Firefox closing down would be pretty big loss since we'd lose all our serious non-Chrome/Chromium-based alternatives

hey maybe firefox just wants to show that ladybird is worth the wait

It's either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I'd suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there's enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.

Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today

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Fork, blah, blah, blah.

When one of these forks doesn't depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.

I've been using librewolf over the last week. Honestly.... It's a drop in replacement for me

Does anyone?

I don't want to see Mozilla shutdown because Google no longer pays them, or due to the loss of another funding source.

Diversifying their income sources is a good thing.

It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current "donation" option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.

They could try not having an overinflated budget?

Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.

Bingo.

As if de-anonymizing hasn't been demonstrated, repeatedly.

No one starts a company because they care about people

You posted this on Lemmy.

I don't believe a web browser should be designed specifically for one business model, period.

There are plenty of free sites. Truly free, with no ads.

There are plenty of paid sites, supported by subscribers.

There are plenty of sites funded by educational institutions, nonprofits, or similar.

There used to be plenty of sites that were supported by non-invasive ads.

I don't give a damn if everyone uses Facebook and Google. That doesn't mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.

Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.

It was a different place, but worked ok.

More effective is a massive understatement. Now they can precisely measure effectiveness and adjust their strategy in real time to maximize output. They have increased effective effectiveness several fold. The cat is out of the bag, even if we try to roll this back the googles of the world know the data is there and can’t not harvest it. Our best strategy has to combine regulation and monopoly busting, break these companies into smaller ones that have less power to comb through big data.

For a good read on this, check out The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuniga.

If your product doesn’t generate enough revenue to turn a profit, you don’t have a viable business

I originally was one of the "FUCK FIREFOX IS FUCKED" people. However, after taking a deep breath and actually reading, yes, you are correct. There is no indication that they're blocking adblockers or taking away firefox customization. I think they're both looking for alternative revenue streams and trying to make the advertising business less intrusive. That being said, their communication is absolute dogshit and they deserve a lot of the shit they get. But I am not yet panicking. Firefox remains the best choice for blocking ads.

Thank you for breathing a bit of sanity into this thread. Same here. Some commenters were like "oh there's already too many adds" and I was like wait, what? They're not adding more adds to Firefox, are they? The article doesn't suggest that.

The "Mozilla bad" crowd echo chamber has gotten completely out of control in my opinion, and it's an avalanche of low effort comments, dozens of upvotes, and it's kind of a self sustaining echo chamber that exists because it exists.

Yes, that's the same thing every time Firefox is mentioned here. It's like people here WANT to be angry.

Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant's grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.

I could see them trying to take themselves away from Google which wouldn't be a bad thing as that's where most of the money comes from for them ... Unless that's changed recently..

I'm afraid it won't last long without it. That's the key problem.

People hate ads, as do I, but what's the alternative?

Eh, I care about a third: browser engine diversity. If they drop Gecko, I'm out, there's literally nothing left to keep me here.

Funny that's exactly what Black & Decker did the moment they got their hands on the Craftsman brand

Did you read the article?

Advertising will not improve unless we address the underlying data sharing issues, and solve for the economic incentives that rely on that data.

thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising

We can’t just ignore online advertising — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years. - MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA source

if we stay with that metaphor of "We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it", it's not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he's "staring straight in the eyes" :/

i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad

Yeah adblock plus said the same thing. A lot of companies have said the same thing. It always comes down to greed

In addition to your good points:

a world where Mozilla is actively engaged

That doesn't have to mean a world where Firefox itself is involved in this engagement, despite her insistence that it for some reason must be. Firefox is not Mozilla as a whole.

Good luck with even maintaining that fork up to date , with security threats and web standards changing so quickly.

The thing is, people willing to maintain a fork could contribute to Firefox today, and reduce the development cost, reduce the need for income.

Sure, some people will be more willing to contribute, if it's a pure grassroots effort, or if they're left without a browser otherwise, but to just assume that a fork will fix it, that's wishful thinking.

