Comment by theseatoms

theseatoms Apr 9, 2019 parent

Imagine how powerful a paid browser could become on this front. As people slowly become more privacy-aware this might be feasible.

meruru Apr 9, 2019

You already can donate to Mozilla: https://donate.mozilla.org

Karunamon Apr 9, 2019

I'd rather buy a browser as a company's primary product, not donate to Mozilla which makes a browser and does many other things, many of which I disagree with and would rather not fund.

ogre_codes Apr 9, 2019

I'm confused here. Seems to me that if you want these kind of features in a browser you want exactly what funds. Also, even if you paid for software with these features, it's likely a good portion of the money you pay will also go towards things you disagree with as well.

_hl_ Apr 9, 2019

Could you give some examples of things they do that you disagree with? I can't really think of any controversial non-firefox things they've done.

fxbl0i Apr 9, 2019

Controversial != useless. I don't like they wasted money on Firefox OS or Persona; I don't want to donate to them if my money goes there instead of to Firefox. In fact, why not let us decide where exactly our money will go if we donate?

vkou Apr 9, 2019

Mozilla invested into Firefox OS, because they were hoping to disentangle their #1 revenue stream from ad-tech companies.

sroussey Apr 10, 2019

It also led to the sharp decline in memory usage as that became super obvious when they went 100% mobile.

0zZc Apr 10, 2019

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7k8ved/mozilla_fac...

https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/mozilla-announces-resign...

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Speaker_Series#Monday_Oct_1.2C_2018...

https://twitter.com/datasociety/status/1093227579723730946

I could go on forever with Mozilla's connections to organizations promoting and facilitating politically motivated censorship.

pluma Apr 10, 2019

Just to be clear: other than the Mr Robot promo your main criticism is that their politics don't align with yours?

Because I think when people ask about Mozilla controversies they're thinking about situations in which Mozilla has "broken character" by e.g. risking users' privacy, not activism that is absolutely in line with Mozilla's stated goals (whether you personally agree with them and their interpretation thereof or not).

GoblinSlayer Apr 10, 2019

Censorship isn't really a personal preference. Or is it?

lrem Apr 9, 2019

But Firefox is Mozilla's primary product. It just so happens that Mozilla is big enough to also have some side products.

dahfizz Apr 9, 2019

I have a hard time believing a paid browser would ever get big. People just do not care enough.

pluma Apr 10, 2019

Opera started as a paid browser and nearly went bankrupt. They even had ads on the free version. Barely anyone paid for it and the ads killed adoption.

Heck, even Netscape Navigator started out as shareware. It was "personal use only" but most commercial users never bought a license. It was eventually defeated by Microsoft Internet Explorer, which was free for commercial use even before it shipped with the OS.

If there is any chance someone will attempt a paid browser again, it will most definitely be based on Chromium (or maybe Firefox) rather than written from scratch and no website will make any effort to test on it (just like barely anyone ever tested on Opera).

Aeolun Apr 10, 2019

If Jetbrains were to build a browser on top of firefox with a similar level of features to their IDE’s, I would absolutely pay for that.

Developer tools is already invaluable, but there’s no reason it cannot be better.

sroussey Apr 10, 2019

Very few people pay/donate, and very few did for Firebug back in the day.

packet_nerd Apr 9, 2019

I care and would pay. Same with websites. especially if the experience was easy, scalable, and protected my privacy and anonymity.

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