Is There A Google-Free Future For Firefox? (forbes.com) 99
Forbes reports:
Firefox is exploring subscriptions and other "value exchange" services to ease its financial dependence on rival Google, according to the browser's lead developer.
Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue. Although Mozilla only last month renewed the search deal, ensuring Google remains the default search engine for Firefox in the U.S. and other territories, the company is keen to explore other ways of raising revenue, including charging users for services.
Mozilla's partnership with Google is an uncomfortable alliance, not only because the companies distribute rival browsers, but because their values are markedly different. While Google generates the vast bulk of its revenue from online advertising, Firefox's developers expend much of their effort creating tools that thwart advertisers, including the automatic blocking of third-party tracking tools and social-media trackers. "At Mozilla, we tend to believe things are at their best when users have this transparent value exchange," said Dave Camp, senior vice president of Firefox at Mozilla. "The advertising model has become a default way to fund things on the internet and to fund products, and we're pretty interested — not just for financial reasons, but actually for health of the internet reasons — to explore how can we do better for users than advertising."
Mozilla recently began charging users $4.99 per month for its VPN product and Camp says the company is exploring other subscription products. "We don't have any immediate plans in the Firefox team to do add-on services or anything like that at the moment, but we're going to look at other ways to get some value exchange going on," said Camp.
Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue. Although Mozilla only last month renewed the search deal, ensuring Google remains the default search engine for Firefox in the U.S. and other territories, the company is keen to explore other ways of raising revenue, including charging users for services.
Mozilla's partnership with Google is an uncomfortable alliance, not only because the companies distribute rival browsers, but because their values are markedly different. While Google generates the vast bulk of its revenue from online advertising, Firefox's developers expend much of their effort creating tools that thwart advertisers, including the automatic blocking of third-party tracking tools and social-media trackers. "At Mozilla, we tend to believe things are at their best when users have this transparent value exchange," said Dave Camp, senior vice president of Firefox at Mozilla. "The advertising model has become a default way to fund things on the internet and to fund products, and we're pretty interested — not just for financial reasons, but actually for health of the internet reasons — to explore how can we do better for users than advertising."
Mozilla recently began charging users $4.99 per month for its VPN product and Camp says the company is exploring other subscription products. "We don't have any immediate plans in the Firefox team to do add-on services or anything like that at the moment, but we're going to look at other ways to get some value exchange going on," said Camp.
This project has lost its way. (Score:5, Insightful)
It went from being a light alternative browser, to being a for profit endeavor. Truthfully, every party in this group should leave, and find employment with a real business. This is where they should not be, and the correct people need to be installed.
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Developing a browser is expensive business. Mozilla doesn't just develop Firefox either, they are big players in web standards.
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Developing a browser is expensive business.
So is developing movies, songs and video games, yet people have no problem justifying stealing the product without paying for it.
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Songs not so much anymore. Movies less so every year.
Not really sure what stealing has to do with anything you've said but I'm going to infer that I can steal the most music, a middle amount of movies, and the fewest video games.Or maybe a distinction needs to be made between sealing high budget movies and video games vs. the indie games and b-movies?
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Which is why I'm appalled that they employ people to write very partisan political articles and pass them off as "news" in their newsletters. They've gone from being a browser development group to a giant money waster, spoiled on Google money. One could probably fire three quarters of their staff and have a better browser because of it. They've lost their way, blinded by dollars.
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Well in the pursuit of income I would strongly suggest that Mozilla open a China office probably in partnership with either Ten Cent or Huawei. Doesn't cost much to start up an office with support and they would likely pick up a lot of branding business (rebranding the browser in corporate colours, custom stuff they want, that does not conflict with FOSS).
Want to escape the high priest of mass consumption evil grasp (an accurate description of Google), open offices in China and India, make sure to partner
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I go for whoever provides the best experience. If your product demands that I log in to your shitty service for a singleplayer game that has DRM on top of that then of course I'm going to pirate it. Piracy is 100% a service problem. Doubly so if you decide to censor or remove things because some bitch on white-supremacist sites like reeeeeeesetera [imgur.com] threw a tantrum. I'm an adult man and I decide what I can and cannot be exposed to.
Re: This project has lost its way. (Score:1)
Thanks for sharing that picture.
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But the botched most recent version of Firefox for Android have made me a lot less inclined to sponsor them.
