I would love to have Android software on an Apple device. Their hardware is incredible!
Ultimately, I tolerate Android from a privacy standpoint because we're still able to fully modify our devices and use open-source app sources. The minute that goes away (and it feels like Google isn't as tolerant of it anymore), I go.
Add-on replacements:
- Linguist for translations.
- Search by Image for reverse image search (there are others that just use Google Lens directly, but I use this one).
Cast is a bit more cumbersome. There is fx_cast on GitHub, but it requires a companion app. Firefox seems to want to add cast based on a flag you used to be able to enable, but I'm guessing there are some restrictions from Google's end they ran into.
To little, too late. They underwent massive scope creep, throwing money at anything and everything, while neglecting the core task of maintaining a standards-compliant, user-friendly/non-hostile, privacy-respecting browser ... resulting in such incidents as Mr. Robot ad tie-in and the global add-on outage.
Oh ... and I still can't customize my controls fully. (Add-ons only take effect after a page load.)
Had they actually kept their scope small and focused, they could have put the difference into an endowment that would let them give the middle finger to the Chromes of the world forever. Yet here we are.
Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service or how to comply with Google's advertising decisions.
Then they would let people contribute money to the browser (instead of to Mozilla Foundation which goes to enabling aforementioned trash fires) and to the salary of a multi-million dollar CEO after laying off developer staff and hiring more C-suite assistants.
Mozilla is a bad organization in every sense, a bad steward of Firefox, and the best thing that could happen is they do have their funding cut, they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community.
>Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service
It's pants-on-head level of crazy talk to suggest that the VPN service is compromising Mozilla's finances.
It's a re-wrapped Mullvad VPN that probably was not expensive to roll out (it being inexpensive to deploy is probably precisely the reason they moved forward with it). It's like people are just workshopping arguments where they randomly claim these things are expensive without any substantiation whatsoever.
Mozilla is sitting on 1.2 billion in assets and investments. They're not underwater. They are indeed in a position where they need to diversify revenue, but the idea that the side bets have created running deficits is a narrative completely manufactured in comment sections.
This kind of thinking appears to be prevalent. "Firefox does one specific thing which I construe as evil. Therefore I use the competitor which also does this thing, plus dozens of others which are anti-competitive and generally destructive to the ecosystem."
"The coleslaw in the Jedi salad bar has raisins. Therefore I joined the Sith. Their coleslaw also has raisins."
You misunderstand. The vast majority of people who complain about Mozilla on HN are Firefox users. We're the ones with the highest level of investment in the idea of an open web, so we're the ones who've stuck it out until Firefox's market share is all but gone. But because we care so much, you'll also frequently find us on here complaining that Mozilla is drunk driving their company and does not seem to realize that the only thing they do that actually matters is maintain the one independent browser engine.
Nice speech, but the argument about VPN costs is just as spurious as it was a few comments ago. Why has this passionate concern drifted into nodding along to such ridiculous arguments?
I too am I Firefox user, I too am invested and concerned with, say, adtech. Somehow I've managed to avoid saying crazy things about VPNs.
= = =
Edit: replying here because it won't let me add a new comment. I'm not making the positive claim in the VPN argument. It's puzzling why "based on no information" would cut in favor of an argument asserting VPN has unprecedented costs without substantiation but not against it.
Also, as I've already pointed out and the other commenter has (as well as commenters in previous threads whenever this comes up), what we know of ordinary costs to run VPNs would not imply any expense on the order of magnitude necessary to make the argument work. Which is a legitimate challenge to speculation that would presume otherwise without substantiation.
And once again I have to emphasize that this is completely detached from any cause and effect argument about what missing browser feature would have otherwise been developed but for the resources spent on a VPN. The idea that there's a legitimate open question about whether a re-wrapped VPN is costing millions or tens of millions in losses is not the reasonable argument you seem to think it is. And it's not because reasons, like the ones mentioned here.
= = =
Edit 2: This was originally about whether the VPNs were a cost sink on the order of millions or tens of millions of dollars. But now it seems to have changed to whether the VPN generates enough revenue that it's a positive way to contribute. Not sure when that happened.
Your VPN argument is based on, as far as I can tell, no information. Do you have numbers for what percentage of the VPN subscription goes to Mozilla? If not, you have no reason to believe that it's an effective way to contribute to Firefox dev.
I want a way to contribute to Firefox, not a VPN, and if 90% of the subscription goes to Mullvad that's a waste of money.
Apparently it's letting me reply now although it wasn't previously.
I'm just going to note that for whatever reason the goalposts appear to have shifted here. Originally, I was replying to a commenter who was claiming without substantiation that the VPN was a massive financial sink that was part of the reason for Mozilla's loss of market share.
