go to the corporation and are not spent on the browser. They are spent on things that have nothing to do with the core mission of the maintaining the browser.

Nobody is allowed to fund Mozilla to maintain the browser, which is the actual question you're asking.

A user like me would be willing to idea of some monthly donation when Mozilla restructures its expenses.

If memory serves right, the biggest slice of expenses were in C-level compensations & shortlived pet projects. The organization has to focus on growing a cadre of good engineers and product teams for their core offerings (just like the ones who rewrote large chunks of Netscape code into a fledgling Firefox ~22y ago).

One can't be expected to donate just to eventually subsidize a penthouse purchase for the CEO or their swanky McLaren.

I would chip in the average Facebook user value for my country if, and only if, Mozilla completely reversed course on ad tech, selling user data, and 'private tracking'. The fact that it acquired Anonym (with its close ties to Facebook) makes it clear that Mozilla would not diversify away from ads, it would just jump from one ad company (Google) to the other (FB).

I would not give a penny to a company that looks to sell me out.

If mozilla was a paid software on steam I would buy it for a one time payment up to $20. I would like to avoid giving my payment details to the browser directly as I see it as a risk of some malware misusing them to take my money.

After a few years (like 4) I would probably consider buying "Mozilla 2" for another one time payment up to $20 if the mozilla I bought becomes "end of life".

I would never buy "mozilla" from a microsoft store or android/apple appstore. I would not give a cent or continue using mozilla if ublock origin becomes not supported. Any kind of forced ads or restriction on adblocking will make me forget mozilla ever was a thing.

I would like to fund a technical Mozilla that exclusively focuses on actual products and community building. I would not want to give my money to the current Mozilla, as I believe the money and endowment they already have would be sufficient or at least give them all the means to do it, if they consequently stripped away everything else.

Mozilla must split their engine and basic browser UI into separate browser, something like Chromium right now, without any "Mozilla" features: no pocket, no AI, no sync, nothing extra that is not necessary to browse the web. This part must forever stay open-source, free, and supported. Only then I'll gladly set up recurring donation. On top of that, they can build a "Mozilla" spin of the browser, with all the bells and whistles they ever wanted: ads, AI, sync, pocket, Mr. Robot promos, etc. This also opens avenue for other companies to build on top of base browser their own improvements, either by using extensions or extension bundles. Even Microsoft might provide their own spin with all Microsoft services and telemetry added.

If mozilla spun off firefox or otherwise reorganised their company to be about making firefox the best web browser possible, so I could trust that my money was going to development of the browser and not random nonsense, I would happily pay £5-10/month.

I would fund Firefox, not Mozilla. I learned from all the recent discussions that money donated to Mozilla do not go to Firefox. It’s as if Mozilla is structured in a way such that Firefox cannot be community supported.

Many people want to donate to Firefox exclusively but you can forget about that. Mozilla will not carve out Firefox because it's the only reason that the mother org gets half a billion of free money from Google.

Carving out Firefox means Mozilla is dissolved as none of their other activities make any money.

I'd fund a browser that has the following:

1. Zero telemetry. I mean ZERO: remove all telemetry code from the codebase. They can ask me about features the old-fashioned way - surveys!

2. Focus on privacy and security. Put these to the top of the list.

3. Stop paying your CEO millions! Not worth it imo!

4. Stop with all the other Mozilla shit! I am interested in a browser (and perhaps an email client... I'll let you work on that too!). No more Pocket, VPN and all that other shite.

5. ZERO, I mean ZERO data capture at all! Nothing. Not a single bit except when someone clicks the link to download Firefox, you can capture their userAgent and whatnot. But the browser, Firefox, should not be capturing a single byte of data from me once installed (except perhaps a periodic version check and you can pass in the version like this: https://firefox.com/update?v=123.568).

6. For sync, allow me to sync an encrypted file to Dropbox, OneDrive, Local drive, Whatever.com. That way my passwords, bookmarks etc. can be sync'd from MY location that I control, not yours!).

7. Have a "Block all shady JS tactics" button. This would include fingerprinting, location and such. Perhaps you could send bogus, random data when it's asked for instead. That'd be fine too.

I think that's it :)

For a browser that did this, and was properly audited to prevent anything shady from creeping in, I'd pay $30 a year for it.

Edit: To clarify - I wouldn't pay the current Mozilla a single penny!

Yes; depending upon what governance and financial/business model they choose. Maybe Firefox to begin with. And of course minus the CXO and their entourage. I think it should go the Thunderbird way or something on those lines.