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They have at least started fixing the layout issues with it. One of my two test sites now works.
Re:This project has lost its way. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not seeing the problem with it. The play phone we keep in the living room auto-updated yesterday and seems fine. Our lone plugin (uBlock Origin) works just fine and the UI seems easier to navigate than the previous version. The menu is sill there, and it's easier than every before to get the address bar to show up, and it's quick to hide when I don't need it.
Overall, it seems noticeably faster than the previous version. It's probably more noticeable because it's an older phone. Maybe 5 years or so?
Let me put it this way: All the complaining seems to have been blown way out-of-proportion. Just like all the moaning about Australis. (I switched back to Firefox when they made that change. It was a good thing.) Yeah, I get the complaints about the plugin system change, but there were very good technical reasons for that and they did an amazing job working with developers to make the transition. All of these things, by the way, happened ages ago. Isn't it about time you got over it?
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The new UI is what I hate the very most, it's totally unusable for me. Every bookmark is opened in a new tab for example and I haven't been able to figure out how to tell it NOT to open in new tabs.
about:config is also removed so there's no way to fine tune the behavior anymore.
Speed of the browser is the least of my concerns since in almost every case it's the remote site that's slow, not the browser itself.
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Next year your choice will be a Facebook or OAN funded browser so I wouldnt be quite so picky.
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"Totally unusable" because it opens bookmarks in a new tab? Now, if it always opened in the current tab, I could see the issue. But a new tab?
To quote myself: All the complaining seems to have been blown way out-of-proportion.
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I really want it to open in current tab, I don't like to have a gazillion tabs open.
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You can close tabs you know.
As your problem is that you want bookmarks to open in the same tab, you clearly aren't opening a lot of bookmarks in quick succession.
The new interface actually makes it easier to manage tabs. It should take less than a second to close a tab.
"Totally unusable" Get real.
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It's just adding complexity to the usability of the software, it's a lot harder to work with than the old version 68.
I had to revert to version 68 to get a working UI for me.
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It has very obviously reduced complexity. That's your whole complaint.
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[...]Every bookmark is opened in a new tab for example and I haven't been able to figure out how to tell it NOT to open in new tabs.
That's definitely not default behavior. Maybe you need to delete your configuration and start from scratch (remember to backup your bookmarks first)?
The only time bookmarks open for me in a new tab is if I'm holding down at the same time.
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I did get over it. That is why I switched to Chrome. Apparently even the Firefox devs themselves think it is a better browser since all they do is copy it. Who am I to argue?
Also I cannot tell the difference between the two browsers except that one of them seamlessly integrates with google translate when I need to read foreign language sites and doesnt crash as much when I youtube.
Protip for the firefox team. The first step in getting people to use your product is to make it different from the one that most
Re: This project has lost its way. (Score:1)
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To
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Web standards that the big boys could care less about.
Re:This project has lost its way. (Score:4, Informative)
As far as Firefox itself is concerned, it lost its way by copying every bit of usability erosion that Google implements in Chrome. Firefox is no longer the browser for power users, it's just a Chrome clone. Removing the status bar, killing themes and most extensions, over-simplifying navigation, stuffing the location dropdown with sponsored garbage, and now with FF 79 on Android has removed navigation and the tab bar altogether, making it an excruciating chore to use. Firefox has not been a leader in browser usability for a decade.
It would not surprise me at all if the rumors are true that Google's default search payments also stipulate making Firefox completely suck.
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What would you have done if you had been in Mozilla's position? You have Firefox. It's single threaded, performance is light years behind Chrome because of it. You have a pile of security issues stemming from XUL and poorly written add-ons. Your browser share is slipping because nobody likes a slow browser that goes down in flames when one tab has issues. Even half the add-ons that some of your users think are so important are stagnated, not updated for a decade and a great deal of work due to be totally in
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I bought 16GB of RAM for Rimworld, Minecraft, and Dwarf Fortress, not Firefox.
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I’d rather a Mozilla free future for Firefox (Score:3)
Re:I’d rather a Mozilla free future for Fire (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is going to pay for it though? Good developers don't work for free, every attempt to do an open source fork has stagnated.
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The project would cost a fraction of its original budget if they stopped working on extras that no one asked for. Pocket? Screenshot tool? Video chat? That paper airplane icon for sharing with social media? Political donations? The list goes on.
