Ask HN: Would you fund Mozilla to become independent of Google?
How much would you and or your company be willing to fund Mozilla should it need to become independent of Google?
How much would you and or your company be willing to fund Mozilla should it need to become independent of Google?
The only way I would donate to Mozilla is if the corporation is shuttered and the non-profit is disentangled from it.
Any donations you send to Mozilla today go to the corporation and are not spent on the browser. They are spent on things that have nothing to do with the core mission of the maintaining the browser.
Nobody is allowed to fund Mozilla to maintain the browser, which is the actual question you're asking.
I think you're getting it mixed.
The corporation funds almost exclusively the browser.
The non-profit doesn't fund the browser.
This and I would pay between 10 and 20 USD a year for it.
Much like Wikipedia, my donations depend on being able to donate to the actual engineers, and not to unrelated political advocacy.
> Much like Wikipedia, my donations depend on being able to donate to the actual engineers, and not to unrelated political advocacy.
Yep. I even agree with most of the unrelated political advocacy, but I want to be able to donate for that to a different organization.
Jimmy Wales should really push for a Wikipedia fork of Firefox. People trust Wikimedia Foundation and the entire thing is in line with the goals of Wikimedia who also 'get' web development.
Please no. This is uncited, but from a quick AI search:
> For example, in its 2022-2023 fiscal year, the Foundation gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like Art+Feminism, Black Lunch Table, and Whose Knowledge, according to tax filings cited by outlets like the Daily Caller. These groups focus on editing Wikipedia to emphasize feminist perspectives, racial equity, and marginalized communities—goals that align with leftist priorities like social justice and decolonization. Art+Feminism, for instance, has organized events to edit articles on topics like abortion and LGBTQ+ biographies, often with a "human rights perspective."
> Another example is the Knowledge Equity Fund, launched in 2021 with $4.5 million to address "racial inequities" in Wikimedia projects. Its first grants went to organizations like the Borealis Philanthropy Racial Equity in Journalism Fund and the Media Foundation for West Africa, which train journalists on racial equity—initiatives that some critics see as inherently progressive. The Fund’s framing around "breaking down barriers" for marginalized groups echoes language common in left-wing discourse.
> Historically, the Foundation has also been linked to left-leaning donors. IRS records show it donated $13.7 million in 2019 to the Tides Foundation, a progressive pass-through funder that supports various Soros-backed nonprofits. George Soros himself pledged $2 million to the Wikimedia Endowment in 2018, though this was for long-term sustainability, not direct editorial control. Critics, including some X users, argue these connections suggest a bias, especially given Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s public claims that the site has shifted leftward, silencing certain viewpoints.
A fork? Getting any momentum behind this might be really hard.
Mozilla are doing other things that a browser, yes. And this is good. Browsers are special and don't make money by themselves, and Firefox in particular is entirely dependent on Google's money. Having alternative projects that can bring revenue (e.g. Pocket) helps them remove that singular dependency and ensure they can survive long term.
And having a specific "donate to Firefox only" would probably end in disaster. They might end up in a situation where they're forced to waste money on Firefox because that's what the donations are for while not having enough money to keep the lights on in offices. For a fun example of what happens when you have fixed budgets that don't have any flexibility, Atlanta's MARTA was founded with an agreement providing public funding, with a fixed 50/50 split between capex and opex. So they found themselves with brand new trains because there's capex budget to spend, but falling apart infrastructure because 50% wasn't enough for opex.
You state that the non-Firefox activities of Mozilla are good, as if an established fact.
I'd reason that there's no consensus on this at all. Some things might be perceived as good, some neutral or bad, and many might be perceived as well intended but ineffective.
> You state that the non-Firefox activities of Mozilla are good, as if an established fact.
No, I'm stating that it's good that Mozilla has non-Firefox activities and is trying to diversify. I've only used Pocket from them and it's good, but don't have an opinion on any of their other activities.
I think there are lots of people in this thread saying (directly or indirectly): "There is nothing that Mozilla does that I would want to fund, besides Firefox!"
Why do they need to diversify? In case they need to pull the plug on Firefox? There is simply no way they could offer anything else as useful as Firefox.
They have enough money that they could throw it all in the S&P 500 and maintain Firefox indefinitely off the growth. That’s what they should do.
But you just described what Mozilla is doing right now! 0% of what anyone donates goes to the browser, and its a disaster!
Why do you think it's 0%? I doubt it, it's not like the money goes into separate buckets and engineering salaries for Firefox only come from the Google bucket, and donations get spent on lobster and champagne parties for the C-levels.
A user like me would be willing to idea of some monthly donation when Mozilla restructures its expenses.
