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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is definitely a good point.
the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Wasn’t firefox a volunteer open source project at one point?
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