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I find the screenshot tool very useful, as it auto-selects HTML elements, and can grab entire webpages.
Re:I'd rather a Mozilla free future for Fire (Score:2)
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Not well. The difference is so dramatic that I can't believe you'd even suggest that.
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Okay but let's say 10 developers needed full time, that alone is $2,000,000+ alone. Where is the money coming from?
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I suppose, but they need money to do development... Anyway do you really think changing the default search provider would have made any difference?
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IMO, what makes Firefox such an expensive browser to develop is that they build their own "Web" engine (HTML+css+Javascript) and those are insanely complicated. Also, the standards keep changing: Javascript keeps evolving, CSS keeps evolving, the features browsers are expected to have keep evolving (HTML video, RTP support, WebAssembly, AV1 support.
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Mozilla did just fine a few years ago, pre-v30 they were actually a good browser going in a good direction.
Since then they have lost all sense of leadership and vision within the organization, every team seems to be just doing whatever they want and spending more time on pointless issues (such as banning the third party Dissenter plugin for perceived social issues) and growing more close to Google.
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Pre v30 was the era of single threaded crashes taking down the whole browser, one JS heavy tab slowing down the rest and add-ons riddled with security flaws. It was also when they were losing ground the fastest to Chrome.
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Yep, now you just have multi-threaded crashes, race conditions and still 300MB of RAM, but now per thread.
They were losing ground back then because Google was doing so well. Chrome has since worked itself into the same problem Firefox has - adding features and changing behavior for the sake of adding features and changing behavior. The browser was stable, sure it had issues, but it was workable for most persons. I still have to go around and deploy v30 or v50 to date because major breaking changes not handl
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If you were seeing huge RAM usage it was probably because back then Firefox used to be quite leaky, especially with some of the poorly written add-ons. And at least now if a tab crashes it only affects the one tab, not the whole browser.
If you really want to go back to v30 then try Pale Moon, it dates from that era and hasn't been updated much since.
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OMG is that why my dissenter app failed?
Re: I’d rather a Mozilla free future for Fir (Score:2)
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Did RMS built anything comparable in complexity to Firefox without commercial input?
GCC might be comparable in complexity but a lot of the contributions are commercial, for example. That's the basic issue with open source - it doesn't scale beyond a certain point unless you have people paid to work on it.
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It's a thankless job on a codebase which is by sheer complexity ensured to be an enormous head ache to sufficiently internalize to work on. Most people want money for that.
Quantum of which many of the components were programmed in Rust was a huge step forward as far as I'm concerned. The breaking of extensions hurt a bit, but the complete lack of containment of extensions was not tenable either. Something needed to change and the original API unlike webextensions was just not going to fit in a sandbox ... i
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100% agreed. I'd like to add that The Mozilla Foundation is not really true to their claimed ideals. While their web site talks about "...the freedom to state any belief, however odious, so long as it doesn’t threaten anyone’s safety or impinge on anyone else’s freedom" they support stop hate for profit [stophateforprofit.org] which is calling for a Facebook corporate censorship board.
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doesn’t threaten anyone’s safety or impinge on anyone else’s freedom
That's the part that you seem to have a lot of trouble understanding.
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Words posted on Facebook can impinge on anyone freedom.
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*smh* "cannot" (sheesh)
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Oh, how wrong you are...
Words on a page can most definitely put people's safety and freedom at risk. I honestly don't see how any reasonable person could deny this.
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Words on a page can most definitely put people's safety and freedom at risk. I honestly don't see how any reasonable person could deny this.
For some reason it's always people claiming to be pro free speech who say this. I think these are actually some of the most anti free speech advocates there are.
Free speech is important only because words have a huge amount of power. If they're truly worthless, they're not worth defending.
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You're confused. Yes, speech is extremely powerful, which is why it's so important to protect it.
What you don't seem to understand is how certain kinds of speech is not only dangerous to the freedom and safety of some, but also a danger to their freedom of expression!
This is just the "paradox of tolerance" with a new outfit. I'm not anti-freedom of speech any more than I'm intolerant because I won't tolerate someone else's intolerance.
Just as being tolerant of intolerance leads to more intolerance, not le
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Um you seem to have had a lot into a rather glib comment I made about a depressingly large bunch of people who claim to support free speech.
