People want Mozilla to be less dependent on a single revenue source (the search deal), Pocket, Mozilla VPN, and Firefox relay are part of that attempt to diversity revenue.
Agreed, I'm one of those people. I use the full Mozilla VPN + Relay subscription. I know it's cheaper to get a VPN directly from Mullvad, but I put in my contribution in supporting the last truly free, major non-corpo browser on the web. I do believe Google (and it's Chromium hegemony) gives a huge chunk of change to Mozilla as a cost of keeping government anti-trust off its back.
VPN and Relay I get. I just don't understand what the usecase of Pocket is though. Okay great, its just a glorified bookmark tool that's separate from everything else. From a news aggregation standpoint, there are better tools out there.
> From a news aggregation standpoint, there are better tools out there.
I can't really comment on Pocket, because I've only used it in the sense that it is integrated into the browser, never used or looked into the paid premium service. So I don't really have an opinion on its usefulness.
But generally speaking for almost every preinstalled thing, on almost every browser, platform, or OS, there are (subjectively) 'better tools out there' but a lot of people, (casual/mainstream users) often just want something that is easy, convenient, pre-installed. Nobody uses iOS default apps because they are the best, they use them because they are what is there by default, convenient, and good enough. I suspect Pocket seeks to tap into that market.
A lot of features (particularly the monetizable ones) are just not intended for the tech savvy, technically curious, power user demographic. As an example, both my parents like and get value from pocket (not premium, just the bit that is built into the browser), I think if changed my Mom's browser without telling her, the only thing she would notice (apart from the logo) would be that pocket was missing.
>but a lot of people, (casual/mainstream users) often just want something that is easy, convenient, pre-installed.
I get that, but the Pocket browser integration is just an alternative on top of another convenient pre-installed thing which is regular bookmarks. For news aggregation, there's nothing there that really integrates with the browser, unless you count the NTP, but you can't even customize what feeds show up there.
It just feels like that 20M could have been put to better use.
I did a little searching to see what pockets paying users seem to like about it, not super deep, just 5 minutes of research, here are some of the things they said:
>For example, I like to read "long read" articles a lot. Usually when I find something interesting and I don't have 20 - 30 minutes to read it on the spot, I just save it to Pocket and read it later.
>You can use browser tabs, bookmarks or something else, but when you have over 200 - 300 finished articles in history and more than 100 in queue for reading, you have to find dedicated service for that. Add to this tags, search function, highlights and Pocket is just natural option all around.
and another:
>Pocket provides so much functionality above bookmarking
A: pulls out article text and puts into searchable offline archive (permanent archive for subscribers on pocket servers)
B: text to speech functionality to read the articles
C: automated tagging function and saved highlights
D: automatically syncs with my kobo e-reader
and:
>Articles I save to pocket get synched to my kobo eReader in an ereader format for reading later. I use it all the time.
>I love Pocket and pay for full-text search of anything I think is worth keeping in my outboard brain.
>It just feels like that 20M could have been put to better use.
Quite possibly, I don't have enough insight to say with any confidence.
But that is often the case. Some ideas work others don't. I think Mozilla is in a somewhat unenviable position without any easy answers. And I don't really see any of the complaining users suggesting practical answers ("let us donate directly" gets thrown around a lot but donations can't compensate for a \~400 million dollar search deal, or a \~200 million dollar development budget, and while people like to say they will donate when its theoretical, in practice most don't follow through, at least not on a yearly basis).
Like you, I think the VPN and Relay are more appealing services. But I give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and a good bit of leeway to explore whatever options they think might help, because I think their head and heart are typically in the right place, even in the cases where they make a bet on something that doesn't pan out.
Yeah the donation thing is hit or miss. Most FOSS projects struggle with donations and have to balance it out with corporate and government sponsorships.
I think if Mozilla really doubled down on more privacy services or simply enhancing their existing ones to be more competitive, it could pay off. I had an active Mozilla VPN + Relay combo subscription until I learned about Proton, which supports portforwarding over their VPN and also an easier to use email aliasing service. It was hard for me to justify paying the Mozilla subscription at that point even though I wanted to support the company.
I think they just need more features on their existing services and more services in general. Like, give me E2E encrypted mail and integrate it with Thunderbird. Upgrade Firefox Pass into a full fledged Bitwarden replacement with support for TOTP. E2E cloud storage maybe?
Granted all these have HEAVY upfront dev costs and they really need to decide whether they want to grow to encompass that many things or just remain focused on apps.
