… I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job …
Edit:
Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:
- As long as Firefox is sponsored by ‘we are not a monopoly’ Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
- For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if ‘we’ accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
- This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
- Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
- This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
Ok idealist.
What is your alternative funding stream for Mozilla?
It’s bad.
Is it worse than the advertising owned browser that gives your information directly to said advertiser?
I used to say the same, but now I wonder if they need as much as they have?
I am genuinely curious. There have been a lot of threads like this full of criticism for not spending enough on the browser.
It seems the browser is plenty funded, so maybe the org and co have too much and are in search of where to spend it?
Maybe it’s just the company with too much and the org is still struggling?
I mean, that argument starts to wade in to the Mozilla foundation as a whole, and what their purpose is, and that’s a giant kettle of fish.
Theoretical game. They lowball Google on how much Google pays them. How do people react? I don’t see them doing that and say, “Man, I’m glad Firefox is reducing Google’s influence over them”. I see them making a thread about how Firefox is giving Google a discounted rate because they’re all corrupt technofacists.
The core problem there still exists IMO. Funding.
What we really need is a reasonable way for open source, free, software, that exists for the good of the whole, to get money. But that has it’s own kettle of fish, where does it come from, how big is big enough to get some, what if they charge for support, how open is open enough.
Something something, seize the means of production, communism, etc.
How does KDE do it with Konqueror?
They don’t. They rely entirely on donations (and sponsorship donations). It also mean, they have less resources to maintain and develop their software, ESPECIALLY Conqueror since it’s not as much well-maintained compared to other parts of the KDE software suite. Plus, Firefox do maintain their own web-engine, while KDE just use the WebKit one, so even more reasons that Firefox can’t substain with the resources KDE currently has.
Thanks for explaining.
Konqueror is dead since years.
That’s a shame.
Fair question. First move for Mozilla: Fire the whole fucking leadership team and use the millions saved for some more developers working on Firefox. That should finance the next 2 years, afterwards we can think about next steps. :-P