What you don't seem to understand is how certain kinds of speech is not only dangerous to the freedom and safety of some, but also a danger to their freedom of expression!
Um... Duh? I don't really know why you think I didn't understand that.
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Words on a page can most definitely put people's safety and freedom at risk.
Only if they are in a heavily bound book dropped from a tall building.
I know it isn't the same in every country, but in the US the philosophy is "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." James Madison and Thomas Jefferson believed that absolute free speech is a requirement for democracy to function. Benjamin Franklin said "If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed." How ap
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James Madison and Thomas Jefferson believed that absolute free speech is a requirement for democracy to function
James Madison also argued against a common law of libel. I wouldn't lean on Madison or Jefferson to argue for "absolute" free speech.
Besides, you love the restrictions we have. You like that the food you buy must be labeled accurately. You like that sellers can't make fraudulent claims about their products. You like that I can't publish false and malicious lies about you with impunity.
Those are all restrictions on freedom of speech that you love! Don't pretend that you actually buy in to that grade sch
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Besides, you love the restrictions we have.... You like that the food you buy must be labeled accurately.
Yes, now we are on the right track! Lets talk about the differences between these things.
Fortunately there are clear lines between political opinions on Facebook, inaccurate food product claims, and libelous statements. Most importantly, food product claims are not "speech" at all so no freedom of speech argument applies. Instead, they are commerce that is part of a regulated industry (FDA in this case). When we talk about censoring political political opinions posted on Facebook, we are talking about a
Exactly. (Score:1)
Re-install Eich now! And jettison that grasping bitch who has currently usurped control of the Firefox project.
Re: I’d rather a Mozilla free future for Fir (Score:1)
what i do for web browsers is (Score:2, Interesting)
and i use pale moon for the rest of the internet, firefox is not the slim trim and lean browser it started out to be, but pale moon is a fork from a time when i actually liked firefox so i use pale moon
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I hear this a lot, but I find Firefox to be just as fast as Chrome. It seems like the benchmarks flip-flop between the browsers depending on who runs the test and what versions they run it on, but even with dozens of tabs it seems just fine.
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Show alerts for breeched sites isnt scalable and theres no real information on how to get off that shitlist, so many sites like XKCD are going to find their site enjoys a nastygram every load.
Its for more staining than that.
Sites typically get put on these malicious site warning lists because of the ad network they use. The ad network is the malware vector, which is of course owned by Google, but the site itself gets the label, not ANY of googles ad networks (which it has MANY.)
Re: what is it Mozilla does exactly? (Score:1)
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WebKit is dead outside Safari.
e.g. CEF, Electron and QtWebEngine.
Re: what is it Mozilla does exactly? (Score:2)
We don't need Mozilla.
The argument for complicated web browser code based is the multiplicity of web standards that need to be supported.
Most of these standards are garbage that can be dumped.
Seriously, who needs emojis? Who needs html5 video and audio players? I block all video and audio.
Who needs PDF support? Text or simple HTML - everything else gets ignored. Same with email.
Who needs to display images? Block them, you've blocked almost all advertising. And cut your mobile bandwidth down
No! (Score:2)
Even Betteridge knew that years ago.
donations? (Score:2)
do they ask for donations? if not, maybe the could. pretty sure some big companies use firefox in some capacity, and donations can be tax deductible, so firefox can have the coin they need and the huge companies won't see their ceo bonuses impacted
Yes. Here is the link (Score:2)
https://donate.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
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Let's Compare Blender and Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not an expert on this so please correct me if I'm wrong. In fact this is more a request for input from people who do know a thing or two to make a good comparision than anything else. I'm just posting what I think I know to get the ball rolling.
So, as I understand it:
Both were spawned from commercial enterprises.
Both compete with commercial products.
Both are now free and open source.
Both have been around for at least a decade.
I think the significant differences are that:
Blender is not a vehicle for advertising, firefox is indirectly since its involved with advertising to the extent that some people try to block ads within it.
Blender is not a part of web standards. This is the most important difference, as the mozilla organization is.
I'm not sure how Blender gets funded. My speculation is that I think a broad range of developers contribute to it, and these are, I think artistic types as well as programmers, and are willing to volunteer because they want their tool to be as good as possible. It started out being considered vastly inferior to the professional alternatives, like Maya. But recently, starting especially with version 2.8, its gained a lot of notice. (Maybe Coved-19 has something to do with that. People cooped up in their homes are deciding to have a go with it.)
