alt Hacker NewsThey are in a tough place.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
Replies
> how to pay for that
I would not mind to pay for the browser, but they will not let me.
I've donated to thunderbird since they made a promise that won't go into other weird/stupid mozilla ventures.
I'd gladly do the same for firefox, but they have not given the opportunity.
If I had the cash back then I'd do the same for B2G/firefoxOS.
Firefox has 1.4 billion in reserves and no debt.
If they stop paying tens of millions to their management, they could easily afford paying devs in perpetuity just from investing that money.
Doesn't Mozilla foundation have millions of dollars, including paid for by Google? "Linux" is better capitalized, "Wikipedia" is sort of open source, what else ranks above Mozilla?
Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.
> They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari)
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.