I wish that most forks wouldn't be even worse. Pale Moon, the most interesting one, is a gang of patent trolls.

Is this a response to the fact that they may not get paid for having Google as their default search engine? If so, I worry about a bunch of Linux distributions. It's ironic that a company's toxic virtual monopoly was paying for so much open software.

Eh, they've been speedrunning this for years, this is just the most efficient way to get to the end goal of complete ruin.

I have a few alternative ideas, but I honestly don't think they're interested in hearing them.

Maybe they've been infiltrated by bad actors from Google, parading around as pro-privacy frauds.

It’s already been done, LibreWolf is what Firefox originally set out to be.

Maintaining a browser is very labor intensive

Did I miss something? I don't think the browser is going to be full of ads?

You're forgetting about the people in the office building that sit around the big table. They embrace it too.

I think the bigger issue is them potentially losing their Google income.

They've failed to diversify their income with a bunch of failed subscription services, Google is in hot waters because of anti-competitive behaviour; they're going to need something.

Which isn't to say I like it. But "this is happening because they take Google money" is parroted beneath every slightly negative thing Mozilla does.

So is NetSurf, and has been for most of this century already. I mean, it's great to see people even caring about independent browsers, but NetSurf surely needs much more love (and more developers). :-)

I used to work in a marketing agency, and had a few clients that heavily used advertising data.

I'd go as far as to say that while more data is nice, good data is much better. If Mozilla can somehow produce an advertising platform that is not intrusive, is opt-in, and has a wide enough reach to satisfy advertisers, they're on to a winning strategy. Furthermore, they would need to codify any changes into Mozilla itself to ensure that advertising never gets to intrude on privacy or the browser experience - with the removal of the CEO and entire exec team as the cost for triggering this.

With all that said, I think the threat of doing this is probably a good thing. Mozilla's track record of products is, frankly, piss poor. The thing is, everyone seems to be good at advertising, so there's no reason why if Google leaves they can't just say "fine, we're an advertising company now" and eat their lunch.

Very unlikely. They will support new extension API's (they are already 90%+ compatible with manifest v3) bit Mozilla has committed to maintaining compatibility for the manifest v2 API's that don't exist in v3.

Claims otherwise are FUD.

Manifest v3? I gather they're already moving towards this but not in a manner which harms ad blocking

69% of the world population doesn't use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.

Not only are we technical folks (only 5% of the population not their target audience, it seems most people don't care enough about ads to ever try to stop them... at all.

It's probably at least a factor, yeah. They've been trying to reduce dependence on Google for a long time, which was always a smash hit with the community (not), but if there's a very concrete scenario where will stop paying, then the urgency ramps up quickly.

If Mozilla starts being aggressive to ad blocking, I'll agree with the common opinion on this post. But for now I'm more less neutral. If the choice is Mozilla dies or they do some ad stuff, I'd rather the latter. Whether the current and former people running Mozilla have made the right decisions or not to get to this point is kind of irrelevant, because people do not want Mozilla to disappear (even if they claim otherwise) because Mozilla is still a major driver of privacy-oriented work in w3c and web in general.

Aside from that... The only real way to stop ads and tracking, or at least prevent selling and sharing of data outside of the 1st party collector, is a legal path. Whether Anonym/Mozilla is as private as they are claiming, their intent is at least what a realistic legal solution to web tracking would condone that would continue to allow for revenue via ads. There is no way ads will ever go away in a capitalist economy, so it'll need to do something, blocked or not.

They've decided who their customers are, and it's not you

Since FF is free - isn't that a given?

He seems to only have been involved during roughly the first year of Mozilla's existence.

Thanks but

We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.

We need an alternative before that

Based. I switched to Midori

I’ve been using Zen, too, for a few weeks now and despite it being early days it feels like a very polished experience.

Same! Check the telemetry line in about:config that still has a value in it though (I forget what it is, just that it had one)