Netscape couldn't compete with Internet Explorer, not because it was an inferior product but because the latter was backed by the Microsoft Behemoth. I think there was a stink made about monopolistic practices on Microsoft's part, but maybe that was something else Microsoft was doing. I happened to work at Netscape briefly as a contractor, and when I was there, they were already very worried about Microsoft. When Netscape folded, Mozilla was the alternative. For those with an anti-Microsoft sentiment, Mozilla/Firefox was the only way to keep from being assimilated, similar to the way Linux was the only way to keep from being assimilated in the OS domain. Maybe the youngsters here aren't aware of just how dominant Microsoft was in those days, and how scary it was for grass-roots programmers. That's a big story in itself. A lot of my feelings about Firefox and Mozilla go back to that, and I don't think I'm the only one. I want to keep the dream of software that isn't owned and controlled by remote, indifferent at best suits, alive.
Re: Let's Compare Blender and Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
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Why are large companies funding Blender? In the case of Linux, a lot of companies contribute, and I think its because they benefit from having this open source, license free OS. Many of them are hardware companies and want to sell their hardware. Also, they want good reliable software for their internet servers, where they don't have to depend on Microsoft or some other such company to fix bugs etc. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't really see a parallel to that with Blender. There's a parallel in th
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Who are the top Blender patrons? Unity, Epic, AMD, nVidia, all companies that game creators need to get their product out, and all of whom stand to gain from both the creators and their customers, the players.
More like a Firefox-free future for Google. (Score:2)
More like a Firefox-free future for Google and the rest of us. I used to use FF exclusively. Now I only use it rarely, when I need some extensions to work. I haven't even bothered to update since version 4x.x, after which they started breaking all the extensions.
Life is short, and I don't have the time to fix everything that they break on every release, learn a new UI every other month, etc.
Sorry, FF, you're receding in the rearview mirror. It was fun while it lasted, like an old girlfriend with whom yo
A new UI every month? Please... (Score:2)
And let the extensions thing go. That was YEARS ago now. And most of the extensions I used (as a web dev and end user) have been rewritten for Quantum.
It was fun while it lasted, like an old girlfriend with whom you now realize you have nothing in common.
OR: Your girlfriend (Francine Firefox) just lost a LOT of weight and is healthier/faster and will live longer as a result, but you dumped her because 1) you don't like her new, occasional haircut or fashion choices, and 2) she won't go absolutely everywh
Middle-click "Reply to This" for JS-free form (Score:2)
Find me an addon that will cache text fields so if, for example, this post I'm writing gets eaten by a power outage or windows freezes or the page crashes, I'm two clicks away from restoring.
If you middle-click "Reply to This" instead of left-clicking it, you get the non-JavaScript version of the comment composition form. Last I checked, Firefox was capable of saving and restoring non-JavaScript forms like that one.
Re: A new UI every month? Please... (Score:2)
Same problem with all software today. Bloated, shitty.
should be asking... (Score:1)
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I certainly hope so.
Do you want an IE6 repeat? Because that's what will happen without a viable browser alternative.
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It is already too late for that. From the POV of web designers Firefox is not even a thing anymore. It has lost too much marketshare. It won't be long before it breaks sites as much as Pale Moon does. I used to love using a customizable browser but Firefox stopped being that a long time ago.
Google gives them all their money (Score:1)
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Just select another default search engine. Job done.
My Firefox is way out of date. Google (YouTube and others) keep threatening to discontinue support for my version. They've been doing this for years now. Funny, it still works (minus some pop-up ads).
I have a newer version of Firefox on a 64 bit machine (Linux). Somewhere between this one (32 bit) and that one, Firefox switched to Pulse Audio. So I get no sound with that Firefox. Suits me fine. If I actually want to watch a video, I'll paste the URL into
As long as anti trust laws are on the books (Score:2)
Netscape the "Mosaic Killer" (Score:2)
Maybe with non-SJW management (Score:2, Insightful)
With the current crew of fuckups, they are doomed. Not surprising in any way.
Fastest Way to Get Firefox Forked (Score:2)
Stop all animations by default (Score:2)