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Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

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Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#92
post #86

Mozilla please just give us a Firefox Pro that costs a few quid a month I make basically all my income via Firefox indirectly.. if you want a slice just ask for it, don't be creepy

Interesting idea. What would Firefox Pro offer to users?

I personally think that Firefox Pro could offer a shiny icon that says "Pro" in it, and the satisfaction of knowing that I supported a project I care about.

For an annual license, perhaps a sheet of stickers?

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#93
No thanks. I’ve used Firefox since the beginning and never took to Chrome etc. Use Brave on iOS so guess I’ll be seeing how that and other alternatives are on Mac. I’d be willing to pay some bucks a month. I’m not willing to have the area of the browser that should be signal littered with noise.

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#94
post #86

Mozilla please just give us a Firefox Pro that costs a few quid a month I make basically all my income via Firefox indirectly.. if you want a slice just ask for it, don't be creepy

Interesting idea. What would Firefox Pro offer to users?

A promise to not put ads anywhere

Don't nerf regular Firefox

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#95
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting idea. What would Firefox Pro offer to users?

A promise to not put ads anywhere Don't nerf regular Firefox

Let's take YouTube Premium as an example to set a baseline. About 3% of users convert (50M vs 1.5B), for basically the same benefit.

Firefox starts with 200M users now and if 3% get Pro that is 6M users paying $5/month (?) for $30M/month and $360M/year in revenue. That is almost exactly that same as what Firefox makes from Google. The added benefit is that this change could transition it into a user-centric mindset.

Do you agree with the math?

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#96

After 19 years on Firefox I moved to Edge in August. While I always kicked the tires on Chrome and other browsers over the years, I never felt compelled to switch until now. I'm still on Edge and while it's a work in progress, I'm pretty happy with it. It just took a while to get everything setup how I like it. While ads definitely help keep me away, I left because the keyword shortcuts for search engines claim to wo…

I don't think Edge is advisable. It doesn't offer end to end encryption for all categories of synced data, its session ID persists across reboots and is hardware-based and their start page connects to approx. two million things.

Including of course the standard of having search suggestions on and sent to a privacy unfriendly vendor.

It's an amazing browser, probably just the best one atm if you don't care about privacy, but for privacy it's far from ideal.

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#99
post #82
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was amazed/saddened that they laid off the Servo team. That seemed like the one really worthwhile improvement Mozilla had bet on in a decade. I use and appreciate Firefox, maybe it's partly nostalgia for when FF pushed the web experience forward.

Maintaining even one browser engine is an ungodly amount of work (see how even microsoft dropped the ball on that), let alone 2. Discontinuing Servo was the correct decision however sad it is. On the other hand, Firefox does incorporate more and more Rust into the browser, but reimplementing such a core part is simply infeasible.

Servo was a research project to write those various Rust components that did made it into Firefox not an alternative reimplementation to one day replace it wholesale.

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#100
post #81

Does anyone trustworthy offer a paid version of Firefox? I don't know of one, but I'd be customer #1. The pitch is clear: "Users are our only customers. We'll always do what's best for you and we'll do it completely transparently."

Donate to Mozilla.org - bam, paid Firefox

That’s by definition very different than what I’m looking for. I want to pay someone to sell me a browser that puts users (and specifically, paying customers’) needs first. Like essentially any other paid software or service.

If Mozilla wants to offer a “We won’t screw with you, like by creating new places for ads and burying the settings (like we have and will with free users)” premium plan, I’d consider it. I’d prefer to pay a company that doesn’t do that at all, though (that is, it’s built around innovating for paying customers), even if they aren’t able to offer a free browser.

Obviously being a paying customer doesn’t guarantee customer-first decisions or transparency, but as we saw this week, not being one makes it almost impossible.

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