Meanwhile, the argument you seem to be making is that you want information that supports the contention that it's a significant revenue raiser for Mozilla which is not the claim that I was responding to. If you're also doubting that the VPN is a huge money losing bet, then we're probably in agreement.
Fair. I wasn't actually responding to your initial comment or defending the specific claims of the person that you were replying to—just responding to the person who mischaracterized the source of most anti-Mozilla rhetoric.
So yeah, my beef with the VPN as a solution for monetization is different than OP's, and I wouldn't try to defend a position that claims that it's an active money sink. My argument is just that unless they have an extremely favorable deal with Mullvad it's most likely an extremely inefficient way to make money from someone like me who would be straight-up donating monthly if it were an option.
>just responding to the person who mischaracterized the source of most anti-Mozilla rhetoric.
I can't agree that it's mischaracterized given that it literally was the source of comments in this thread and just one of numerous instances of that argument I've seen across HN (if you check my user profile, at this point the first two or three pages of my comment history are responding to arguments of this type) and even you seemed to think it was close enough to something you agreed with to be a suitable jumping off point for a different argument borrowing from the same rhetorical momentum.
Sometimes it's the VPN sometimes it's AI, sometimes it's Pocket, sometimes it's about the blockchain, sometimes it's about their VC fund. Generally the idea is that these side bets supposedly siphoned away developer resources and are there reason for the loss of market share which involves a critical misunderstanding of real drivers of market share. So it's quite a prevalent argument. And so far as I can tell, baseless.
So as I said previously, I too care about Firefox and I too am concerned about issues related to ad tech and somehow I don't end up going off the deep end and nodding along to crazy arguments about the VPN.
Is it? Do you have a citation for this? From what I understand it's a white labeled Mullvad VPN, and I haven't been able to find numbers for what percentage of the revenue is taken by Mozilla and what percentage goes to Mullvad.
I don't know any details of the revenue split, but I'm talking about the act of running a VPN service itself as being low overhead compared to the costs. Paying mullvad obviously reduces the margins, but it doesn't have the kinds of organizational overhead that would come with say, running an advertising company on the side like Mozilla now does.
Previously the argument was that the VPN was an example of "throwing money into open firepits", but now we're talking about the extent to which it generates revenue.
Do you have a source for this? I'm a big fan of Mullvad and trust their service more than any. I wouldn't mind supporting Mozilla's independence from Google while getting the same VPN service I'm currently getting
Hopefully Mozilla's MDN Plus offering can grow to bring them a big source of revenue. MDN is a treasure for any web developer and, should Mozilla go under, this public service would be sorely missed for the open web.
The main problem with mozvpn is that they have a mozilla:mulvad account mapping. I'm unclear if my name goes to mulvad, but it does to mozilla.
Yes with mulvad you can pay anonymously via cash or bitcoin or whatever, but assuming you aren't doing that, using mozvpn seems potentially safer than mulvad - as you'd have to compromise both mulvad and mozilla to link my name/credit card with the vpn used.
I imagine their VPN service is financially viable if they've still stuck with it this long.
Aside from that, they've just about cut all other initiatives aside from "Firefox and AI". The latter gives me pause, but hopefully they really are more focused moving forward.
I think Mozilla has done alright, but I agree the folks is in charge of their business direction and especially PR are abysmal. Personally, I wish a company like Proton was at the helm.
> Then they would let people contribute money to the browser
People keep saying things like this, but the truth is that direct contributions to any ad-supported system contribute more like 1%-10% (at best) of their income.
It does not have to be the majority. It would suffice to produce enough funds to continue developing Firefox, with full-time engineers, infrastructure, etc.
The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Let's assume that half of it was dedicated to Firefox; e.g. $60M/y. It would take 500k users paying $120/y (aka $10/mo) to support their favorite browser. The current audience of Firefox is approx. 170M users; it would take about 0.3 percent of the audience to be paying users; 0.6% if you lower the rate to $5/mo.
This is how any freemium works.
Even more funnily, someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors. Eventually the developers might stop needing the paycheck from Mozilla, and thus from Google.
If we adjust to these numbers, we need to quadruple the number of paying users, up to some 1.2% of the total user base. Let's add a safety margin, and bump it to 2%.
> someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors
I had the same thought. I dont think such an org would be able to pull in nearly the same amount of money as Mozilla does, but even a few million dollars a year would fund a lot of development work.
Spotify makes over 80% of revenue off of paid subscribers, even though over 60% of users are on the free, ad-supported subscription.
Now that's not some optional donation scheme, there are real tangible benefits to being a paid subscriber, so idk how that could fit into something like Firefox.
Yup. Firefox Relay, their own VPN, MDN Plus, and many more.
The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income.