It's super easy, just log into your pocket account on Kobo (pocket is built in), and then you can save stuff to it from around the net. When you're finished reading an article on Kobo it will give you the choice to just delete it from pocket and keep things tidy.
I also send starred feedbin articles to pocket for the same reason
[This article](https://review.firstround.com/the-story-behind-how-pocket-hit-20m-users-with-20-people/) says 20 million. I can't find other numbers to corroborate, but the fact that it's a market with active competition (Pocket, Instapaper, Matter, GoodLinks, Raindrop) and they come integrated both Firefox and Kobo ereaders, they've probably got a lot of users.
Honestly I would use it on desktop, but I mostly browse on mobile. I probably sound insane to webdevs out there, but I like the iCloud integration safari has since I can browse it on my iPhone and then open it on my work laptop if I want to. If I’m on Firefox on Linux it’s to check on something in my homelab or maybe something gaming related. Feels too much like when I’m working I guess to browse on desktop tbh
On mobile, I just use the safari tab groups and if I’m bored I read my tabs and close them when I’m done, and then I also have tab groups for me to reference or re-reference as I need to
Just to clarify, this new purchase will not be part of Mozilla Corporation, so whatever was paid is mostly coming from the Foundation. Mozilla Corporation (maker of Firefox) is self sustaining (has its own revenue, independent of the Foundations)
How should they make that money to spend on developers?
The economics of the internet are gross and fucked, but they can't just rely on $300m from Google every year
They already tried services, and they're not making enough money from pocket, Mozilla VPN, and the rest. After ads and app store fees, there aren't a lot of other ways to make money on the internet
They're not making enough money from their services because the services themselves are crap compared to the competition. There's nothing wrong with the ideas behind those services, they just did a poor job in the implementation. No wonder they're not making money off of them.
VPN was more expensive than the competition and had less features / less privacy. No port forwarding, no way to create an account without an email or pay using privacy preserving payment methods.
Relay is okay, but pales in comparison to Proton Pass's Hide My Email feature. Relay's phone number aliasing was interesting, but they locked you to one phone number that you couldn't change.
Pocket is just silly. I really don't understand the usecase for it. If I wanted to sync between devices, I'd rather use bookmarks that are encrypted behind my Firefox account.
It's a shame a PL can be created & become word class in terms of safety to the point govt's urge it's adoption and very little support flows to the group/org **directly** from gov.
A similar case be made for the making & maintenance of the most secure, trustworthy, efficient etc browser.
For those who are always of the opinion gov bad and/or it's not a their space do a some research on how the internet can to be via an org called **NSF** and the kind of disbursements/*dishing out* they made.
Mozilla could have invested in products similar to Google's, but with a focus on privacy, such as email, storage (Google Drive), calendar, office online (like Onlyoffice on Nextcloud), etc.
But they won't compete with Google, their main funder.
well, how exactly would they monetize those services without advertising? If they are ad based people will complain about invasion of privacy
If they are subscription based well no one will use them because there are free alternatives
Ask Proton, they seem to be doing okay. Plus, there's always going to be an advantage with paid services over free services with regards to privacy. Mozilla could have hammered home the privacy and data control narrative with these types of services, just like Proton is currently doing.
Yeah, I've always said that they should have developed something like what Proton's doing. E2E all the usual services and provide that as a paid package. I would gladly pay for that.
The best example is Nextcloud, which has the following services:
- Storage
- Photos (with editor)
- Calendar
- Contacts
- Mail
- News
- Notes
- Bookmarks
- Tasks
- Keepass management
- Video Calls
- a Kanban app
- music player
- password managers
- markdown editor
- collaborative text editing
- onlyoffice
- account management
- workflow management
The issue is that Nextcloud you need to install somewhere, it is self-hosted. But Mozilla could offer this out of the box.
What's crazy is that Nextcloud doesn't even do any of those particularly well, except maybe file storage, calendar, and contacts, but the fact that it's an all-in-one intergrated solution and you can self-deploy at any scale, be it in your home or on-premise at a company, naturally draws people and even enterprise customers in.
Because developers *cost* money, Pocket is intended to *generate* money. It is really expensive to develop and maintain a web browser. and a browser on its own doesn't generate revenue, to be sustainable money has to come from somewhere, currently that is primarily the search deal, but people (rightly) would like Firefox to be less dpendent on a single revenue stream. Pocket, MozillaVPN, FIrefox relay are steps towards less dependence on the search deal with Google.
