… 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.
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dump move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
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.
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Proton did something similar.
This poll shows promise: https://mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/112654592627487236
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 my private users and massive corporations alike, 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.
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.