Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web, severely cramped by their complete economic dependency on Google and their inability to allocate their funds intelligently
But they get shouted down whenever they try to monetise independently, can't have it both ways.
Either more users start donating $5-10 a month (seems worth it to me given the time I spend with their product) or they take the Google money and deal with the conflict of interest best they can.
A Shuttelworth style billionaire benefactor would work as well, but I doubt one will come from the tech community as Firefox is working against the anti-privacy data collection model that made them (or their friends) rich.
This. Bear in mind that Mozilla is experimenting with different monetisation models, be it subs, donations, relying on Google for search as well as partnerships with companies such as Scroll (publisher content monetisation platforms).
Also, if you follow the discourse on anything published by Mozilla in the past 2-3 years—there's been a shift when it comes to how they speak about Googe. It's a marketing move, of course, but I think it's also a sign of the direction they are following.
I believe something will change here, for better, in the next couple of years. I'd sign for a Mozilla subscription if it included services such as better VPN, supporting those who cannot afford to pay directly, but pay with they data instead.
The move towards paid vs. non-paid services creates a risk that we'd end up with two types of internet users, with privacy being the currency of those who cannot afford an expensive mobile phone or a browser not trying to sell you things whether you want it or not.
The history of Guardian (in the past 5 years or so) shows that people are happy to pay for a valuable service just to allow the others to have access to it. Maybe I'm just being overly optimistic here, but I shudder every time I think about the alternatives.
The Guardian has gone downhill in the last few years, just like the rest of UK mainstream news reporting. They have rolled over to do whatever the Government wants not reporting - take Assange for example.
Their coverage is practically non-existent.
I used to buy The Guardian every day, then I subscribed digitally. And then when their reporting slid downhill, I stopped subscribing. I still read it - but block their data scraping scripts and all ads. They are not worth supporting IMO.
The more likely explanation is that people got tired of Assange's story and so the articles didn't get the clicks to justify covering them any more. The Guardian can get more clicks with a steady drip of vegan opinion pieces, stories laughing at Tories and the dreadfulness of brexit so that's what they'll do.
Same as the Telegraph will feed its readers "the glory of Boris", "forwards unto brexit" and "Good lord look what Corbyn said today, he's a dreadful little man isn't he?"
News organisations are slaves to their audiences and will just produce what their audiences want.
Pretty much. Click metrics like this might become the death of journalism. I used to read a lot of news but have stopped due to how every news paper became more and more about click bait and about appealing to the audience. Sure, I presume I too clicked on more news until I one day stopped reading entirely.
That's not a likely explanation when it comes to Assange. The Guardian has been terrible, and even its previous star reporter Glenn Greenwald (who won them a Pulitzer on the Snowden reporting) has been extremely critical. See for example https://theintercept.com/2019/01/02/five-weeks-after-the-gua...
Someone else said it already some time ago, but if Mozilla had just put the money they get from Google into a fund, they'd be able to develop browsers till the end of time. But they try to "innovate" and "re-invent the web" with WASM and also other completely unrelated ventures such as Rust, as nice as it may be (Rust not WASM that is).
Another aspect of the Mozilla Foundation is that they're basically acting as a fig leaf for the monopolist web Google has created in this decade, with Google financing them to prevent anti-trust investigations, and Mozilla also playing along with Google-financed WHATWG to white-wash "web standards" and prevent real and obvious innovations such as third-party script blocking, serving only Google's interests.
FF indeed does work against anti-privacy, and I'm applauding them for that, but OTOH FF also enables ad blockers. I've used uBlock just like most of you here, but ad blocking is also a factor turning the web into a privacy minefield. Eg. if you're indiscriminately block all ads whether targetted or not, there is no possible way to finance web content production; yet people also don't want to pay for content. So what people get is polarizing click-bait, propaganda, and low-quality content while content creators (other than some high-profile YouTubers maybe) can't earn a living.
We really should stop with "fighting for the future of the web" articles when the reality is that the web locks people into addictive behaviour, fake social interaction, and crap web frontends for oligopolist cloud-hosted services (completely antithetical to personal computing and site autonomy principles), and results into cultural loss due to the expectation that everything must always be available for free, all the time, a model only creating monopolies.
> Eg. if you're indiscriminately block all ads whether targetted or not
If the ad industry got together to design the most benign ad technology they can come up with (isolate from host site, no cookies, no js, no video, enforced by iframe security directives) then perhaps adblocking extensions could add an exception for this kind of ad, based on technological criteria, not a manually managed whitelist.
But such a thing does not exist and ads are so intransparent and deeply integrated into pages that one cannot tell, thus blunt hammers need to be applied until no ad is left standing.
The reason that they get shouted down is because every time they have tried to make money in other ways it has been done in shady ways. Like giving away the browsing data of their German users to Cliqz (would probably have been illegal post-GDPR) or running guerilla marketing for Mr Robot in Shield Studies (which reduces the trust from people who enabled Shield to help Mozilla with studies).
