I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions, unlike the locked-down and hobbled Chromium ecosystem. I suspect they do realize this because they've been really leaning into extensions recently, but over the years I've worried that Mozilla's committment to Firefox isn't as serious as I would like.
Regardless, I'd love to see this give FF a big bounce in the stats. Something to reinforce that there are people out here that really want manifest v2, badly enough to switch!
> I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions,
The problem is that Mozilla's customers are not Firefox's users. Mozilla's customer is Google. They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
I think it's pretty clear that the TOS change basically coincided with the removal of manifest v2 change in chrome.
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.
Do they? I thought Google significantly reduced their payments to Mozilla a few years back, which started Mozilla current random-walk.
Edit: As of 2023, they were as high as ever at 85% of Mozilla's finances coming from Google [1] . However the DoJ antitrust case against Google targets Google's payments to various entities (Mozilla, Apple) to make themselves the default search engine, thus threatening Mozilla's income. I did not immediately find sources for Mozilla's 2024 finances, but I can imagine they see the existential threat.
> and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
> They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
I am trying to understand how this works? If they pay Mozilla to exist, yet their intention is to destroy their competitor, why even pay for them to begin with?
I think it's partially Goodwill, partially business. Google does get some benefit out of being the default search engine for those additional users. It's not substantial, and Cromes is the dominant browser in the market, so I think Google is more just happy to keep Mozilla existing. Also, the existence of Mozilla makes chrome seem like less of a monopoly.
Part of what the DOJ is seeking against Google would severely impact Mozilla financially however, as they want to ban them from paying to be the default search engine.
That's enough to be (apparently) profitable. It doesn't matter if most people don't pay for search as long as enough people do that paid search can exist.
It's more like 0.005%-0.02% of queries and like 0.001% of users depending on what statistics for Google you go by, but of course still very insignificant.
Ah yes, the mystical 0.0073 units of people paying for search, assuming every person searches.
Over a year ago, Kagi hit 20k paying members. This puts monthly ARR between $200k and $500k ($10 to $25/head), roughly. That's 0.000273% of all people -- quite a jump!
Someone in an infosec podcast recently summed up the whole situation far better than I've been able to:
The vast majority of people won't pay for privacy.
Some people will pay for search. Some people will pay for content. It's really not many, though. Can you imagine if effectively everything on the internet was paywalled? I sure as hell don't know what the solution is, but we wouldn't've gotten to this spot right now, with all of the good and the bad of the internet, if the vast majority of sites and services on the internet charged for use.
(My best guess is that we can have the good that we have now with ads that aren't individually targeted. I literally have no guesses other than that.)
I have loved Kagi's "small web" where I find interesting items, almost like stumbleupon. It reminded me that not every site on the internet is optimizing for eyeballs.
Mozilla diversifies by increasing the CEO's salary for nothing.
Wiki:
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5 million, and again to nearly $7 million in 2022.
The new CEO brings computing for AI money bleed that almost no one wants.
I'm not defending it at all, but I think it's worth pointing out this pay rate is below the rate most CEOs of tech companies of this size are making. I don't really know what the solution here is but I imagine any CEO they replace her with would also seek a high salary. I'd love for them to become a worker-owned cooperative like Igalia but I really don't see that happening any time soon
I don't agree with Mozilla paying that huge CEO salary, but…
Do you know Firefox's handy new offline translation feature? That's AI a well. And Firefox is the only browser that doesn't leak your web page when translating it.
There are plenty of other uses for AI, such as describing images without alt-text for the blind, or summarization. I, for one, want AI in my browser, you can't really say that “nobody wants it”, when many people clearly do.
Thunderbird is doing pretty good. They actually have a surplus in donations they have to get rid of. Yet Mozilla abandoned it and refuses still to accept donation for Firefox.
Linux kernel is backed by Linux Foundation, Servo web engine is backed by Linux Foundation Europe and both are making a great progress. Why can't Firefox be funded by companies like Linux is?
I think it absolutely would be great if a Wikipedia-like model were viable, but Wikipedia is like the extreme high watermark for that, and they get five billion visits a month, which I think is an order of magnitude higher than what Firefox has access to. Ramping up to Wikipedia scale levels of donations would be a serious project and a significant gamble.
Wikipedia has also been around as long as the internet itself and its current fundraising drives are the culmination of decades of momentum and cultivating a perception of the compact that exists between them and their users.
Also, I believe that even in the best of times Wikipedia is raising about half as much as it costs to run Firefox.
