Let me pay for Firefox

Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs.

Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.

> hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier

I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities.

> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”

Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.

Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I realise that HN has different people posting different arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the years.

All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser?

In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.

These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.

You imply it’s the hackers or Hacker News that has changed to create a negative atmosphere. From my perspective, however, it’s the direct result of a very long series of hostile-to-hackers decisions made by Mozilla.

> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.

On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising!

That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.

As someone who spends a lot of time on HN, I fully agree with you. I am beyond bored of seeing the same things just continually reposted and take over some good threads. I actually got to a point where I would not click on comment threads that had anything to do with anything that Elon touches, because it just got ridiculous.

On the flip side though, I know there are a ton of readers who only occasionally Read the interesting story, who are part of today's lucky thousand who haven't heard yet. For that reason, my position has become somewhat moderate in that I think the hyperbolic hate posts are still ridiculous, including some informative and reasonable comments is probably good. To be clear though, The majority of this thread is not that :-D

Using Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully settled on the name Firefox— the days of "Firebird" and the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages like about:mozilla. Firefox is dear to me and it has been for a very long time now.

Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about.

(That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)

> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer

Let's start hating and discussing how much Chrome leads are paid too.

Because they are a non-profit, they have to spend their money every year. That’s why Mozilla is/was over employed and following all these projects that die, because they need these engineers to work on something.

My friend worked at Mozilla 15 years ago, arguably during their golden years and he said it was a joke how much money they wasted because they had to spend it.

I feel like these are stuff that the C-suite needs for justifying their pay. If it is "boring browser development", it will show that they are doing nothing, redundant, and cannot have bonuses and salary raise.

They're trying to diversify their revenue so it doesn't all come from Google. All these 'self-indulgent projects' are attempts to actually make enough money to compete with a multi-trillion dollar company's resources because they know they can't compete long-term.

They have cut back on those a lot now, haven't they?

Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized than Mozilla? We're so so blessed with Linus and everyone is afraid of the moment the project has to stand without him. But I'm confident he's aware and working towards that point in time. I'm not too much into it though, so this is more or less assumptions.

> But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.

Certainly when it comes to Wikipedia: there is oversight. I know people don't like the fact that Wikipedia spends money on things other than server racks, but spending money on developing the community is a pretty legitimate thing to do! How else can you maintain such an encylopedia? You need to attract knowledgeable people to write and review articles!

Three examples off the top of my head — PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, and Debian — are doing just fine without someone "taking responsibility" (when have Mozilla's CEO ever done that?).

Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.

There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.

Leadership doesn’t mean earning more money.

I’m fine with twice the amount of a developer. Taking into account responsibility, public involvement and special clothing. Travel costs and so on are separate. The developers are doing the hard work.

There is not “team” if a MBA or lawyer gets 38 times the wage of an actual person doing the work.

It can be done; an example is Igalia: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/

> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.

If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.

They wrote "pad the CEO salary", not "support any leadership"

Compare to Torvalds. You may or may not like his leadership, but nobody feels sour about his salary.

I think you need a CEO, you just don't need a CEO that is paid $7m/year. That's ludicrous. What amazing decisions have they been making that were worth that amount? Have they really contributed more than a team of 70 developers could?

There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.

CEO is typically needed for-profit purposes on a scale. Donating for devs to build browser without that purpose does not need CEO. Just a lead engineer and accountants.

> don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy

I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.

I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.

I think that's because those everything else are products with an opaque structure, and Mozilla, and for example Wikipedia, are more transparent. Really highlights why some people don't open up, either themselves, their source code, or their organizational structure: it's just inviting endless criticism.

Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.

I think you are being too pessimistic. Maybe it is difficult for this to happen for Firefox due to its system already subverted. However, it is not true of OSS in general. Folks already directly donate to creators/maintainers with no executive in between.

>There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.

Well then I’m just not going to pay.

>Yet we happily do that for everything else.