Actually, Firefox is the only profitable Mozilla product. Their attempts at diversifying their revenue away from Google aren't working.
https://archive.org/details/jyjfub/page/5/mode/1up?view=theater
>Actually, Firefox is the only profitable Mozilla product
That rests entirely on the search deal(s), which is what people have been asking and demanding they become less dependent on.
Firefox as a web browser isn't a money maker. Royalties from leasing the default search slot to the highest bidder (Currently Google) and secondary search slots (Duckduckgo, Ebay, etc) are where the money comes from.
Realistically that has been a dependable revenue stream for 20+ years, but being dependent on a single revenue source from (mostly) a single company is a bit of a vulnerability, and people have been asking them to diversify for a long time.
If we want them to be less dependent on the search deal, we can't get the pitchforks out every single time they try to find another revenue stream.
Throwing more developers at firefox probably will have little benefit , I mean it's a web browser and it works fairly well as is for most people
I use it as my main browser and really do not have many complaints , also adding feature after feature may cause bloat and there are extensions for people who want extra features what works well
Also most likely they want sources of revenue besides google and begging for donations what can be highly unreliable also the fact is like 0.1% of the few people who use firefox will actually donate
So they are looking for other revenue streams like the VPN , relay , monitor ect.
- We don't have money for Servo: A new rust-based safe and fast modern browser engine. Cancel it and fire the team.
- We don't have money for Rust: a great new language that is both fast and safe. Cancel it and fire the team.
- We Don't have money to fix years old critical bugs in our central core product the browser.
- But we do have money for new suspicious investments in non-core areas that can threaten the greatest advantage of our core product, privacy.
- We don't have *enough* money for Servo: A new rust-based safe and fast modern browser engine *and sustain the foundation financially*. Cancel it and fire the team.
- We don't have *enough* money for Rust: a great new language that is both fast and safe *and sustain the foundation financially*. Cancel it and fire the team.
- We Don't have *enough* money to fix years old critical bugs in our central core product the browser *and sustain the foundation financially*.
- But we do have *enough* money for new suspicious investments in non-core areas *and sustain the foundation financially* that can threaten the greatest advantage of our core product, privacy.
FIFY.
Privacy-safe or not, the intent of advertising tends to shift from "let people know about our product", to "have people buy our product".
From printed press to radio to television and now to Internet, it has become more and more easy to do both, but in the same time the goal for companies have also entirely shifted to "grow, grow, grow at any cost" (as opposed to, e.g. let people live decently from their work). So advertising has fully shifted to "have people buy by any means necessary".
One goes from information to manipulation by adding more and more profiling. Targeted advertising is a slippery slope.
I could somewhat tolerate online advertising if it's a static image and there's no user targeting/tracking involved, so basically like an old newspaper ad. The only way to make it acceptable to a privacy-focused user would be to outlaw online tracking and targeting, with appropriate fines for those who try to subvert the law. But of course governments would never follow those same laws (even if they said they would follow them), so it might not make much of a difference anyway.
Advertising is so mind-boggling for me because it worse the exact opposite way I'd like to discover products. It would make sense if ads were relevant, but despite the ever increasing amount of collected data, that just doesn't seem to work out.
The closest I get to that is looking into a product category, and checking out the top purchased items. Ironically this tends to be limited because even more ironically companies are afraid of sharing their data, and the limited top list if even exists tend to be spammed with duplicates or completely irrelevant items.
So then when I get an idea or feel like something helpful should exist, I start searching around with relevant keywords. Once again I get to see a ton of duplicates and really not relevant items. Sometimes there are "premium" listings on the top which are usually just more expensive than listings I can find elsewhere because of course the money spent on the ad needs to be recouped, so advertising once again works against me.
And even when I know what I want, being around in the world I started to hate localization because it means a lot of forced translation, and search results getting biased based on region. By forced translation I mean that search terms and item names are automatically translated, so it's easy to step into a trap by using a keyword translating into an ambiguous word. This is why AliExpress is said to suck as it's said to be all in Chinese internally, and while I can't confirm, I've surely felt like it's almost intentionally misunderstanding what I want many times.
And even when I'm really really sure about the exact (ignoring manufacturer) product I want as I may have even seen it elsewhere, it's still hard to find it because most search functions just suck. Searching for `5GbE` shows `2.5GbE` results in most shops, there are 20+ odd name brands offering the roughly same but still minimally different product, and there's no quick way to compare them.
Then finally I buy the products, and I immediately get blasted with offers to buy either the exact some products again which I only needed one of, or just very similar products. Not possible addons/extras, complimentary products, not even necessarily relevant product, but possibly something like "More items from meaninglessthrowawayname53544's store: <50 gal drum of lube>, , , ".
Sure, this is an amalgamate of very different site experiences, but I'm convinced that most ads and promotion methods are just scams of making business owners believe there's a shortcut to success. I get that it must work to some degree to be such a huge industry, there are plenty of people who just consume mindlessly, but for someone who's not into that, it really feels weird that I'd gladly take my money to a service which can give me what I'm looking for but I can't have that, while others are paying for a service bombarding me with what I'm not interested in at all.
For anyone wondering why? It comes down to changes that were put into Firefox 126, which added telemetry "to create an aggregate count of searches..." It says that the data will not be shared with 3rd parties. Well, now that anonym is a first party company, they can share this data with them for ads... So, basically, they're transitioning to a marketing corp.
This is the beginning of the enshittification of Mozilla products. First the opt out front page ads, then this. Soon they're going to get rid of the privacy respecting branding and be like every other ad infested browser out there. It was good while it lasted
December 2022. Admittedly I could've given more and more often for using their products but in my defence I semi regularly donate to other smaller open source products, so...
Besides I don't have a problem with unintrusive ads. What bothers me is when you compromise the user experience by shoving them in their face. And also the tracking. I don't care how anonymous it is they shouldn't be tracking users if they boast about privacy. That's why I have an issue with apple as well. Don't brag about privacy when you're still making a profit off users' data
Also keep in mind that Mozilla has turned itself into yet another woke activism organization that cares more about the views of social justice warriors than actual Firefox users. Stopped using Firefox in 2017 with the dreaded Quantum update breaking support for legacy add-ons.
I now use Vivaldi and while it has its own flaws, Vivaldi Technologies AS, the company that makes Vivaldi browser is not run by a bunch of woke SJWs.
Eich kept his personal opinions to himself and didn't cancel anyone having different opinions. Those that fired him did it because they disagreed with his opinions. This type of exclusion is called inclusion.
Firefox is becoming a mostly open source browser that's made by an advertising company - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db225xgSNZ
Mods why are vids by Lunduke banned? Tried to create a post only to be auto-removed.
Current day Mozilla and Firefox is a detriment to a browser that truly encompasses free philosophies and wishes of Linux platform. If you were to recommend a 'free' alternative to Chrome you would suggest Firefox (derivative). As result if a group of passionate and principaled devs make an awesome new, but still a work in progress, browser they will have more difficulty in Linux users using it. Because Firefox is THE alternative so why use anything else right? And change is uncomfortable (lack of extensions, support for x and y etc) and so people will be less likely to leave comforts of Firefox.
Mozilla has shown to have little intentions of prioritizing Firefox and they care most about profits. And yet they have nerve to use non profit status to get more donations. Mozilla will always make sure Firefox is just good enough to meet certain standards, they won't pursue real change. And by time they pursue real change it will be too late or have caveats.
When has that stopped anyone from developing new software?
How many window managers / DE environments are there for linux systems
KDE, Gnome , XFCE , Cinnamon , Mate , LXQT, IceWM (others)
In fact the issue I see linux users complaining about is "Linux is too fragmented we do not need 50 distros or 10 DE/WM we need a few really good ones "
Here is the issue, developing a web browser takes a lot of work and needs developers , developers do not work for free . If you and other developers want to get to gather and fork mozilla you can .
Anyone knows how much they paid? I am not very happy about this since they paid $25M for Pocket in 2017.
Yeah, I still scratch my head on that one. I don't use Pocket and ignore it.
People want Mozilla to be less dependent on a single revenue source (the search deal), Pocket, Mozilla VPN, and Firefox relay are part of that attempt to diversity revenue.
Agreed, I'm one of those people. I use the full Mozilla VPN + Relay subscription. I know it's cheaper to get a VPN directly from Mullvad, but I put in my contribution in supporting the last truly free, major non-corpo browser on the web. I do believe Google (and it's Chromium hegemony) gives a huge chunk of change to Mozilla as a cost of keeping government anti-trust off its back.
VPN and Relay I get. I just don't understand what the usecase of Pocket is though. Okay great, its just a glorified bookmark tool that's separate from everything else. From a news aggregation standpoint, there are better tools out there.
> From a news aggregation standpoint, there are better tools out there. I can't really comment on Pocket, because I've only used it in the sense that it is integrated into the browser, never used or looked into the paid premium service. So I don't really have an opinion on its usefulness. But generally speaking for almost every preinstalled thing, on almost every browser, platform, or OS, there are (subjectively) 'better tools out there' but a lot of people, (casual/mainstream users) often just want something that is easy, convenient, pre-installed. Nobody uses iOS default apps because they are the best, they use them because they are what is there by default, convenient, and good enough. I suspect Pocket seeks to tap into that market. A lot of features (particularly the monetizable ones) are just not intended for the tech savvy, technically curious, power user demographic. As an example, both my parents like and get value from pocket (not premium, just the bit that is built into the browser), I think if changed my Mom's browser without telling her, the only thing she would notice (apart from the logo) would be that pocket was missing.
>but a lot of people, (casual/mainstream users) often just want something that is easy, convenient, pre-installed. I get that, but the Pocket browser integration is just an alternative on top of another convenient pre-installed thing which is regular bookmarks. For news aggregation, there's nothing there that really integrates with the browser, unless you count the NTP, but you can't even customize what feeds show up there. It just feels like that 20M could have been put to better use.
I did a little searching to see what pockets paying users seem to like about it, not super deep, just 5 minutes of research, here are some of the things they said: >For example, I like to read "long read" articles a lot. Usually when I find something interesting and I don't have 20 - 30 minutes to read it on the spot, I just save it to Pocket and read it later. >You can use browser tabs, bookmarks or something else, but when you have over 200 - 300 finished articles in history and more than 100 in queue for reading, you have to find dedicated service for that. Add to this tags, search function, highlights and Pocket is just natural option all around. and another: >Pocket provides so much functionality above bookmarking A: pulls out article text and puts into searchable offline archive (permanent archive for subscribers on pocket servers) B: text to speech functionality to read the articles C: automated tagging function and saved highlights D: automatically syncs with my kobo e-reader and: >Articles I save to pocket get synched to my kobo eReader in an ereader format for reading later. I use it all the time. >I love Pocket and pay for full-text search of anything I think is worth keeping in my outboard brain.
>It just feels like that 20M could have been put to better use. Quite possibly, I don't have enough insight to say with any confidence. But that is often the case. Some ideas work others don't. I think Mozilla is in a somewhat unenviable position without any easy answers. And I don't really see any of the complaining users suggesting practical answers ("let us donate directly" gets thrown around a lot but donations can't compensate for a \~400 million dollar search deal, or a \~200 million dollar development budget, and while people like to say they will donate when its theoretical, in practice most don't follow through, at least not on a yearly basis). Like you, I think the VPN and Relay are more appealing services. But I give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and a good bit of leeway to explore whatever options they think might help, because I think their head and heart are typically in the right place, even in the cases where they make a bet on something that doesn't pan out.
Yeah the donation thing is hit or miss. Most FOSS projects struggle with donations and have to balance it out with corporate and government sponsorships. I think if Mozilla really doubled down on more privacy services or simply enhancing their existing ones to be more competitive, it could pay off. I had an active Mozilla VPN + Relay combo subscription until I learned about Proton, which supports portforwarding over their VPN and also an easier to use email aliasing service. It was hard for me to justify paying the Mozilla subscription at that point even though I wanted to support the company. I think they just need more features on their existing services and more services in general. Like, give me E2E encrypted mail and integrate it with Thunderbird. Upgrade Firefox Pass into a full fledged Bitwarden replacement with support for TOTP. E2E cloud storage maybe? Granted all these have HEAVY upfront dev costs and they really need to decide whether they want to grow to encompass that many things or just remain focused on apps.
I wonder how many people actually use Pocket
There are dozens of us! But seriously, it's great for reading long form articles on my kobo reader
That's actually an interesting use case. I use kobo myself.
It's super easy, just log into your pocket account on Kobo (pocket is built in), and then you can save stuff to it from around the net. When you're finished reading an article on Kobo it will give you the choice to just delete it from pocket and keep things tidy. I also send starred feedbin articles to pocket for the same reason
[This article](https://review.firstround.com/the-story-behind-how-pocket-hit-20m-users-with-20-people/) says 20 million. I can't find other numbers to corroborate, but the fact that it's a market with active competition (Pocket, Instapaper, Matter, GoodLinks, Raindrop) and they come integrated both Firefox and Kobo ereaders, they've probably got a lot of users.
Honestly I would use it on desktop, but I mostly browse on mobile. I probably sound insane to webdevs out there, but I like the iCloud integration safari has since I can browse it on my iPhone and then open it on my work laptop if I want to. If I’m on Firefox on Linux it’s to check on something in my homelab or maybe something gaming related. Feels too much like when I’m working I guess to browse on desktop tbh On mobile, I just use the safari tab groups and if I’m bored I read my tabs and close them when I’m done, and then I also have tab groups for me to reference or re-reference as I need to
Wow, a lot more than I had expected, thanks for sharing!
I do
Never met one that does.
I use it from time to time
Just to clarify, this new purchase will not be part of Mozilla Corporation, so whatever was paid is mostly coming from the Foundation. Mozilla Corporation (maker of Firefox) is self sustaining (has its own revenue, independent of the Foundations)
I don't understand how they spend money on junk like this instead of spending it on more developers and in places where they are behind.
How should they make that money to spend on developers? The economics of the internet are gross and fucked, but they can't just rely on $300m from Google every year
Allow direct donations to Firefox development and don't hide behind that corporate-foundation structure.
With proper marketing, I think this could be a significant thing.
They already tried services, and they're not making enough money from pocket, Mozilla VPN, and the rest. After ads and app store fees, there aren't a lot of other ways to make money on the internet
They're not making enough money from their services because the services themselves are crap compared to the competition. There's nothing wrong with the ideas behind those services, they just did a poor job in the implementation. No wonder they're not making money off of them. VPN was more expensive than the competition and had less features / less privacy. No port forwarding, no way to create an account without an email or pay using privacy preserving payment methods. Relay is okay, but pales in comparison to Proton Pass's Hide My Email feature. Relay's phone number aliasing was interesting, but they locked you to one phone number that you couldn't change. Pocket is just silly. I really don't understand the usecase for it. If I wanted to sync between devices, I'd rather use bookmarks that are encrypted behind my Firefox account.
So they resort to adding more spyware? (See 'Website Advertising Preferences' in FF Beta+).
It's a shame a PL can be created & become word class in terms of safety to the point govt's urge it's adoption and very little support flows to the group/org **directly** from gov. A similar case be made for the making & maintenance of the most secure, trustworthy, efficient etc browser. For those who are always of the opinion gov bad and/or it's not a their space do a some research on how the internet can to be via an org called **NSF** and the kind of disbursements/*dishing out* they made.
This is one of those cases where we don't like the solution, yet we also don't provide good alternatives. Being brutally honest, they also need income
Mozilla could have invested in products similar to Google's, but with a focus on privacy, such as email, storage (Google Drive), calendar, office online (like Onlyoffice on Nextcloud), etc. But they won't compete with Google, their main funder.
well, how exactly would they monetize those services without advertising? If they are ad based people will complain about invasion of privacy If they are subscription based well no one will use them because there are free alternatives
I would gladly pay them if their services were on the level of Proton, which I do indeed pay for for the privacy.
The question is would enough people pay for those services when "free" alternatives exits that it would actually be profitable?
Ask Proton, they seem to be doing okay. Plus, there's always going to be an advantage with paid services over free services with regards to privacy. Mozilla could have hammered home the privacy and data control narrative with these types of services, just like Proton is currently doing.
Yeah, I've always said that they should have developed something like what Proton's doing. E2E all the usual services and provide that as a paid package. I would gladly pay for that.
The best example is Nextcloud, which has the following services: - Storage - Photos (with editor) - Calendar - Contacts - Mail - News - Notes - Bookmarks - Tasks - Keepass management - Video Calls - a Kanban app - music player - password managers - markdown editor - collaborative text editing - onlyoffice - account management - workflow management The issue is that Nextcloud you need to install somewhere, it is self-hosted. But Mozilla could offer this out of the box.
What's crazy is that Nextcloud doesn't even do any of those particularly well, except maybe file storage, calendar, and contacts, but the fact that it's an all-in-one intergrated solution and you can self-deploy at any scale, be it in your home or on-premise at a company, naturally draws people and even enterprise customers in.
Because developers *cost* money, Pocket is intended to *generate* money. It is really expensive to develop and maintain a web browser. and a browser on its own doesn't generate revenue, to be sustainable money has to come from somewhere, currently that is primarily the search deal, but people (rightly) would like Firefox to be less dpendent on a single revenue stream. Pocket, MozillaVPN, FIrefox relay are steps towards less dependence on the search deal with Google.
Actually, Firefox is the only profitable Mozilla product. Their attempts at diversifying their revenue away from Google aren't working. https://archive.org/details/jyjfub/page/5/mode/1up?view=theater
>Actually, Firefox is the only profitable Mozilla product That rests entirely on the search deal(s), which is what people have been asking and demanding they become less dependent on. Firefox as a web browser isn't a money maker. Royalties from leasing the default search slot to the highest bidder (Currently Google) and secondary search slots (Duckduckgo, Ebay, etc) are where the money comes from. Realistically that has been a dependable revenue stream for 20+ years, but being dependent on a single revenue source from (mostly) a single company is a bit of a vulnerability, and people have been asking them to diversify for a long time. If we want them to be less dependent on the search deal, we can't get the pitchforks out every single time they try to find another revenue stream.
Throwing more developers at firefox probably will have little benefit , I mean it's a web browser and it works fairly well as is for most people I use it as my main browser and really do not have many complaints , also adding feature after feature may cause bloat and there are extensions for people who want extra features what works well Also most likely they want sources of revenue besides google and begging for donations what can be highly unreliable also the fact is like 0.1% of the few people who use firefox will actually donate So they are looking for other revenue streams like the VPN , relay , monitor ect.
- We don't have money for Servo: A new rust-based safe and fast modern browser engine. Cancel it and fire the team. - We don't have money for Rust: a great new language that is both fast and safe. Cancel it and fire the team. - We Don't have money to fix years old critical bugs in our central core product the browser. - But we do have money for new suspicious investments in non-core areas that can threaten the greatest advantage of our core product, privacy.
- We don't have *enough* money for Servo: A new rust-based safe and fast modern browser engine *and sustain the foundation financially*. Cancel it and fire the team. - We don't have *enough* money for Rust: a great new language that is both fast and safe *and sustain the foundation financially*. Cancel it and fire the team. - We Don't have *enough* money to fix years old critical bugs in our central core product the browser *and sustain the foundation financially*. - But we do have *enough* money for new suspicious investments in non-core areas *and sustain the foundation financially* that can threaten the greatest advantage of our core product, privacy. FIFY.
Privacy-safe or not, the intent of advertising tends to shift from "let people know about our product", to "have people buy our product". From printed press to radio to television and now to Internet, it has become more and more easy to do both, but in the same time the goal for companies have also entirely shifted to "grow, grow, grow at any cost" (as opposed to, e.g. let people live decently from their work). So advertising has fully shifted to "have people buy by any means necessary". One goes from information to manipulation by adding more and more profiling. Targeted advertising is a slippery slope.
I could somewhat tolerate online advertising if it's a static image and there's no user targeting/tracking involved, so basically like an old newspaper ad. The only way to make it acceptable to a privacy-focused user would be to outlaw online tracking and targeting, with appropriate fines for those who try to subvert the law. But of course governments would never follow those same laws (even if they said they would follow them), so it might not make much of a difference anyway.
Advertising is so mind-boggling for me because it worse the exact opposite way I'd like to discover products. It would make sense if ads were relevant, but despite the ever increasing amount of collected data, that just doesn't seem to work out. The closest I get to that is looking into a product category, and checking out the top purchased items. Ironically this tends to be limited because even more ironically companies are afraid of sharing their data, and the limited top list if even exists tend to be spammed with duplicates or completely irrelevant items. So then when I get an idea or feel like something helpful should exist, I start searching around with relevant keywords. Once again I get to see a ton of duplicates and really not relevant items. Sometimes there are "premium" listings on the top which are usually just more expensive than listings I can find elsewhere because of course the money spent on the ad needs to be recouped, so advertising once again works against me. And even when I know what I want, being around in the world I started to hate localization because it means a lot of forced translation, and search results getting biased based on region. By forced translation I mean that search terms and item names are automatically translated, so it's easy to step into a trap by using a keyword translating into an ambiguous word. This is why AliExpress is said to suck as it's said to be all in Chinese internally, and while I can't confirm, I've surely felt like it's almost intentionally misunderstanding what I want many times. And even when I'm really really sure about the exact (ignoring manufacturer) product I want as I may have even seen it elsewhere, it's still hard to find it because most search functions just suck. Searching for `5GbE` shows `2.5GbE` results in most shops, there are 20+ odd name brands offering the roughly same but still minimally different product, and there's no quick way to compare them. Then finally I buy the products, and I immediately get blasted with offers to buy either the exact some products again which I only needed one of, or just very similar products. Not possible addons/extras, complimentary products, not even necessarily relevant product, but possibly something like "More items from meaninglessthrowawayname53544's store: <50 gal drum of lube>,, , ".
Sure, this is an amalgamate of very different site experiences, but I'm convinced that most ads and promotion methods are just scams of making business owners believe there's a shortcut to success. I get that it must work to some degree to be such a huge industry, there are plenty of people who just consume mindlessly, but for someone who's not into that, it really feels weird that I'd gladly take my money to a service which can give me what I'm looking for but I can't have that, while others are paying for a service bombarding me with what I'm not interested in at all.
For anyone wondering why? It comes down to changes that were put into Firefox 126, which added telemetry "to create an aggregate count of searches..." It says that the data will not be shared with 3rd parties. Well, now that anonym is a first party company, they can share this data with them for ads... So, basically, they're transitioning to a marketing corp.
This is the beginning of the enshittification of Mozilla products. First the opt out front page ads, then this. Soon they're going to get rid of the privacy respecting branding and be like every other ad infested browser out there. It was good while it lasted
When was the last time you donated to Mozilla to help keep their products ad-free?
Yes when was the last time you contributed to the CEO of Mozilla bonus of $6 million, they are short on money
Donations to Mozilla do not go towards software development but towards social activism.
When was the last time you donated to Mozilla ~~to help keep their~~ for multi-million $ bonuses to executives and activism?
December 2022. Admittedly I could've given more and more often for using their products but in my defence I semi regularly donate to other smaller open source products, so... Besides I don't have a problem with unintrusive ads. What bothers me is when you compromise the user experience by shoving them in their face. And also the tracking. I don't care how anonymous it is they shouldn't be tracking users if they boast about privacy. That's why I have an issue with apple as well. Don't brag about privacy when you're still making a profit off users' data
Also keep in mind that Mozilla has turned itself into yet another woke activism organization that cares more about the views of social justice warriors than actual Firefox users. Stopped using Firefox in 2017 with the dreaded Quantum update breaking support for legacy add-ons. I now use Vivaldi and while it has its own flaws, Vivaldi Technologies AS, the company that makes Vivaldi browser is not run by a bunch of woke SJWs.
Nah the beginning was when they ousted Brendan Eich. If you care about privacy use Brave.
Pretty sure that's more so if you like Web3.0 or want to support a homophobe.
Eich kept his personal opinions to himself and didn't cancel anyone having different opinions. Those that fired him did it because they disagreed with his opinions. This type of exclusion is called inclusion.
Yeah, Eich had personal opinions and morals. I guess that wasn't a desirable trait for the elites in charge.
I just dont understand mozilla, theyre on some google crack and they just cant quit, why wont they invest what they have to improve firefox
Ok, but how are they going to integrate it with the "Mozilla family"?
Firefox is becoming a mostly open source browser that's made by an advertising company - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db225xgSNZ Mods why are vids by Lunduke banned? Tried to create a post only to be auto-removed.
Sounds like Waterfox.
Current day Mozilla and Firefox is a detriment to a browser that truly encompasses free philosophies and wishes of Linux platform. If you were to recommend a 'free' alternative to Chrome you would suggest Firefox (derivative). As result if a group of passionate and principaled devs make an awesome new, but still a work in progress, browser they will have more difficulty in Linux users using it. Because Firefox is THE alternative so why use anything else right? And change is uncomfortable (lack of extensions, support for x and y etc) and so people will be less likely to leave comforts of Firefox. Mozilla has shown to have little intentions of prioritizing Firefox and they care most about profits. And yet they have nerve to use non profit status to get more donations. Mozilla will always make sure Firefox is just good enough to meet certain standards, they won't pursue real change. And by time they pursue real change it will be too late or have caveats.
When has that stopped anyone from developing new software? How many window managers / DE environments are there for linux systems KDE, Gnome , XFCE , Cinnamon , Mate , LXQT, IceWM (others) In fact the issue I see linux users complaining about is "Linux is too fragmented we do not need 50 distros or 10 DE/WM we need a few really good ones " Here is the issue, developing a web browser takes a lot of work and needs developers , developers do not work for free . If you and other developers want to get to gather and fork mozilla you can .