Based on their interop performances Mozilla seems to be doing the best they can to do both. Firefox interop has improved significantly in the past 4 years (surprisingly, so has Safari's) and they've also rolled out more new Mozilla offerings that could some day replace Google revenue
> The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income.
There's no inherent contradiction here. Mozilla still doesn't give me a way to donate to them to fund Firefox. They haven't even tried. I want to fund Firefox development, desperately, but they deliberately structured their organization to make that impossible without paying for some other random project that has its own overhead.
I want Mozilla to offer a Firefox+ subscription or donation or something, anything. Let me give you my money! Just give me a way to be confident that you'll take it as a signal to fund Firefox and not as a signal that what your customers really want is VPNs.
Taking your money creates a firmer expectation from them to stick to their main selling proposition of privacy which would make it more difficult for them to go after revenue streams that are more lucrative but less privacy-focused.
The only revenue stream they should be pursuing is interest on the endowment they built from the Google payouts. Anything else makes them dependent on someone else and corrupts the mission.
You can still install uBlock Origin in Brave, assuming you don't mind the crypto stuff and how they pay it out (or, rather don't) to site owners. Even Firefox feels a little weird now with the advent of Mozilla Advertising.
You can, but ultimately Brave is downstream of Chrome and their stated intention of supporting Manifest V2 "for as long as [they're] able" doesn't inspire as much confidence.
Firefox is also the only open alternative to Chromium at the moment, so I prefer to endorse it instead.
Brave has its own Rust based Adblocker BUILD IN. That is at the very core of the Browser, uses the exact same filter lists uBlock Origin and all the other use. There is no point in using uBlock origin in Brave at all. I have been using Brave for years now and the adblocker pretty much like uBlock. Never looked back. I think it even inspired by uBlock but the fact they can even integrate it tighter with Chromium makes more then than an extension written in JS.
uBlock Origin does a bit more than applying community maintained filter lists though. I regularly use its capability to add custom filters for instance. Is that also possible in Brave?
We would not do that on principle, but imagine we're the mustache twirlers you fantasize we are: we'd light our brand on fire doing any such thing, lose all our lead users, stop growing and start shrinking. Think / Type / Post is the Ready / Aim / Fire analogue you seek.
I know that you probably went with Chromium based on the way your relationship with Mozilla ended, but man... I'll never have a Chromium based browser as my daily driver, I simply never trusted the ad company to not do what they ended up doing in the end (killing ad blockers). Brave will always be a no go for me for this reason. And now more than ever, we really need some company with real fire power to take the reins of the Firefox source code and create a real trustable fork.
This is a choice we made. As I wrote in my last reply, I think we would have died trying to get Gecko/Graphene with a Web front end up to competitive scratch vs. Chrome (nm Firefox).
A Firefox fork would have gone over badly with some potentially large number of Mozilla/Firefox fans, and we'd still lack key elements not part of the Mozilla open source (at the time, e.g., Adobe's CDM for HTML5 DRM). On the upside we'd have more UX customizability.
But our choice of Chromium/Blink (via Electron, so we had Web front end upside without Firefox extensions) was not a slam dunk choice. It involved trade-offs, as all engineering does. One downside is we have to audit and network-test for leaks and blunders, which often come from Chromium upstream:
Huh, I was under the impression that you were forking Chromium itself instead of building over Electron. Or are you talking about a past, post-Gecko decision that had to be dropped as well?
No, we started with Gecko (on Graphene, a sandboxing multiprocessor framework from b2g/FirefoxOS). We switched for hard-nosed wins of Chromium (as part of Electron) because out of the box vs. Gecko, most rows in the spreadsheet favored Chromium decisively. This is covered in
Why do you write "probably... based on... relationship ended"? Brave as a startup does not have time for feels not realz, pathos-over-logos nonsense. I recommend you avoid it in your work efforts too.
Thanks for the replies. I did not knew that you started with Gecko. Anyway, Brave is my go to advice when a regular user asks for a mobile browser, it just works out of the box. Not for me, and I still hope to see a Firefox fork becoming the main Chrome competitor in the future.
I get it. I run FF as my primary browser (mostly because I don't want to see the internet devolve into a Blink mono-culture).
But, I always recommend Brave for less-technical folks. It just works! My FF setup includes a number of extensions, some of which need a bit of tuning to be useful. Then you have to deal with issues in websites that just don't properly support FF, etc. My grandmother can install Brave and simply start browsing. Things just work without extra config or tinkering.
What I specifically mean by 'large media elements' is that I currently have the uBlock option active to 'Block media elements larger than [50] KB'. (Where the 50 is a spinner so I can increase or decrease the size if I want.)
I would like to know this, too. It does not seem to be on the list of features unless they are referring to it via "cosmetic filtering". I often block particular elements on websites.