Survival of Firefox is critical (as of now more than Mozilla) for the open web to remain open.

Why donate to tainted when you could to Ladybird

I would fund one of the Firefox forks to become independent of Mozilla.

I wouldn't fund Mozilla. I'd absolutely pay for Firefox, though, if it reverted some of the more problematic things they've been adding recently.

As a Firefox user who is worried about he current browser landscape, I already donated to Mozilla in the past.

However as many others pointed out, there is no way to ensure that the donated amount is used specifically to fund Firefox.

Should it need to become independent, OR is it going to be forced to become independent?

It seems Google won’t be able to pay to be the default SE in any browser: Safari, Mozilla, etc.

https://askpandi.com/pandipedia/judgement-against-google-pro...

So I guess Mozilla is scrambling to find new revenue streams since 88% of their revenue comes from it.

I won’t fund Mozilla because it’s been forced to operate fairly.

They should build a product that makes me want to pay for it.

I’ve used Firefox almost every day since it was released. I have way less issues with it than Chrome even though web developers never test their work with it.

I think an open web is critical to our society. I think Chrome is the new IE and that Google cannot be trusted with controlling the engine of essentially every browser besides Firefox.

I have disposable income and would pay every month to support it…but only if Mozilla had new management. I have zero trust in Mozilla’s management and feel that most money given to them would be wasted rather than used for browser development.

The best answer is an old graph of CEO compensation to Firefox market use.

I would absolutely pay for the development of an independent, open source, privacy oriented and user friendly browser. I would never pay for the shitshow the Mozilla Corporation is.

I would find $5-$10 per month perfectly acceptable.

For now maybe donating to Ladybird [1] and Servo [2] makes more sense?

---

[1] https://ladybird.org/ [2] https://servo.org/sponsorship/

I think the problem is deeper in the standard. Funding those who run after a train that is designed to be expensive to catch up with is wasted effort.

We need Web-next which would be clearly defined in proper primitives and features that don’t suck from the beginning and need no further extension. And a reference implementation of it in a clean way, even if not very performant. E.g. fine if it takes 50MB of RAM just to start and show a welcome tab. Implementors will optimize it later.

$100 dollars per year. The better question is what should that money be spent on. This being HN, I assume they would mostly just want engineers which I partially agree. I feel though Mozilla needs some funding to maintain and extend the docs they have as well as some money to lobby for a less chrome-dominant internet.

At the end of the day, it's pointless to have a beautifully engineered browser if 50-60% of the websites don't work because they were designed for chrome. That's the future of the web unless someone stands up to them.

Unlike IE, a well engineered browser won't cut it anymore. I only see two paths going forward from here:

future 1. google goes full baddie and severely nerfs ad blockers to the point where over 50% of the time you get ads. This is a problem with technical solution thus easy win for firefox

future 2. google nerfs ad blockers but not hard enough to sway browser usage towards firefox. Bad scenario, Google remains dominant and free to nerf the competition by making chrome specific apis or other shenanigans that they know most websites will adopt

There are plenty other open source softwares out there. I don't really understand why Mozilla needs so much money, I heard their revenues were quite high.

Why do you mean by "you"?

I bet there would be plenty companies who would give money to mozilla to improve their browser and at least answer their demands.

I don't really know the mozilla company as a whole and how it's managed, but in my view there might be some things that could be removed from mozilla, like trim the fat. I have the feeling a lot of marketing people have entered mozilla, and I don't like it.

I want an answer to the question "how many software engineers and UX people are involved in the process of developing firefox".

Just let users and especially companies tell mozilla what it wants in firefox, and go from there.

I don't know how many people are paid for the services like sync, pocket, VPN, etc, and if those services are profitable to keep them.

Tech funding that's reliant on a large number of small donors is less sustainable than a few deep pockets.

However, the latter situation opens the door for somebody to simply become the largest funder and start implicitly dictating its direction, like what Google eventually did with Mozilla.

Surely it doesn't cost $150m/yr to maintain security updates for a browser - is there a cheaper way to fund one? Functionally, it seems that browsers don't do anything more today that they haven't been capable of since 2015. W3C changes occur at a glacial pace too, it's not like there are always new things to be adding into the pipeline.

Seems like a lot of people here have never heard of LibreWolf. Check it out at https://librewolf.net/

I could see this becoming a fully independent open-source project, and then supporting that.

In the past I have donated on a monthly basis to Mozilla, around 15$.

