… I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job …
Edit:
Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:
- As long as Firefox is sponsored by ‘we are not a monopoly’ Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
- For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if ‘we’ accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
- This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
- Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
- This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
This is after they bought an ad company last month, Mozilla is compromised now
Edit: Somebody pointed out the reason: Mozilla Foundation has no members. It’s just the executives, no one in the actual community has any input in Mozilla’s direction, and considering how wildly out of touch tech executives are this explains it all
A bunch of Firefox devs need to leave Mozilla, fork it and start up an actual non-profit not based around monetization. I would happily donate monthly if I knew it were going to Firefox development, instead of the dozen other things Mozilla spends its money on. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Google’s “just so we can claim there’s competition in the marketplace” payment to Mozilla to stay the default search engine is what funds most of Firefox, even without the executive pay and unrelated nonprofit work. Building and maintaining a browser engine is not cheap, I don’t think mere individual donations are going to help here.
Without the reputation and contacts of Mozilla, those devs also wouldn’t have much of a say in the social side of browser development, like web standards and certificate authority programs.
I’d love a first party Firefox fork that’s not limited by Mozilla’s desperate attempts to stay afloat when Google decides not to keep them around anymore, but I don’t think a few developers are going to be enough to get it done. The current situation, “Firefox but with very minor tweaks”, is probably the best we can expect for now.
EU should donate to firefox for a free world without enshitification. I mean give the money and force no ad tracking.
The EU has the Horizon Europe programme for stuff like that, but I don’t think Mozilla will be able to apply with their current setup. As of now, it’s impossible to donate to Firefox development, you have to donate to the nonprofit that funds Firefox development, but also does tons of activist work and education funding.
Many people want Mozilla to figure out a way to only fund Firefox, but I don’t think Mozilla wants to have money earmarked specifically for Firefox when they have so many projects and programmes going on.
Proton did something similar.
This poll shows promise: https://mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/112654592627487236
I think I would pay for a proton browser as well, if it isn’t just chromium. 5$ a month seems reasonable, but I am more the pay 250$ for lifetime type 😄
You’re definitely not alone. If this happens and it becomes some major news in the community with reasonable visibility, I’m sure many people would support this.
All of these claims clash with the reality of so many core open source projects, used by private users and massive corporations alike, that rely on single voluntary developers or super small groups which receive no flowers and no donations.
In general I agree: Open source projects are super hard to monetize and too much work does not get donations, flowers or even thanks.
For Firefox specifically I am not so sure, especially when Thunderbird seems to be doing good with their donation based model.
As long as Firefox is run by Mozilla throwing millions at their incompetent leadership, I will not donate a cent to Firefox.
If Firefox would get forked by some developers I’ll happily donate money to them and given Firefox high visibility/importance, this might work out, like Thunderbird did.
You can’t donate a cent to Firefox anyway, the Mozilla Corporation does not accept donations. Thunderbird is also developed by a for profit company under the Foundation, but does accept non-tax-deductible donations.
There are some Firefox forks, but they tend to get outdated… / have slow update cycles
I like floorp
yea. but they get to claim like they fund the opensource world. like come on… stop posting fake funding claims on an anonymous forum and hire yourself a developer team if you’re so invested in this.
But whaa… developers salary aren’t funded by your $2 dollar donations, even with 100s of donations. oh geez… who woulda thought.
Is Librewolf already a Firefox without ad companies colonization ?
LibreWolf is little more than a custom config for Firefox, they don’t do actual development on the engine, which is the important and very technically laborious part.
In the meantime you can give a look to the Servo project. If Servo is clean for you, you can support them.
I think it’s more because the Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company and people barely understand the difference between the Corporation and Foundation or what the Foundation even does, or the rules that allow a non-profit to own a for-profit.