If memory serves right, the biggest slice of expenses were in C-level compensations & shortlived pet projects. The organization has to focus on growing a cadre of good engineers and product teams for their core offerings (just like the ones who rewrote large chunks of Netscape code into a fledgling Firefox ~22y ago).
One can't be expected to donate just to eventually subsidize a penthouse purchase for the CEO or their swanky McLaren.
You can look at their most recent annual report[1].
Their total expenses were ~$40M, and their CEO made over $6M in compensation. So out of a $100 donation, $16 goes directly into the CEO's pocket.
The total compensation for their top 10 employees is close to $10M. They all are President of this and VP of that and Director of thus--my strong guess is none of them write Firefox code. So $24 of your $100 go into their pockets.
1: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-fo...
I’ve tolerated them being in the gray zone for years with their neglect of Firefox. After their latest stunt they’re out for me. I would not donate to an org that openly neglects a social responsibility of this magnitude.
I would chip in the average Facebook user value for my country if, and only if, Mozilla completely reversed course on ad tech, selling user data, and 'private tracking'. The fact that it acquired Anonym (with its close ties to Facebook) makes it clear that Mozilla would not diversify away from ads, it would just jump from one ad company (Google) to the other (FB).
I would not give a penny to a company that looks to sell me out.
Mozilla must split their engine and basic browser UI into separate browser, something like Chromium right now, without any "Mozilla" features: no pocket, no AI, no sync, nothing extra that is not necessary to browse the web. This part must forever stay open-source, free, and supported. Only then I'll gladly set up recurring donation. On top of that, they can build a "Mozilla" spin of the browser, with all the bells and whistles they ever wanted: ads, AI, sync, pocket, Mr. Robot promos, etc. This also opens avenue for other companies to build on top of base browser their own improvements, either by using extensions or extension bundles. Even Microsoft might provide their own spin with all Microsoft services and telemetry added.
I would like to fund a technical Mozilla that exclusively focuses on actual products and community building. I would not want to give my money to the current Mozilla, as I believe the money and endowment they already have would be sufficient or at least give them all the means to do it, if they consequently stripped away everything else.
I would fund Firefox, not Mozilla. I learned from all the recent discussions that money donated to Mozilla do not go to Firefox. It’s as if Mozilla is structured in a way such that Firefox cannot be community supported.
Mozilla treats Firefox like an unloved adoptive child kept around for the monetary benefit.
Many people want to donate to Firefox exclusively but you can forget about that. Mozilla will not carve out Firefox because it's the only reason that the mother org gets half a billion of free money from Google.
Carving out Firefox means Mozilla is dissolved as none of their other activities make any money.
Why can't Mozilla just be Firefox? I would donate to a group of open source developers, but I would not donate to a huge org chart tree of CxO's and VP's and non-technical administrators and administrators-of-administrators and assistants-to-administrators-of-administrators.
Well, I just explained you why. Firefox subsidizes the mothership which is doing a lot of non-Firefox activities. When you carve out Firefox, the mothership is gone.
What I'm asking is why can't Mozilla just drop all the non-Firefox side quests?
I'm guessing because they don't want to. Their "mission" is much larger than Firefox.
Everything they do has approximately zero value add to the community compared with the value add of having a legitimate alternative browser.
It’s like saying, yeah I solved cancer, but my vision is so much bigger than that! I also invented an Excel formula that allows shoe stores to advertise 2% less expensively to dogs.
We really need an alternative browser. We have one. But the people running it want to use your donations to do other things that are 100x less important.
Like many others, I would pay 20+€/year no questions asked, if and only if that money went to projects of my choosing (Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird) and they immediately and permanently halted work on user hostile projects such as ad tech.
If mozilla spun off firefox or otherwise reorganised their company to be about making firefox the best web browser possible, so I could trust that my money was going to development of the browser and not random nonsense, I would happily pay £5-10/month.
Yes; depending upon what governance and financial/business model they choose. Maybe Firefox to begin with. And of course minus the CXO and their entourage. I think it should go the Thunderbird way or something on those lines.
Survival of Firefox is critical (as of now more than Mozilla) for the open web to remain open.
I would fund one of the Firefox forks to become independent of Mozilla.
Should it need to become independent, OR is it going to be forced to become independent?
It seems Google won’t be able to pay to be the default SE in any browser: Safari, Mozilla, etc.
https://askpandi.com/pandipedia/judgement-against-google-pro...
So I guess Mozilla is scrambling to find new revenue streams since 88% of their revenue comes from it.
I won’t fund Mozilla because it’s been forced to operate fairly.
They should build a product that makes me want to pay for it.
