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Their current userbase is not their target userbase. They are trying to reach a more mainstream audience but all of their attempts to monetize are seen as useless by their current userbase.
- They want to increase revenue w/ ads - A loud swath of FF users are tech savvy and have adblocking enabled
- They want to pivot towards AI - A loud swath of FF users see AI as gimmicky
Repeat ad-nauseum
It really is strange. They really should be copying the success of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia.
Especially right now as Google is truly finally breaking a lot of adblocking and pushing a fight with adblockers in the YouTube space.
It's a perfect storm of opportunity to stand out as a solid, differing offer, but they're going to blow it as usual.
I'm willing to bet that the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren't the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla. People in online forums talk a big game about wanting to pay for products and not be the product. But it seems like people don't really want to pay any meaningful amount of money for a browser.
the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren't the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla
I went to donate to Mozilla when I switched back to it from chrome early last year. It said on their website by the donate link, which was very difficult to find, that the proceeds from those donations did not go towards firefox but towards their other projects.
I don't know if that's the case today, but there was no way to contribute to firefox directly when I sought it out, or at least not in a way I could find. Maybe it was a stipulation of the Googlegeld, idk.
They really should be copying the success of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia
Step 1: Be hilariously wealthy from prior investments and businesses Step 2: Do a thing nobody has ever done before at a time when interest rates mean money is free Step 3: Blind luck
I'm not sure how they're supposed to reproduce those at this point.
Yeah, the amount of money they get from donations is so tiny compared to what they need for developing Firefox, that they don't even divert it for Firefox.
They use it for activism, community work and in the past, they've also passed it on to other open-source projects, which are also important for the web but don't have the infrastructure or public awareness to get donations directly.I'm not donating to them because of where the money goes. Would donate to Firefox the moment it becomes possible.
They also used that money to pay one of their C-suite employees a $7m dollar salary.
That's unnecessary. Everything upwards of like 300k is not salary, it's business money. That person is a natural business.
Big difference to the Wikimedia Foundation is how much money they need. The Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox) has around 750 employees.
Optimistically, only 500 of those are devs and work on Firefox. If you pay those a wage of 100,000 USD, that makes 50 million USD of costs just for wages.
Firefox has less than 200 million monthly active users, so everyone using it would need to donate $0.25, or alternatively 1% of users would need to donate $25, yearly.
That's a lot of money to hope people donate, and this is a very optimistic ballpark estimate.
I don't understand why cryptocurrency isn't an accepted solution to this. Open firefox, attach wallet, drip $0.25/month/user. It's good for tiny transactions.
Because crypto just has such a stink on it.
It may well be a reasonable solution for this specific problem, but still... no one is going to get behind this.
Yes now it does, it's beyond soured. But it's a strange disconnect. Ignoring all the social commentary and looking for the most practical solution for making small pay-per-use payments - it was right there.
Maaaaaybe. I think the actual advantages over other methods are fairly intangible.
If "surfing the web" required making many very small anonymous payments every hour then yeah, there's advantages. I'll admit that doesn't actually sound terrible - I'd rather pay a few cents to read articles than the current advertising & subscription model.
As a solution for mozilla in isolation though, it would be an over engineered solution with too much baggage. Current mozilla users might have the aptitude for something like this but Mozilla wants to seduce a larger market share which is not people like us.
Ya I think the ship has sailed, maybe one day. Right now it would be a loony toons move.