Almost nobody complains about the them taking money from Yahoo and Google for higher placement in the search engine list. And if their other revenue streams had been as transparent I think people had been fine.
You can't call yourself a champion of privacy and then sell the browsing history of your users to a marketing company. It simply doesn't work that way.
I wouldn't suggest an alternative funding model as much as guess what will it be maybe a year or two from now. Key quote from the article:
> Mozilla has launched Monitor, a data-breach reporting service; Lockwise, a password manager; and Send, a privacy-focused alternative to services such as WeSendit. It’s also beta-testing a VPN (virtual private network) service, which it hopes to market to privacy-conscious users.
Once these web apps mature a bit, I expect to see them in a free tier + a premium behind the subscription (with the core browser of course remaining free). My hunch tells me that's why you'll see this front-and-centered if you open mozilla.org:
> Firefox is more than a browser. Meet our family of privacy-first products
Just imagine not being from the US, donating to Mozilla so they improve Firefox, and they instead spend the money on translating the USA presidential election.
Right now my parent is getting downvoted but I think that there's a great truth in this comment:
A lack of focus generally hurts an organizations legitimacy in the eyes of it's donors.
Increasing the quality of a countries national elections isn't a goal I'd immediately assume to be part of Mozillas mission, so I'd be disappointed about such a project.
They could go the more transparent route and create a second organization for funding things their management likes.
... but I assume that such an organization would probably have some funding problems.
Sort of similar reasons; while this is true, it’s also that we aren’t sure how we’d allocate that money if we got it. Discussions about a possible foundation for Rust are ongoing, and these kinds of questions are a big part of why that hasn’t happened yet.
Part of the reason for that, I think, is that Firefox development is done by the Corporation, rather than the Foundation. The Corporation's can have far bigger income streams (i.e. the search engine deal), so it makes sense to make that responsible for the development of Firefox - even though that means you cannot donate to it.
And for marketing purposes they should get into discovery of free/open web services, a la old school Yahoo.
As a web site builder, I don't want to have to manage credit cards. As a user, I don't want to have to trust random web sites with my credit card info. I also don't want to be redirected to Paypal, I just want a secure wallet that can be used on web sites with a drop in <paymentframe recipient="foo@bar.com" usd="8999" description="BonsaiThing Pro 1 year subscription" /> or similar.
As a web user, I want to be able to store my photos, downloads, music, documents, etc conveniently in a little cloud-synced folder. I want to be able to quickly give fine-grained access to different web apps to different parts of that space. Photo app wants to access my photos? Great. Github wants to access my repos? Fine. Photo app wants to access my repos? No.
And the discovery thing... There's a ton of free software out there. Mozilla basically has shut the door behind it. "Thanks for the install. Good luck finding other Free tools to use with it." They should be building a directory of other free software that can be used with Firefox. I should be able to use my Mozilla account to post reviews, to discuss new apps that are voted up, etc. That will allow enthusiasts to start engaging socially with the brand in a way that Mozilla (not Twitter or Apple or Facebook) can control the identities.
From there maybe there is some social identity service, but if it's just a way to engage the community—great. Like Hacker News is to YCombinator, Mozilla should provide a place for us to discuss and share web services.
If they want to get into search, that's great. Write a new shitty open source search engine that any web site can federate with. Use Google for now, but use that money to dig us out of the hole Google put us in.
I think storage is probably too costly to implement
But they can readily "become a PayPal" by bundling a digital ethereum wallet like metamask in the browser by default. Even if it's limited to max $50 / month, it could revolutionize the way we consume web content. And it also acts as an anonymous digital identity. Both ethereum and firefox enjoy trust by the community, that helps. But, we re more likely to see these from another browser like brave.
Could you explain a bit more? Why are you confident either would be profitable?
1) would be competing with google drive, onedrive and icloud, which are all funded by very big pockets and have other revenue sources. Furthermore, even dropbox has trouble competing with this.
2) Again competition by paypal, apple pay, google pay, ... . Also, banking business is quite far removed from what they are doing and hard to do while being a non-profit.
In both cases they’d have to bet on growing the Free Software pie. It would be the beginning of transitioning the company to trying to support the Open Web as an institution, supporting open source webservice developers on an equal tier with open source browser users.
No idea if that pie can realistically grown. But unlike their current strategy, it would be in line with their mission statement.
i like the gist of both of your ideas but i'm not sure they are feasible for firefox, since both are expensive services (in different ways) that are a bit outside the competency and mission of firefox.
i could see firefox providing hooks for 3rd parties to make those services easier to integrate however (and maybe charging a fee, e.g., to certify the 3rd party). that would fall squarely in their wheelhouse.