I'd fund a browser that has the following:
1. Zero telemetry. I mean ZERO: remove all telemetry code from the codebase. They can ask me about features the old-fashioned way - surveys!
2. Focus on privacy and security. Put these to the top of the list.
3. Stop paying your CEO millions! Not worth it imo!
4. Stop with all the other Mozilla shit! I am interested in a browser (and perhaps an email client... I'll let you work on that too!). No more Pocket, VPN and all that other shite.
5. ZERO, I mean ZERO data capture at all! Nothing. Not a single bit except when someone clicks the link to download Firefox, you can capture their userAgent and whatnot. But the browser, Firefox, should not be capturing a single byte of data from me once installed (except perhaps a periodic version check and you can pass in the version like this: https://firefox.com/update?v=123.568).
6. For sync, allow me to sync an encrypted file to Dropbox, OneDrive, Local drive, Whatever.com. That way my passwords, bookmarks etc. can be sync'd from MY location that I control, not yours!).
7. Have a "Block all shady JS tactics" button. This would include fingerprinting, location and such. Perhaps you could send bogus, random data when it's asked for instead. That'd be fine too.
I think that's it :)
For a browser that did this, and was properly audited to prevent anything shady from creeping in, I'd pay $30 a year for it.
Edit: To clarify - I wouldn't pay the current Mozilla a single penny!
I agree with all of this with some minor modifications:
C-level compensation is not a problem unless it’s a problem. Linus Torvalds is compensated handsomely, and it’s okay, because he still delivers.
all the other Mozilla shit also isn’t a problem until it’s a problem. It’s a problem in Mozilla’s case because they neglect the browser.
I’ve switched to Orion by Kagi with their new Linux beta. It’s sadly WebKit, but with the increase in bullshit from Mozilla, the scales have tipped for me.
Crazy: The Orion iOS app has adblock.
> Zero telemetry.
So no crash logs or similar issues? Logging is seen as a subset of telemetry
I agree with most of your points but you missed out an important one: active lobbying to counteract or reduce google's dominance on the web. As long as Chrome reigns supreme, Firefox will always be playing catch up as Google can break the web for non chrome devices by regularly adding apis that are only in chrome and forcing devs to use them
I don't consider things like crash logs and debug stuff to be telemetry. This can easily be dealt with by a popup saying "want to upload the crash log?". It can just be a text file with a bunch of data.
I'm fine with that.
Telemetry to me is knowing what I'm doing, like clicking a button, using a feature etc. They record that shit! Also, sending data about my websites back to the mothership so they can sell ads (or sell to ad companies... same thing).
That's what I mean when I talk about telemetry.
I wouldn't fund Mozilla. I'd absolutely pay for Firefox, though, if it reverted some of the more problematic things they've been adding recently.
Why donate to tainted when you could to Ladybird
Maybe because one is a working browser whereas the other is not.
Exactly, and to make it easier, here is the donation link for Ladybird:
https://donorbox.org/ladybird
I'll start (Receipt #: 51816267).
As a Firefox user who is worried about he current browser landscape, I already donated to Mozilla in the past.
However as many others pointed out, there is no way to ensure that the donated amount is used specifically to fund Firefox.
I’ve used Firefox almost every day since it was released. I have way less issues with it than Chrome even though web developers never test their work with it.
I think an open web is critical to our society. I think Chrome is the new IE and that Google cannot be trusted with controlling the engine of essentially every browser besides Firefox.
I have disposable income and would pay every month to support it…but only if Mozilla had new management. I have zero trust in Mozilla’s management and feel that most money given to them would be wasted rather than used for browser development.
I would absolutely pay for the development of an independent, open source, privacy oriented and user friendly browser. I would never pay for the shitshow the Mozilla Corporation is.
I would find $5-$10 per month perfectly acceptable.
For now maybe donating to Ladybird [1] and Servo [2] makes more sense?
---
[1] https://ladybird.org/ [2] https://servo.org/sponsorship/
The best answer is an old graph of CEO compensation to Firefox market use.
Do you have one of these? I made a Google Sheet, but accidentally deleted it. (I could probably get a research LLM to recreate...)
A chart similar to this [1] was what I remember from a friend's time at Mozilla:
[1] https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
https://i.imgur.com/Oap8YeM.jpeg
There are plenty other open source softwares out there. I don't really understand why Mozilla needs so much money, I heard their revenues were quite high.
Why do you mean by "you"?
I bet there would be plenty companies who would give money to mozilla to improve their browser and at least answer their demands.
I don't really know the mozilla company as a whole and how it's managed, but in my view there might be some things that could be removed from mozilla, like trim the fat. I have the feeling a lot of marketing people have entered mozilla, and I don't like it.