There's probably important caveats that relate to comparing software development projects with resources and content, because I think the most successful donation-driven examples are Wikipedia, NPR, and The Guardian. And what they seem to have in common is generating content to be consumed.
In terms of software development projects, to me the most natural analogy is something like VLC, which does indeed rely on donations and is orders of magnitudes smaller. Or maybe the Tor project which does rely on donations, but I think they're at the order of like 10 million or so, which is certainly promising, but not a like for like substitution for the revenue they get from Google.
Similar to Mozilla & Firefox, there isn't an exact breakdown for Wikimedia expenditures to know the costs associated with Wikipedia. For Firefox, it's often stated its costs are ~200m but those are all expenses Mozilla categorizes under software development. For Wikimedia, within their operation expenses, ~3m were in hosting and ~84m in salaries (related to programs). The salaries are stated to be for multiple initiatives, among which platform development is mentioned*.
*Although arguably the most important part of Wikipedia, and their other collaborative projects, are the volunteers maintaining and contributing to it, rather the developers.
Note that $15 million is nowhere near enough to pay the number of employees who work on Firefox. As a for-profit (unlike the foundation), Mozilla the corporation has to pay folks market rates, and if you're paying an employee in the US, you're paying that same amount on top as taxes, insurance, benefits, etc. etc. so $15 million gets you a few dozen people at most. Mozilla employs a few hundred. So you'll have to add a zero to that number before it's in the same ballpark (e.g. wikipedia would be a good example).
Is the AI coming at a prohibitive cost? I'm not sure I understand what is going to come of those bets, and I'm not a fan of AI everything so I hope it's only used in measured ways that are beneficial, but I certainly would rather them continue innovating.
I don't think they did a whole lot with blockchain beyond some very preliminary dabbling in decentralized web stuff which if it could have gained traction I absolutely would have supported but it certainly doesn't seem like it was a significant drag on developer resources or finances so far as I could tell.
And wouldn't that have to be the argument for any of this to matter?
So you made this claim about the blockchain and I did a little bit of Googling to learn more. And so far as I can tell they barely did anything beyond some like papers and very preliminary demo implementations of stuff like IPFS and dabbling with Web3.
Those were very preliminary ventures and not anything that commanded substantial developer resources, so I don't know what you're talking about. And look. I obviously disagree with people who claim that side bets compromised Mozilla, but the arguments sort into different tiers with some being understandable (issues with adtech, CEO pay), some in the middle (the non profit Mozilla Foundation is bloated!), some that are one step up from utter nonsense because they're at least expressed in coherent sentences but have little to no supporting evidence or theory of cause and effect (e.g. "Mozilla lost all its market share due to their side bets being prohibitively expensive").
But we're at a point where apparently these arguments have been seen and repeated so many times that there's a new class of commenters who have been making the lowest effort versions of these arguments that I've yet seen, and are the least interested in anything like evidence or logic or responsiveness to questions or anything that I would associate with coherent thought. Which is where I would put the blockchain argument.
> Those were very preliminary ventures and not anything that commanded substantial developer resources, so I don't know what you're talking about.
Are you sure they intended them to be preliminary? Maybe they backed off when they saw their users' opinion about Web 3-4-5 or whatever number the blockchain "evangelists" picked out.
In 3-5 years if Firefox will still be around are you going to tell me their "AI" initiative was just preliminary too?
What I'm talking about is trust again. Easily lost, hard to gain back. As I said elsewhere, I want a guarantee that my money is only spent on the actual browser before I donate.
> everything I said about the relative quality of different Mozilla arguments
You see "they're trying this promising new technology" i see "they're running around like a headless chicken, trampling the poor browser's body with their boots in the process".
I'm not going to look for mitigating circumstances until I see a pattern of news that the Mozilla org is at least admitting to working on the browser and not whatever is evangelized this week.
This to me is the ultimate sign that Mozilla has zero values or principles.
They've long advocated that Big Tech is a problem, but as soon as somebody tries to actually address it and this coincidentally impacting Mozilla, they abandon any and all principles.
That would be a good thing.
If Firefox is funded by donations, rather than by Google, it ensures there is no enshittification in the future.
And yes, donations can fund a big project, as evidenced by Thunderbird and Ladybird.
Nobody uses Ladybird, at this point it's vaporware. And Thunderbird is still based on Firefox.
