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A look at Firefox forks

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Re: A look at Firefox forks

#241

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

lolinder wrote: post #99
TylerE wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting people to pay for something that has always been free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a browser is. They just think it’s part of the OS.

Enough people pay for Nebula and Kagi and Fastmail to make them profitable, even though YouTube and Google and Gmail are free. You don't need to get everyone in the world who uses the free service to be willing to pay, just enough of them to fund your project. There's actually an advantage to the paid business model vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million people in order to pay the bills: you only have t…

gmail is only free for a subset of its users, as are other google services.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#242

Post by whitehexagon »

I switched to GNU IceCat about a week ago, following the ToS / privacy changes in FF. I have never used chrome, and never will on principle, in fact I now use zero google services, or best I can. Disabling webfonts / google fonts has been interesting. Anyway, IceCat is growing on me, once I figured out how to gradually enable bits of js for the sites I frequent (not many left at this point). I have a physical aversion to adverts, so I feel better that my limited browsing data is not being sold by mozilla. One thing I havent yet worked out is enabling webGL in IceCat, since I want to get back into my Zig/wasm/WebGL stuff soon.

I'm interested if HN has stats for visitor browser-agent, but also for account-holders. Since I wonder how many users actually switched in the last month, or if it was all just huff and puff.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#243

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

hilbert42 wrote: post #184
slindsey wrote: post #50

For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox. The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational struc…

"The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox." For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled coun…

> The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited).

Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible.

Here at ardour.org, we use this:

> either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code.

(technically, name your own price for the binaries)

and retain the GPL. It works fine for us.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#244

Post by cevn »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #237
Semaphor wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a short time with it, I find it kinda funny. Back then, power users were up in arms about things like the omnibar, and chrome removing more and more parts of the actual URL. And here is a browser marketed at power users that goes beyond that, showing only a small fraction. There doesn’t even seem to be a Zen mod that restores a real usable URL bar. For me, I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private…

There’s an option under Settings > Look and Feel for a full length URL bar.

Perfect.. the real hacks always in the comments!

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#245

Post by Daunk »

voytec wrote: post #240

I've tried using LibreWolf on MacOS but there's a few annoying bugs. HN has a really small text size for me and I usually read HN at 120-133% text size. LibreWolf does not remember this setting on per-site basis and even opening HN-to-HN link in a new tab doesn't preserve text size and I need to increase text size constantly. In addition, posting images to Bluesky doesn't work. Every attempt results in an image of pr…

You can use the Stylus extension to get HN to look any way you want. There are some good community made styles for HN as well.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#246

Post by lolinder »

ta8645 wrote: post #233
slindsey wrote: post #50

For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox. The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational struc…

The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?

You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation.

So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#247

Post by lolinder »

hnlmorg wrote: post #128
bmacho wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People pay for youtube and random youtubers now. They are fine paying for things.

Sure, for those things. However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.

This is what people said about Search before Kagi. And, incidentally, those folks are also working on a paid browser that real people do buy.

Times change. Subscriptions are normalized, and tech people are increasingly aware of the hazards of "free".

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#248

Post by glenstein »

maccard wrote: post #213
glenstein wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea. Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $5…

I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary. Call it a million a year, and that’s enough to comfortably employ 4-5 programmers to work on something full time, with enough left over to cover the lulls in income. Make it 1.2 and there’s enough for an admin person to prioritise, liaise with Mozilla, and do the financials. That’s 150x less than Wikipedia. I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve th…

>I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary.

Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. So it sounds like you're saying an additional 1 million is a difference between 3% market share and 30% market share.

We seem to be on the same page about what plausibly could come in from revenue, but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting. I feel like the psychological comfort from pointing to that as an underutilized option is intended to make the point that there's not enough resources for software development. But if you compare it to what they're already spending, they're spending more than would ever be generated from such revenue. Which admittedly is a little bit off-track from the point you're making. It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#249

Post by lolinder »

dblohm7 wrote: post #125
matheist wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted. I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their prioriti…

> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities. I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole... > They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution. I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contribu…

When you left, do you have a sense for how many developers were actually working on Firefox full-time? I'm curious because people always say that Firefox would be impossible to fund, pointing to Mozilla's expenses, but I've never seen someone actually put forward the math for what portion of those expenses are actually Firefox.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#250

Post by glenstein »

WD-42 wrote: post #140
glenstein wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea. Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $5…

Thunderbird received close to $10 million in donations in 2023. And I’m willing to bet far more people use Firefox. If funding development directly, that’s not too shabby.

Wow, I honestly had no idea about that and you're exactly right, and everything I can see suggests that those were small donors to Thunderbird. It's hard to extrapolate, but it certainly seems like 10 to 20 million per year could be in play.
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