The irony is they tried diversifying their income. But people don't want their browser to ask for donations (that's nagging). They don't want their new tab page pre-populated with websites on a new install (even if their browsing overwrites them). They don't want "fun" additions to advertise TV shows (even if they're opt-in).
But they're happy to pay via google's search and tracking. Mozilla doesn't have a lot of options open to them.
Firefox has ~250M users as of about 9 months ago and $562M revenue for 2017.
I'd honestly pay $2 per month (12 times "my share") for a Firefox that completely disavows the ad model and produces a truly user-centric experience sans ads, fingerprinting, etc. However, given that over 95% of their revenue comes from Royalties, I don't see that turning around any time soon.
I would too, but clearly most people wouldn't, otherwise advertisement wouldn't be such a popular way to monetize apps and websites (and Google wouldn't be the behemoth that it is today). Actually I would also gladly pay for a decent search engine but even DuckDuckGo decided to monetize using ads, which IMO means that sooner or later if they're successful enough they'll become just as bad as the rest.
Besides paying for a product doesn't mean that it becomes privacy-friendly, look at how Spotify still tracks your every actions even when you're a paying customer for instance.
You're right but I can't shake the feeling that if they ever become really popular the temptation to change that model will be huge. Maybe the DDG of today is principled enough not to do that (and it's also probably in their best interest at the moment since their most obvious feature compared to other big search engines is its privacy) but what about 10 years from now? Or 20 years? What happens if their growth starts stalling and the shareholders ask for more? Will they take the side of their freeloading users over the paying advertisers and investors? Principles tend to be soluble in a high-enough concentration of dollar bills.
After all there was a time where most of us trusted Google and their "Do No Evil" motto. And then eventually in morphed into "Do More Profit" and we have the corporation that we know today.
If I had the ability to know what a tech company was going to do 10 or 20 years in the future I wouldn't have sold off my Apple stock in the late 90s.
DDG may change how they do things, but I expect that if they do there will be someone else that shows up to make money by providing a value-added anonymizing wrapper on top of search performed by a larger company - and it may not even be on top of the duopoly as it exists right now (are there actual search providers in the US not wrapping Google or Bing?). This may particularly happen if a new company grows in India or China then its able to start spreading coverage to other parts of the world.
I’ve recently switched to startpage.com - they use Google for high quality search results, but anonymize all search requests and show non-personalized, non-tracking ads solely based on my current search term. Also, they’re based in Europe/Netherlands.
In my experience, when Google searches are better than DDG (which is not always), it's because the results are customized to your Google account and search history. StartPage generally gives me worse results than DDG, despite using Google as a backend.
Although the Foundation wholly owns the Corporation (we call them MoFo and MoCo internally), money donated to MoFo does not go towards paying MoCo employee salaries as far as I am aware.
Is that not because Firefox currently pays for itself (via Google search revenue)? If the idea is to change that equation, there's surely no reason why money couldn't flow the other way?
i wonder why mozilla hasn't tried a premium pricing model? the premium version of firefox could have a yearly subscription of, say, $24. it would have all privacy features turned on, the best privacy addons installed, and all analytics/telemetry turned off, by default.
The brand risk of having firefox associated with the free version would be horrendous.
To have a premium product, you need to have a non-premium product, and given that most users would use the non-premium product, firefox would quickly become associated with a browser that has the actually desirable features turned off...
Which would probably be even worse than their low market take up at the moment (and I am typing this on firefox).
I agree. Maybe they could differentiate the two versions with a badge or some adornment in the UI which appears grayed out in the “free” edition. I guess it’s the same as asking for donations but maybe not as blatant. Also not sure why they stopped selling merch. I would buy some right now.
Because if they suggest anything to remove the whales then their paymasters will veto it?
The people who would pay for a subscription are surely some of the most valuable for advertising to, and FF in its current form exists because of advertising.
There is nothing about how charities work under US Federal tax law that would produce this result.
Tax-exempt charities (which must by definition be non-profit, but not all non-profits are charities, and not all charities are tax exempt!) must spend money in a way that's aligned with their mission, and there are rules on how much they can spend outside that. (The really big no-no has to do with political lobbying and the endorsement of candidates for public office -- a relic of a more civilized age when apparently we thought that should be left up to individuals. But I digress.)
The Mozilla Foundation is a California corporation with tax-exempt status under US Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3), which covers "public charities, private foundations or private operating foundations". There are slightly different rules for each category.
I'm not sure what category Mozilla Foundation is; my suspicion is they are either a public charity or a private operating foundation. In either case, there's nothing that would prohibit them from funding software development, as long as it doesn't unfairly benefit someone involved in the organization's governance.
Their 2016 financial statements (I couldn't find anything newer) are available:
tl;dr: In 2016 they spent over $250k on software development as a line-item, out of about $500k in revenue total. It's by far their biggest budget item.
> tl;dr: In 2016 they spent over $250k on software development as a line-item, out of about $500k in revenue total. It's by far their biggest budget item.
The numbers are actually $250 million and $500 million. All the tables this report (as well as a newer one I have to search the link for) list the figures in thousands.
I'm told that this is incorrect and that the FSF has been doing it for 34 years, the EFF does it, the ACLU has done it and others have even paid for proprietary software development (their apps etc).
i worked for mozilla, your donations pretty much do not go to coding firefox. there are side effects where it will affect code, or someone that gets employed by foundation that will now have money and free time to code for firefox for free, but its not like "your dollars go to hiring a sw engineer".
the donations are still useful though because if there were none mozilla foundation would die, and in turn, mozilla corporation would also die or be sold as its fully owned by the foundation
I don't think it's for those reasons, but the outcome is the same -- money donated to the Mozilla Foundation will not be spent on software development on Firefox, which is done by Mozilla Corporation. (I'm pretty sure it will fund Mozilla Foundation software developers, though, as well as all of the initiatives they list on the home page.)
250M users, you would not have a problem with $2 a month. Don't expect the rest of these users to follow. Donations are voluntary, people are unaware, but most importantly: that $2 of yours is of different value elsewhere in the world. All the people who live in poverty (according to my standards) should not feel obligated to pay American price for software. Which is a small quibble I have with proprietary software.
How would that be different from what you can already configure Firefox to do by enabling resist fingerprinting options, turning off Pocket's sponsored articles, turning off telemetry, etc.? It seems like you'd be paying $2/month for keeping a set of preferences up to date.
A subscription model of some sort would probably make sense, but I don't think you'd want to gate those kinds of features on it.
I think there's not much pressure to get at it when they have hundreds of millions in the bank and have been funded externally their whole life.
I believe those backfired since all their marketing has been propped on morality. When they claim ads and tracking are evil, it bit them whenever they ventured anywhere near that stuff. Give many startups here an initial audience of 200M+ engaged users and they'll figure a way!
Are they that cash strapped? IIRC moz://a had an agreement with yahoo which they terminated just so they can sign with Google.
The real irony imo of FF being considered the alternative browser, but not actually competing against Chrome where it could have a serious edge only entrenches the pro commercial anti user status quo.
But they're happy to pay via google's search and tracking. Mozilla doesn't have a lot of options open to them.