The development of Firefox costs around $200 million per year. That's more than what Wikimedia can get from donations, and Wikipedia is a website that everyone uses. And you want to rely on donations from people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
And let's say that it manages to bring those costs down to $100 million per year or less and manages to get it from donations (when pigs will fly) … it still has to compete with a Chrome whose estimated cost goes over $1 billion per year.
If it costs $200 million a year to develop Firefox, then their management team is guilty of gross incompetence.
I am betting this is really paying for the crappy side projects and HUGE pay for the Mozilla Foundation people (just like all the BS spending the Wikimedia foundation does) and has nothing to do with Firefox itself.
Maintaining a fully compliant, secure, cross-platform web browser that competes with the biggest companies on earth absolutely is going to have costs like that.
I think Mozilla Foundation receives something like 5 to 10%. I'm not against the argument that foundations can be bloated and inefficient, but at this point, this anti Mozilla narrative is completely out of control and almost purely speculation driven.
They spent $35 million in 2022 to establish a venture capital fund... they are definitely using a lot more than 10% for BS not related to developing Firefox.
It would have been 5.9% of that year's annual revenue in 2022. It's not even from their annual revenue streams to begin with, it was a one time pull from their $1.2 billion (at the time) of total assets which includes a big pile of investments. Those assets actually grew by more in one year than the entire than the amount put into the VC fund. Also I thought we wanted them to be making side bets to position them for success in the long term?
There's also no cause and effect connection between the VC fund and their market share. It didn't siphon resources away from developers, and there's no such thing as a missing browser feature that would have restored all the market share had they simply not invested in a VC fund.
The 5-10% figure was in reference to 2021 but I think I was overstating that and the Mozilla Foundation actually gets something like 2% annually.
More charitably, it's driven by frustration more than speculation. Browsers are old technology, and some people think that maybe hurling huge amounts of money at stuff like this is unreasonable because projects can/should be "finished" at some point. Forever-development is very often actively harmful, and if it's actually necessary then it might be hiding problems in the wider ecosystem.
It's good that we have alternatives to chrome, but on the other hand the alternatives are not winning, and they prevent any chance of regulation (or having a reasonable discussion about whether chrome sucks, as we see here). There's a strong argument that mozilla IS google's antitrust shield.
Also can we just take a minute to seriously try to imagine the leader of the "Makefile foundation" receiving $2.4M in compensation, and generally burning a lot more money on dead-end "innovations" and then rebranding as "OpenSource.. And Advertising". Make is 20 years older than Mozilla, but does it look like the browser project will be finished or moving in a great direction any time soon while there's big opportunities for grift and graft?
Signed, a grateful but nevertheless annoyed and skeptical firefox user
> Also can we just take a minute to seriously try to imagine the leader of the "Makefile foundation" receiving $2.4M in compensation, and generally burning a lot more money on dead-end "innovations" and then rebranding as "OpenSource.. And Advertising". Make is 20 years older than Mozilla, but does it look like the browser project will be finished or moving in a great direction any time soon while there's big opportunities for grift and graft?
Make is pretty slow which is why `ninja`, funnily enough, was invented to speed up Google Chrome build times.
I’m the cto of the fork foundation where we provide important alternatives to spoons and work hard to serve our community with the kind of necessary innovations that putting modern food into that hole in your face requires.
If you think about it spending a few billion a year on R+D is the least you could expect when modern food is changing at such a rapid pace! And aren’t you glad the whole world isn’t spoons? I decline to discuss personal compensation because I don’t see how that’s relevant to the issues here!
I think it's unfair to call Ladybird vaporware this early. There's nothing suspicious about their development schedule for the scope of the thing they're trying to build.
I agree I don't think it should be in the alternative browser discussion until they do produce something, however.
And also, I think there's a positive to say about Lady Bird here, which is that in the event they succeed, that's as much a narrative about an extraordinarily talented and committed developer, And if they're able to put forward a credible browser, it will be a soaring achievement for them. Not necessarily something I would expect as a kind of default status quo expectation.
I think if you get these alternative from the ground up browsers, you get extremely limited things like Net Surf, noble efforts that I respect, but not going against the billions of dollars Google can throw into modern browser development.
YouTube is a 1st party service for Google, so you can't ad-block their tracking. And you aren't ad-blocking YouTube due to the spying, so don't be disingenuous.
Yes, it really costs that much.
Given Chrome's vast market share, I'm pretty sure its users like it. And you know what? Most users won't mind switching to uBlock Origin Lite, and the elephant in the room is that “manifest v3” also increases security, with Chrome being indeed the most secure browser.