That’s the point though, to take on something with real cost (and real value), occupy the Open Source segment of that market, and then grow that segment.
Netscape was trying way back when. Mozilla probably has some PTSD from those days so I don’t have high hopes.
Someone else will eventually come in and be Mozilla on the services side. Might as well be Mozilla.
Integrating chunks of chromium code into gecko should massively reduce their maintenance costs.
E.g spidermonkey is sub-par to v8 since so many years.
If mozilla invested the money it invest into spidermonkey, into v8, the web would be faster for everyone.
Should I repeat?
The web would be faster for everyone.
Nodejs servers too and also electron apps.
We would also get new js features, faster.
But mozilla doesn't seems to get the point of open source.
They have a reinventing the wheel cognitive disease that is going to stay.
I, for one, am happy that there are multiple competing JavaScript engines. And that’s coming from someone who put in work to improve one you haven’t mentioned.
We don't need JS to get 2% more faster, the limits of those speed improvements were reached, web assembly combined with a compiled language could offer more speed.
I would like to see Firefox move faster in implementing good web APIs, like the lazy loading of images, push for HTML and CSS improvements(like let me customize the numeric text input arrows with css instead of forcing me to use a JS library) .
Maybe the Rust rewrite will make Firefox better achitected so you could have a node version based on Mozilla technologies or you could easily use the web assembly VM in your application without having to load the full Chrome code.
AFAIK Firefox is not doing a full rewrite but incremental refactoring then attempting to swap components.
The unfortunate truth is that writing a browser is almost impossible because of the complexity, IMO we need a new version of the web that breaks compatibility, make everything strict(no longer ignore errors and guess a fix for them) no more 12 ways to center an element , for the legacy web we can use the existing engines
Write websites with Wasm, render UI with WebGL or something similar. Implement JavaScript as a compiler to Wasm (which runs on Wasmitself), implement HTML+CSS renderer as a library which runs on Wasm as well. So basically your browser need to implement Wasm and WebGL which sounds reasonable task. Well, that's simplification, of course, it need to implement some HTTP API like XMLHttpRequest, local storage API and so on, but it's manageable.
Here's an example of website written with Rust and rendering all UI to canvas: https://makepad.github.io/makepad/ it works right now and it's very fast and smooth.
IMO tech for next generation web apps is already here and it's great.
Implementing an html rendered that is compatible with all the css rules and it also implements all the extra workarounds that the current browser implement ( like handling illegal markup is not trivial) markup . I mean think about it, you hit invalid html markup and what do you do? You need to continue but now you need to check what Firefox or Chrome do for each case (missing end tags , P inside span, weird nesting of elements ) I would not want to implement a browser that is compatible with the current garbage.
There was also an article earlier this month or previous month from a Firefox developer about font/text rendering, in case you missed it rendering text in a way that works with all writing system is super hard.
The point was to reimplement a browser. Imagine you want to make an ebook reader,this device needs not to eat too much batteries so you want to implement a basic css and html renderer not to re-skin Chrome.
Some ebook publishing platforms will perform checks and reject your epub(mobi or similar format) if is not respecting some strict rules, this makes it a pain if you have random html that works on web but you want to package it as epub because now you need to find all the bugs(or similar stupid DOM elements) and fix them as best you can.
Which is a lesson they learnt well. So they’re treating Servo as a research project, chunking it into libraries, and retrofitting those libraries into the Firefox mainline.
It is to make synergies through code sharing.
Let's fork the Linux kernel into a redundant implementation and take half kernel developers in order to slow down progress by a factor of two.
The idea that Google would cut off Mozilla to advance Chrome seems to me at least rooted in a deep misunderstanding of how Google makes money.
Something like 75% or more of their revenue comes from AdWords - ads run against search. This is one of the most attractive streams for advertisers ever built. You have a prospect ready to buy (often) who is literally telling you in written software processable words what they want.
AdWords dwarfs all of Facebook in revenue, for context. It is the very foundation of Google. In a way, everything else they do is either support for AdWords or a side project.
The money they give to Firefox is not charity. It is to feed this cash cow. They have a similar arrangement with Apple for iPhone default search engine in mobile Safari. I would argue it is far far more valuable for Google to support Firefox in order to ensure search dominance than to waste that money to advance Chrome. Chrome exists to support AdWords not the other way around.
That money means that Firefox and Safari won't ship ad blocking by default because as soon as they do it, their users are worthless to Google, and Google will stop paying. It also means that their tracking prevention doesn't affect usage of first party cookies on other sites, increasing Google's and Facebook's advertising dominance.
Blocking AdWords — sponsored search results — is very different from blocking display ads. I would be surprised if most users found that sort of blocking desirable in the first place. Some might, and I would not be surprised if it were an option, but also very surprised if proportion of Firefox users blocking AdWords ever approached even 50%. Anyone who doesn’t block is still valuable to Google.