I want an answer to the question "how many software engineers and UX people are involved in the process of developing firefox".
Just let users and especially companies tell mozilla what it wants in firefox, and go from there.
I don't know how many people are paid for the services like sync, pocket, VPN, etc, and if those services are profitable to keep them.
FYI, you can create polls on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
No, I don't think so at the moment. I send small amounts to Wikipedia, and similar projects, but Mozilla? I genuinely don't know what they do. There's a browser. It's decent enough, I suppose; but not compelling enough to use as an alternative to something else. OTOH, they do have wicked good documentation. That, I might fund. But, the browser and the other stuff, probably not.
> but not compelling enough to use as an alternative to something else
It's definitely compelling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43322922
I'm a fan of uBlock, but the argument's just not compelling enough for me. I may be dull, but Ads on the internet are like taxes to me; they'll just have to be paid.
Sites host ads, nobody else does it. They do it for pretty straight-forward economic reasons. If a site's too annoying, why visit it? Eventually, I hope it all settles down to a decent equilibrium.
You would be right if you were talking about ordinary ads, like those DuckDuckGo is using. I'm not blocking that. Most ads today track users and illegally collect huge amounts of information in order to psychologically manipulate you into buying what you don't need.
If they had a public and accountable org structure, but certainly not with their CEO's salary.
I've said this often, I hold them to a higher standard, but they're not even matching the standard of companies I respect.
Yeah, I would, as long as the $ went to just the web browser.
No, but I'd be willing to fund Firefox to become independent of Google.
I would like a way to donate to Firefox browser development directly.
I think the problem is deeper in the standard. Funding those who run after a train that is designed to be expensive to catch up with is wasted effort.
We need Web-next which would be clearly defined in proper primitives and features that don’t suck from the beginning and need no further extension. And a reference implementation of it in a clean way, even if not very performant. E.g. fine if it takes 50MB of RAM just to start and show a welcome tab. Implementors will optimize it later.
Why you need reference impl?
There are things you figure out when writing / playing with a reference implementation that aren't obvious from just the spec. For example: the W3C thought `box-sizing: content-box;` was a good idea, but Internet Explorer 3 implemented `box-sizing: border-box;` semantics which are, just, obviously better. (IE6 changed to context-box, but the W3C were introducing border-box in CSS3, which was then available in IE8.)
Seems like a lot of people here have never heard of LibreWolf. Check it out at https://librewolf.net/
I could see this becoming a fully independent open-source project, and then supporting that.
Not after they posted this: https://web.archive.org/web/20210108215449/https://blog.mozi...
It was the day I switched to Brave and never looked back.
And they removed the post after November... Oof
i don't get it, why was this specifically bad? Other than it has little to do with the browser/Mozilla projects
I can only speak for myself of course and for me it's bad because I don't need or want my browser to tell me what to think.
Slightly adapted from the original First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller
That is why this was (and is) bad. In the original version Niemöller mentions Communists, Socialists, trade unionists and Jews. The first three groups were (and are) at least as aggressive in their attempts to overturn society as the January, 6 protesters were so the comparison here is apt.The Mozilla article posted above doesn't advocate violence against any group (unlike Christians, Conservatives, anti-vaxers and Trump voters, who often do.) It's brief so I will post the four points that it does advocate for here, verbatim, since this is Hacker News and I assume no one will bother, otherwise:
Implying that Mozilla are seeking the extermination of undesirables like modern day Nazis is, at best, an uncharitable reading. Also note that all of these points except the third (amplifying factual voices over disinformation) are advocated by conservatives as well, and only because there is political capital in denying the existence of "misinformation" altogether on the part of a party that employs it so often and so effectively (as pointed out by the article.) No, the other side is not exactly the same, nor doing exactly the same thing.If I missed the part where Mozilla wanted to put anyone into mass graves, please point it out to me.
Here's a book for you to read: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13079982-fahrenheit-451
You misunderstand the comparison for some reason. Mitchell Baker called for an active suppression of not only those who partook of the January 6th riots but also those who were in any way connected to the political movement which gave birth to those riots as well as to 'amplify factual voices' which translates to 'propagandise for our ideology'. That is emphatically not what I want any technology vendor to do. If the likes of Baker get their way there'll be a need for samizdat [1] to circumvent the Baker Browser Brigade. As to whether the Baker Brigades may end up putting people in mass graves I'll leave for you to decide but if history is anything to go by the chance of that happening is definitely not zero. It happened in many countries which underwent revolutions based on the same ideology. They don't need to resort to mass murder to make the proposed censorship, political persecution and propaganda campaigns bad omens for their intentions.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/technology/samizdat
"amplify factual voices" means "amplify factual voices."
