If Firefox is the alternative they better try harder...
Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
521–530 of 675 posts
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
>10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue The only way that works is if they abandoned the entire Firefox codebase and made another Chrome clone. Even in their diminished state they still have 220 million monthly-active-users. With only 10 million, they'd have no leverage in the web standards groups, and no leverage with web developers. The Blink monoculture would be well and truly complet…
> Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million. I disagree. 50M people (including myself) already pay $12/mo ($144/year) for YouTube Premium [1], basically so they do not see the ads even though a completely free alternative is available. (this also tells us you need just one 'killer' feature) And a browser, executed right, is arguably a much…
I'd be curious how many were just Play Music that rolled over into YouTube Premium. I'm not sure it would do as well if it dropped the music streaming.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is legit my favorite feature of the iphone 13 pro max, the battery is like 4300 mAh and it never runs out during the day no matter what I do with it.
There are many Android phones on the market with a big battery and fast charging. Why people think Android=Pixel is beyond me.
Pixels are the definitive Android phones. Outside of the Pixel and Galaxy lines, you're getting into murky waters.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because of such an apparent conflict of interest. At the end of the day we do not know how many good ideas (for the users, for the web and for Firefox market share) were silenced because not to upset the feeding arm. And where would Firefox be today if it relied on its own users for the revenue instead? Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.
Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately. It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue. I don't envy the market dynamics of their sit…
1) Save most of the Google bucks rather than spending them on bloating your org to at least 3x the size it has any reason to be,
2) Invest your saved Google bucks,
3) After a few years you can drop Google for a decade or two and coast entirely on savings + investment income while being beholden to no-one. Maybe indefinitely, depending on how well it goes and how lean you keep your spending.
The alternative would have been putting all that extra staff to work on paid products that didn't suck and were in demand. Firefox could have built an open-source Slack alternative with optional, slick, easy-onboarding paid hosting, for instance. Not that big a stretch. And that's on the boring-and-safe side of things they might have done. Truly, they might have done anything worthwhile with the time and huge amounts of money they had, to gain future independence. Instead, they did... the stuff they did.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Not sure whether we live in different times, but isn't the same with YouTube? The cost to watch is $0, and you can even watch it ad-free for $0 with a free ad-blocker, yet 50 million people still choose to pay $12/mo for YouTube Premium. Isn't that more about information asymmetry than value proposition? Blocking YouTube ads with the appropriate add-ons for free isn't necessarily that well known, except among the te…
Potentially yes, but hard to believe that a $7bn business exists only because of lack of information. I certainly don't lack the information and few other people from my circle that also pay for it so it is hard for me to scale from there.
I'm not aware of any scholarship looking at correlation between level of tech knowledge (specifically, ad blockers) and subscription behavior to avoid ads.
That said, apparently ~42% of global users[0] block some ads.
Given that there are ~4.6Bn users[1], of which ~1.9Bn sometimes use ad blockers, some 2.7Bn users don't use ad blockers at all.
50 million (although that includes YouTube Music subscribers as well as YouTube Premium) subscribers is a little more than 1% of total users and ~2% of users who don't use ad blockers.
I'd also point out that nations with higher per-capita incomes tend to use ad blockers less, which implies (again, I'm not claiming this to be true) that they may be less knowledgeable about ad blocking technologies.
It's not clear what the global distribution of YouTube Premium subscribers looks like, but it's reasonable to think that those with higher (and presumably more disposable) incomes would be more likely to pay for such a subscription.
I don't have any data to back up my hypothesis, as I can't find any published research into the tech savvy of those who pay for YouTube Premium vs. those who don't.
Even more, just because the absolute numbers (50,000,00 subscribers which includes 30,000,000 YouTube Music, and 2+ or 7+ billion in revenue, depending on if you count the 30,000,000 YouTube Music subscribers) are large, given the total population, they are a tiny group.
How many people use add-ons to block youtube ads? Who knows? Possibly Google/Alphabet, but they certainly aren't going to talk about that.
I want to be crystal clear that I'm not saying you're wrong, but the idea that there's a lack of information driving subscriptions to get ad-free youtube is certainly a reasonable one.
Perhaps that's a good topic for a master's thesis in psychology? Since I'm not a marketer or a grad student in Psychology, that wouldn't be something I'd do. Hopefully someone will.
[0] https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
[1] https://www.oberlo.com/blog/internet-statistics
Edit: Added the missing link.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current…
>A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company An even better "funding model" would be a non-profit entity with no additional agenda beyond providing an anti-adtech browser to the world. I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who would donate their time and money to thwarting the overreach of adtech.
Isn't Firefox the proof that this isn't the case?
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#527We somehow need to incentivize the proliferation of browser engines more than actual browsers themselves. Maybe an open design committee that could standardize modules the engines should contain along with calling conventions between them? That would encourage people to work on smaller chunks and not have to build the entire thing by hand. Perhaps browser engine prize competitions?
If there were even half a dozen capable browser engines to choose from when making a new browser that were all accessible, then we wouldn't be in this mess.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#528It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…
I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not). Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do tha…
It's creepy. Like someone looking over your shoulder. Before it became normalized, that wasn't a niche opinion. I'm sure it's very useful for developing software. A camera behind me pointed at my screen might be even more useful[0]. Both are invasive and gross.
[0] Session-recording spyware "telemetry" products practically are this, and are widely used. Watching their session playback, or ability to monitor live users on "your" site (but actually, on their computer) is disturbing.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brave does ad-hijacking and has been caught hijacking referral links in the past. I'm not sure I would call their model "good". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027
Ad-hijacking? The referral code thing was a bug that got fixed - the intended function was Firefox Suggest-esque sponsored links from a local directory when you typed a word but not a complete url, eg. "binance". The bug was that it gave you a suggestion for complete, legit urls too (eg. "binance.us") and put the suggestion at the top. The bug was fixed to make the feature work as intended, and the feature is turned…
Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.
I don't totally understand how people think Brave is against ad-tech, when it is very much an ad-tech company making money primarily from ads, and secondly from its crypto ownership in BAT.
Brave does a lot of user tracking, but it says it anonymizes it, which hopefully it does, but it still tracks all your behavior.
It is still a cool model, but very much ad-tech and ad-based.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That was very much a dominant position among developers in the IE days. Other browsers were a nuisance, and maybe they should just be cut out entirely. I don't usually resort to personalised dissection of post, but to be frank, you've taken a giant shit all over this subthread so I think it deserves it... this notion of yours seems to be the underlying theme of most all of your comments - that everyone here critici…
You have left a number of these meta comments now (a sockpuppet account even appeared to lend you support), apparently that injured that someone disagreed with your comment. To say these add no value is overstating their contribution. Thanks
heh, more insightful perceptions i see... no comment then?