> And you aren't ad-blocking YouTube due to the spying, so don't be disingenuous.
I don't watch YouTube. If all those influencers want to reach me, they should give me a written summary, I don't have time to listen to talking heads for hours.
However, if I ever follow an youtube link, it will be ad blocked because i run firefox with uBlock Origin, for as long as uBlock Origin blocks youtube ads by default.
>Does it? Or that's what the mozilla organization wastes on harebrained initiatives overall?
Yes! They published their 990, and it's mostly software development, but also stuff like legal and compliance and marketing. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but last time I checked, if you really want to make this argument, I think it relates to the CEO pay and the Mozilla Foundation and its advocacy, which are something around the, you know, taken together something like 55 million or so. You can make the argument that administration and operations as well as marketing and legal and compliance are bloated in some sense, but then you'd still have to make the case that there was a viable path to reinvesting that into development in a way that would change the tide when it comes to market share. But I think that is a confused vision of how market share works because the real drivers are Google's dominant position in search and on Android in the ability to push Chrome on Chromebooks.
Back when these narratives about Mosio's mismanagement started, I just assumed that they were highly informed people who knew what they were talking about. And maybe they really were originally, but it seems to have socialized a new generation of commenters into just randomly speculating about things that completely fall apart upon closer examination.
Mozilla thus far have been very reluctant to take donations to Firefox specifically. AFAIK you can still only donate to the Foundation, not the Corp, which means that most if not all of the cash will get spent on random non-Firefox-related things that you probably couldn't care less about.
I mostly agree, but I am slightly worried that it would lead to slower progress in Firefox. As it stands, Google's funding of Firefox is enough to hire a bunch of engineers to make Firefox a pretty competitive browser.
It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that comes in and makes this cheap shot over and over. My understanding is the CEO makes slightly more than 1% of their revenues. And it's actually low compared to the typical tech CEO.
But what's the story of cause and effect here such that if they'd invested 1% of their revenue differently, they would jump from 3% market share back to 30% or wherever they were previously? Once you ask these questions out loud, it's clear that people aren't thinking through the steps of the argument.
My problem with extensions is it's another development team to trust and monitor. I need to know if the extension has been sold, taken over by a new lead, etc.
Yep while this manifest v3 ugly thing is putting me on the brink of jumping ship (I compromise by having two browsers), as for your concern I found that Chrome is going to allow blacklisting extensions for sites, so now I can turn them off for the few sites that I really worry to grant extension read access.
If you are fine with two browsers, maybe you could instead look into separate Firefox profiles with different sets of extensions. I have added "-p" to my Firefox shortcut so it always starts with the profile picker thing.
Yeah that's definitely fair, I have the same concern. Currently I've reduced my extensions to just a few that I either trust (like gorhill's) or that I wrote myself. But I think it would be huge if Mozilla built out the tooling needed to keep a better monitor on them. It's an extremely hard problem to be sure though.
Can you install your own personal extensions without getting permission from Mozilla yet? Or are they still banning that? Because that change drove me away from Firefox.
Firefox has some weird slowness with DNS that I have troubleshot to death. I still use it for almost everything, but sometimes I'll have an entire day of 30s page loading times.
I put this setting in ages ago on my FF profile and haven't seen DNS lag.
My biggest DNS lag was before I used PiHole and was relying on my router, which upstream to 8.8.8.8. I've just assumed that little thing was overloaded or that Comcast was just having a "hiccup".
This is almost certainly a fragmentation issue caused by lower MTU and broken path MTU on the VPN. Drop the system to 1280 to troubleshoot, if things work immediately there's the culprit, raise it up til it doesn't or don't, I keep my VPN's at 1280.
EDIT: I do not know why its an issue with firefox and not chrome, it's likely QUIC fucking up since it cant fragment and needs to fall back to TCP, chrome is probably error handling this better... dropping the MTU that low will make the fallback explicit: https://blog.apnic.net/2019/03/04/a-quick-look-at-quic/
Same here. Tends to be pretty inconsistent. DNS-over-HTTP(s) definitely disabled. 30s is a lot more than I've experienced, but there are times where it clearly struggles to look things up.
Unfortunately this would only be helpful to Apple customers, which itself comes with significant downsides IMHO. I'd much prefer a cross-platform solution
Regardless, I'd love to see this give FF a big bounce in the stats. Something to reinforce that there are people out here that really want manifest v2, badly enough to switch!