However, due to obscene CEO pay during a massive decline in Firefox's market share, as well as very questionable privacy and diversification (thus loosing focus on their core product) moves over the years, I stopped donating a few years back.

If Mozilla were to lower CEO compensation, and shift focus more towards the browser, as well as position themselves better when it comes to privacy, then I would consider donating again.

Lastly, Mozilla should have a way for donations to be marked specifically for Firefox, rather than them going into a big pool.

No, mozilla is a corporation like any other. And the majority of donations they get on the non-profit side don't even go towards the browser or anything surrounding it.

If they had a public and accountable org structure, but certainly not with their CEO's salary.

I've said this often, I hold them to a higher standard, but they're not even matching the standard of companies I respect.

No, but I'd be willing to fund Firefox to become independent of Google.

Of course not. I donated a bunch of money years ago and now I find they're spending way too little on programming and way too much on admin stuff. All they have to do is invest their money in the bank in some safe mechanism and fire 90% of admin staff.

I would like a way to donate to Firefox browser development directly.

Yeah, I would, as long as the $ went to just the web browser.

No, I don't think so at the moment. I send small amounts to Wikipedia, and similar projects, but Mozilla? I genuinely don't know what they do. There's a browser. It's decent enough, I suppose; but not compelling enough to use as an alternative to something else. OTOH, they do have wicked good documentation. That, I might fund. But, the browser and the other stuff, probably not.

If I was 100% sure that my money goes to the browser, I would. If there is even 1% possibility of them spending some of my money funding other organisations (especially involved in politics / society reform / activism), I absolutely wouldn't.

FYI, you can create polls on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

Not the Mozilla as it exists now, dabbling in a thousand projects and neglecting the browser.

Give me a Mozilla focused on Firefox with people providing funds regularly having a certain amount of votes that will actually be respected on bug reports/broader feature requests, and I'm in.

I'd rather fund Chrome, if it can be divested from Google and managed by a separate nonprofit. I'd consider funding Firefox too, but only if it isn't managed by Mozilla.

Mozilla has really lost their way and have not been a good steward of Firefox.

Like many others, I would pay 20+€/year no questions asked, if and only if that money went to projects of my choosing (Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird) and they immediately and permanently halted work on user hostile projects such as ad tech.

No because it does a lot of random crap that isnt browser and is bloated af. Ladybird gets my funding as the hail mary play

I'd fund Mozilla to become independent of its management.*

* If I were filthy rich, of course

I would only donate for firefox specifically, when given the promise that it would be spent on development. Never to Mozilla with all the weird stuff they fund and work on.

If there was a way to financially contribute to development of the browser and only development of the browser I would. Probably like $5 a month.

Would begs the question of could. And, sadly, that just isn't really likely, by my view.

You could regulate a lot of this idea. But financially, it just isn't there.

USD10 a month, as long as it's going to maintaining and developing the browser, not for any other purposes.

Not after they posted this: https://web.archive.org/web/20210108215449/https://blog.mozi...

It was the day I switched to Brave and never looked back.

No, money ruins open and free source. If you are going to do it, do it for the passion. Every single open/free software that I have rooted for that decided that money is important turned out terrible. Please don't ask for a list, it's endless.

I would donate to mozilla an amount they deserve, which would be 0.

Now donations directly to firefox that only are used for browser development would be a different story. I would donate +15$ monthly for that and over time much more if I I can see improvements.

Mozilla is fucked.

They should have gotten into privacy centric groupware a decade ago: thunderbird, collaboration office suite, calendar, tasks, etc all baked into Firefox ala nextcloud but with Mozilla polish.

I’d pay for that, instead they fuck around with VPNs and other stupid services that are harder to use than other products and not as good.

I’ll miss Mozilla when they’re gone but there will be no question as to why they’re gone.

Why is this not a poll? Yes, you can create polls on HN.

Yes, $10 per month per user (me).

Wikipedia style donations. In fact Wikipedia should just create their own fork of Firefox.

Yes. I would.

Only when accepts crypto as donations.

Yes.

Zero

Current mozilla? No fucking way

No, no, no. Since the iRobot fiasco Mozilla is dead to me. Now I'm just enjoying the (oh so well deserved) downfall.

Nothing.

Not at all. Mozilla is now controlled by hyper partisan political operatives. There should be zero intersection between partisan politics and my web browser.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubtWZwtJCdw

> Ask HN: Would you fund Mozilla to become independent of Google?

You mean Mozilla is dependent on Google ? (in the voice of John Malkowitch): Fuck Mozilla, Fuck. /s