There is an Aggressive setting for Brave Shields, which you can set either per-site in the Shields menu from the URL bar, or globally in brave://settings/shields - that should take care of SERP ads and other first-party placements.
Brave has a native adblocker that lets basically nothing through, though it can be configured as desired. Crypto stuff is opt-in, though there is a little monochrome button for it on the browser that one can disable with a right click.
As I see it, Brave is the only Chromium-based browser with a competitive Mv2-deprecation-resistant adblocker. If adblocking is important to you - and it is, to many people - then Brave literally is the only one worth considering. Not to mention it is open source, unlike most of the others.
(I work on Brave's adblocker, and FWIW the folks who work for Brave are very open about their affiliation when commenting about it online)
It is not a subtle insinuation, Brave is the defacto only browser apart from Chrome right now. All the rest are niche and irrelevant if you measure adblock, compatibility and widely subpar privacy protection.
There is some bitching about the ads crypto token, but that is entirely optional, so complaints are mostly fear and dogma. And to be honest, is a fascinating new approach to ads that suvberts the current state of affairs in the advertising market.
Do you have thoughts about Kagi/Orion browser? I've been using it for a bit now and I've been pleased with the ad blocking capabilities and the ability to have ublock origin on my iPhone and iPad. The browser definitely has scales but it's usable for me at this point.
Your comment was downvoted into oblivion, but it's a very valid point. There is a significant number of GNU/Linux users who value the freedoms granted by FLOSS licensing, so I believe Orion not being a FLOSS project is a valid argument against it - specifically in context of GNU/Linux (as a part of Free Software movement).
At least it certainly leaves me (personally) having second thoughts, even though I'm no purist and use proprietary software (but try prefer free software if I can).
If the Google, Pocket and other ad money dries up, Mozilla the company may go away but the Firefox browser itself will continue on because it's open source. As an exclusively Firefox user for over 20 years, I suspect if Mozilla the company dies, it will won't negatively impact Firefox much, at least in any meaningful way. In fact, the browser may be somewhat better off managed like the Blender or MAME projects.
In the last five years or so Firefox has increasingly introduced controversial changes that make it (IMHO) less good, primarily around interface design. And, from what I understand, Mozilla employs full-time UX designers who've been driving much of that. Of course, with Firefox it's still possible to modify, fix and restore all these recent interface "improvements" with user CSS but it's a constant annoyance to need to keep fixing it. Fortunately, there's an active community effort around restoring the Firefox interface and usability, exemplified by the brilliant Lepton project https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/releases.
My perception just watching the evolution of Firefox from the outside, is that it used to be a browser that celebrated the ethos of "Have it Your Way." However, Mozilla the company gets money to pay its executives and employees (millions in the case of more than one recent CEO) by actively driving users and eyeballs for Google, Pocket and other advertisers. So the company is highly incentivized to try myriad changes and redesigns to increase appeal to "the masses" of browser users. Thus, the UX keeps getting 'simplified' and 'de-cluttered' with advanced functionality 'de-prioritized' and add-on support demoted to second-class afterthought - instead of the shining key feature advanced users value most. Basically, in recent years the Firefox UX and end-user features have been pushed by the substantial payroll needs of the Mozilla company to become more like Chrome and Safari instead of embracing its unique position as a tool for power users who value advanced features, customization and extension. And it was all for naught because Firefox has continued to lose market share while ignoring (and even actively alienating) its niche community of fanatically devoted power users.
Do you think the open source community is capable of maintaining Firefox without Mozilla? I find that doubtful. Even if they did, without Mozilla, Cloudflare and friends would start trying to kill Firefox like they do to other independent browsers.
...so long as you're not in a market where they automatically opt you in to sending all your DNS requests to a for-profit company without asking, and if you are, you remember to set up a canary domain or go and update your settings for every new install and new profile.
If you use an Android device, you have the potential to live an ad-free life:
- Use Firefox with Ublock Origin and BypassPaywallsClean to avoid ads and Paywalls.
- Use ReVanced to patch your YouTube APK to disable ads, add SponsorBlock to avoid in-video ads, etc. ReVanced can also patch all major social media apps to remove all ads.
- Use OSS apps to avoid ads or get extra functionality. I use OuterTune for free music, Aliucord/Revenge for a better Discord client, etc.
Ironically, I use an Android device because I resent looking at ads.
I never get YouTube ads (plus I have SponsorBlock among other features), I get no ads or paywalls on my browser (which support Ublock Origin and BypassPaywallsClean), none of my social media apps have ads and most are open source clients, etc.
I haven't seen a single ad on my phone in ages, and that's why I can't part with Android (for now).
Ultimately, I tolerate Android from a privacy standpoint because we're still able to fully modify our devices and use open-source app sources. The minute that goes away (and it feels like Google isn't as tolerant of it anymore), I go.