When you've gotten to the point that you interpret "fact" as "ideology", and the mere mention of "fact" leads you to believe a browser vendor wants to put you into a mass grave, then there is clearly no point in continuing conversation. I hope that someday you get over your martyr complex.
But on the way out, whatever happened to AOC's kill list, or the death camps the Covid cops were going to send everyone to, or the FEMA camps Obama was going to send everyone to? I'm sure Biden was going to do something too but all of these nefarious plots against Christians, Conservatives, white people and Trumpists are hard to keep up with. The way they try to clout-chase victimhood from the very demographics they've traditionally oppressed is getting kind of pathetic.
Good day.
> "amplify factual voices" means "amplify factual voices."
Die Partei, die Partei, die hat immer recht!
Und, Genossen, es bleibe dabei;
Denn wer kämpft für das Recht,
Der hat immer recht.
Gegen Lüge und Ausbeuterei.
Wer das Leben beleidigt,
Ist dumm oder schlecht.
Wer die Menschheit verteidigt,
Hat immer recht.
So, aus Leninschem Geist,
Wächst, von Stalin geschweißt,
Die Partei, die Partei, die Partei.
Let history be your guide to decide whether you are on the 'good´ side here. I think you are clearly mistaken but I also know that it is hard to break the spell, you'll have to do that yourself.
It suggests a major political player be deplatformed for frivolous reasons and spreads conspiracy theories about white supremacy.
What conspiracy theories?
That the candidate is a white supremacist. This is in the article linked above.
As popular as deplatforming is, I'm with Mozilla on this one: deplatforming isn't a particularly effective measure, compared to transparency and scientific inquiry.
Would begs the question of could. And, sadly, that just isn't really likely, by my view.
You could regulate a lot of this idea. But financially, it just isn't there.
Mozilla is fucked.
They should have gotten into privacy centric groupware a decade ago: thunderbird, collaboration office suite, calendar, tasks, etc all baked into Firefox ala nextcloud but with Mozilla polish.
I’d pay for that, instead they fuck around with VPNs and other stupid services that are harder to use than other products and not as good.
I’ll miss Mozilla when they’re gone but there will be no question as to why they’re gone.
You forgot Rust. That was also funded by old-Mozilla
I'd fund Mozilla to become independent of its management.*
* If I were filthy rich, of course
Yes. I would.
I would only donate for firefox specifically, when given the promise that it would be spent on development. Never to Mozilla with all the weird stuff they fund and work on.
Yes, $10 per month per user (me).
Wikipedia style donations. In fact Wikipedia should just create their own fork of Firefox.
Yes.
Zero
$100 dollars per year. The better question is what should that money be spent on. This being HN, I assume they would mostly just want engineers which I partially agree. I feel though Mozilla needs some funding to maintain and extend the docs they have as well as some money to lobby for a less chrome-dominant internet.
At the end of the day, it's pointless to have a beautifully engineered browser if 50-60% of the websites don't work because they were designed for chrome. That's the future of the web unless someone stands up to them.
Unlike IE, a well engineered browser won't cut it anymore. I only see two paths going forward from here:
future 1. google goes full baddie and severely nerfs ad blockers to the point where over 50% of the time you get ads. This is a problem with technical solution thus easy win for firefox
future 2. google nerfs ad blockers but not hard enough to sway browser usage towards firefox. Bad scenario, Google remains dominant and free to nerf the competition by making chrome specific apis or other shenanigans that they know most websites will adopt
Only when accepts crypto as donations.
It's funny you mention this.
Mozilla was one of the first to accept crypto donations. Then some 3 years ago an ex-Mozilla employee posted a rant on Twitter on how this effectively makes Mozilla super evil. It went somewhat viral and Mozilla stopped accepting crypto.
To me this is a great example on how useless virtue-signaling is.
Nothing was improved. The crypto world happily moves on and you won't be getting part of that money. What a great win. But I guess it's fine to receive fiat money of which you don't have a clue either about its source.
Current mozilla? No fucking way
Why is this not a poll? Yes, you can create polls on HN.
For those who don't know: https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Since it is mainly about how much money folks would contribute (the title processing stripped that).
The choices could be 0, $1-$5, $6-10 etc.
Nothing.
No, no, no. Since the iRobot fiasco Mozilla is dead to me. Now I'm just enjoying the (oh so well deserved) downfall.
Not at all. Mozilla is now controlled by hyper partisan political operatives. There should be zero intersection between partisan politics and my web browser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubtWZwtJCdw