Exactly this. Plus, I rarely have over 20 tabs and even when I'm close to that number I mainly use the 10 first ones. Vertical tabs is a cool feature but both modes are useful depending your needs.
Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit but Mozilla Corporation which develop Firefox is a for-profit entity.
There are other subsidiaries under the foundation umbrella like Mozilla.ai and MZLA/Thunderbird. This isn't something uncommon for large entity and there are many advantages. For example, it gives more freedom in term of decision making and spending to projects that aren't targeting the exact same consumer segment. Think about Thunderbird. Under Mozilla Corporation, it was always in the shadow of Firefox. Now, it's striving as an independent project.
It's easier to do small releases often. You have less chances to break multiple parts of the application. You also don't end up in a cycle of "Wait! I'll add just one more thing" which is very common with projects tend to less often.
Folks on HN are good to talk the talk but not really to walk the walk. Not only they could give to developers or company like Igalia but they could also get a Firefox Relay/VPN subscription. They don't even need to use it and their money is going to be 100% profit for MoCo. Also, if we are realistic, the total money in donation that Mozilla could get would probably represent a drop in the ocean compared to their annual budget and the amount of money you need to develop a (complete) browser. It's way more complicated than creating yet another chrome skin.
If you can provide a citation for this claim I'd get a subscription today. I don't pay for their side projects because I don't want them to take it as a signal of demand for VPNs, but if it's truly 100% profit I'd be willing to risk it.
> Also, if we are realistic, the total money in donation that Mozilla could get would probably represent a drop in the ocean compared to their annual budget and the amount of money you need to develop a (complete) browser.
People keep saying this, but given that it's never been tried you have no proof. And even if it were, what harm is there in opening up one more option for those of us who want to be really clear about what we're paying for?
> If you can provide a citation for this claim I'd get a subscription today. I don't pay for their side projects because I don't want them to take it as a signal of demand for VPNs, but if it's truly 100% profit I'd be willing to risk it.
Fair enough. They publish their annual financial report but it isn't splitted per project so it's hard to know for a fact with the public information we have access to. However, it isn't unreasonable to think that at the very least a percentage of the smaller products revenues are reinjected elsewhere in the organization (e.g Firefox) since the goal seems to be to diversify their income sources.
> People keep saying this, but given that it's never been tried you have no proof. And even if it were, what harm is there in opening up one more option for those of us who want to be really clear about what we're paying for?
It's been tried over and over in the FOSS community. Few projects are able to get decent money with donations (e.g. Thunderbird). However, it's nowhere near the complexity of a web browser.
For example, Thunderbird made almost $7M (USD) in 2023 for an average of $20 per donation which is 350k users out of 20M monthly active users [1]. Firefox has 10 times that number of users so we could estimate that they'd make $70M/year. That's far from $500M/year they're doing right now.
$70m is just $5m shy of their entire "subscription and advertising revenue" line item, with none of the extra cost of getting that revenue. Your back-of-the-napkin math would suggest that donations could render all of Mozilla's for profit side projects unnecessary and allow them to focus that energy exclusively on the browser. What's not to love?
As I said above, if it's a failure, fine, at least they tried. Knowing that it's possible to replace the side projects with a better model why would they not at least try?
You can do the same with Firefox. Simply use Beta, Dev Edition or Nightly. The first two are very stable. You just need to flip `xpinstall.signatures.required` to `false` in about:config.
As far as I know, installing unsigned extensions is also possible in ESR builds, in Firefox from Linux distributions, in Unbranded Builds from Mozilla (but I'm not sure if they keep older versions). In forks and in your own Firefox builds (from source).
Because what people really want is a browser that can't use Netflix or Spotify...
Firefox would no longer exist today if they hadn't included DRM. Ideological purity is fun and all, but it's perhaps a good idea to occasionally recognize reality.
So in exchange for their principles, they got to keep 3 whole percent of the market? That's a victory?
I think that's a poor argument. However, I think the stronger argument is that in this case it's actually relatively okay. Like, it'd be a better world if DRM didn't exist, but given that they lack the market power to do anything about that, EME actually seems like the least bad option:
* It's sandboxed.
* It's optional and doesn't run by default.
* Firefox prompts the user and asks if they want to run the DRM.
In fairness, I understand that there are different views on this; I stop one tiny half-step shy of the GNU/FSF position, in that I would argue that people should have complete control of their machines, but that that includes the right to run software that doesn't respect their right to control the machine.
> I run many open source repos myself and you can bet that when people take the trouble to interact with me I make it my mission to listen to what they say and treat them with respect.
+1 for the trust factor. However, it's totally fine to use another instance. That's the beauty of the fediverse, you can use whatever provider you want or even spin your own.
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