Is it because we're >happy< to do it, or there's no choice?

Or in slightly less fatalistic words: In any entity with more than 1-2 employees you need someone to make decisions and be accountable for them. The normal solution is to have a director/CEO for this. You may be able to get away with paying them slightly less than market rates if they are doing it for a good cause, but if you want someone competent you will need to pay them a relatively high salary to compete with other employers.

Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.

Happily? We seem to have a choice here, ergo the expressions of preference to exercise that choice.

Firefox's entire appeal is that it is not like every other corporate entity. Its legitimacy hinges on how far it can separate itself from intrusive corporate interests.

If Mozilla goes the same way, Firefox loses all goodwill it gathered over the years and stops being an option against Chrome et al.

Did you notice that chrome removed the ad blocker extensions?

Ads have many more perverse effects than wasting your time or being ugly, and you can't fix all of those with an ad blocker. They're a constant pressure to make everything retain your attention for the longest time possible, or to editorialize out content that would detract from clicking them.

You also end up paying for all this advertising indirectly, in the price of everything you buy. So you might think you get free content, but you're really not. And let's not even mention the insanity of constantly pushing everyone to consume more trash in a world that really doesn't need it.

Firefox is free, none of its users are paying for it.

This is a very, very Western-centered take. It's been growing in most other areas of the world, although from a much lower starting point. I'd say it's been "reverting to the mean".

> when the purchasing power of the working class has been falling steadily for the last 45 years

Yeah? How much did an always-on pocket sized computer connected to the internet cost in 1980?

This is the Threema business model: https://threema.com/en

Public app, and a separate business offering - both with E2EE

Germanys healthcare systems goes Matrix

Whoops, it happened. An internet argument changed someone's mind. :)

According to their latest financial transparency report[1], software development as a line item is about 60% of their expenses. However, your question wasn't about where revenue has gone, it was about where new donations would go. That lead me to the donation FAQ which reads:

> At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. The Mozilla Foundation programs are supported by grassroots donations and grants. Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.

If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all. This explains the lack of Firefox on their website. Any mention of it as a product of the foundation would be misleading about where the donations go. From the point of view of the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is just another revenue stream for outreach efforts.

This really bums me out, because I'm a huge fan of Firefox. It's my go to browser on my computer and my phone. I advocate for it as much as possible. I've donated before, but I've likely never actually financially supported development of Firefox. I support the EFF, so it's possible I could have donated to this foundation on its own merits. But I didn't.

[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

[2]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...

I'm curious, how capital intensive/wasteful were these aimless projects? Compared to their operating expenses? What better way could they have spent this money? (Development isn't exactly a good answer, if it's not a lot of money, it won't exactly buy a lot of R&D and even if it did, R&D doesn't necessarily translate to more income).

The German "frei" can mean "free of charge" sometimes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frei#Usage_notes

Spanish has separate words (gratis and libre) and so does Dutch (gratis and vrij).

Nobody thinks of it as "land of the free" nowadays

> in the land of the free which is not the land of no cost.

Maybe it is exactly what that means, and we’ve just been interpreting it wrong all this time.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8

> Free installation. Free admission, free appraisal, free alterations, free delivery, free estimates, free home trial, and free parking.

Freedom isn't Free. There's a hefty fuckin' fee

Technically that’s a Latin word that just happens to have kept the same spelling and meaning in English.

LibreOffice?

The intention was great, but I find the word awkward. Leebraayyy

It looks/sounds foreign and feels a bit pretentious to use in conversation

.. or I feel like some gringo speaking broken Spanish

Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening all over the place, there is also a growing market of people who are willing to pay for something of high quality that won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?

Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.

The permanent library was strange. Not very transparent what happened there. I am still shocked they did not invest in the original idea (tag and archive web page), but instead tried to build another content stream with recommended articles and such.

Personally I really hated getting Pocket shoved in my face, but it seems some people missed it.