I wouldn't suggest an alternative funding model as much as guess what will it be maybe a year or two from now. Key quote from the article:

> Mozilla has launched Monitor, a data-breach reporting service; Lockwise, a password manager; and Send, a privacy-focused alternative to services such as WeSendit. It’s also beta-testing a VPN (virtual private network) service, which it hopes to market to privacy-conscious users.

Once these web apps mature a bit, I expect to see them in a free tier + a premium behind the subscription (with the core browser of course remaining free). My hunch tells me that's why you'll see this front-and-centered if you open mozilla.org:

> Firefox is more than a browser. Meet our family of privacy-first products

I guess they can also add a messenger, news client, a calendar, and an address book and call it Firefox Communicator....

As long as it starts in less than 2 minutes and don't push Windows machine into trashing, why not?

I wouldn't mind switching to Mozilla VPN.

All of the non-research grants were in 2006-2013. Has Mozilla stopped this policy of semi-random funding of external projects?

Some of these grants surprised me. For example, $270,000 for the translation and accessibility of the USA presidential election of 2012.

Just imagine not being from the US, donating to Mozilla so they improve Firefox, and they instead spend the money on translating the USA presidential election.

Right now my parent is getting downvoted but I think that there's a great truth in this comment:

A lack of focus generally hurts an organizations legitimacy in the eyes of it's donors.

Increasing the quality of a countries national elections isn't a goal I'd immediately assume to be part of Mozillas mission, so I'd be disappointed about such a project.

They could go the more transparent route and create a second organization for funding things their management likes.

... but I assume that such an organization would probably have some funding problems.

I've heard that you can't even donate any money for Firefox. All donated money are going to other projects.

AFAIK there does not seem to be a way to donate to rust development for the same reasons.

Maybe Mozilla should allow donors to specify the project they'd like to contribute to?

That would give them additional feedback on how the community evaluates their programmatic direction.

Sort of similar reasons; while this is true, it’s also that we aren’t sure how we’d allocate that money if we got it. Discussions about a possible foundation for Rust are ongoing, and these kinds of questions are a big part of why that hasn’t happened yet.

Part of the reason for that, I think, is that Firefox development is done by the Corporation, rather than the Foundation. The Corporation's can have far bigger income streams (i.e. the search engine deal), so it makes sense to make that responsible for the development of Firefox - even though that means you cannot donate to it.

Just to be clear:

I didn't want to imply anything political and the given example of improving elections isn't really a left- or right wing thing.

It's just hard for donors to understand how such a project might relate to the Mozilla brand.

Just to give a (hopefully) completely nonpolitical example:

If they would start to collect art with donor money it would arguably delute their brand in a comparable manner.

Yes, this is the reason I would never donate to Mozilla. They do way too many unrelated things. I only donate to smaller more targeted projects.

Do you mean their MOSS grants? They gave $50,000 to Godot this year.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...

> What do you suggest Mozilla do instead?

Mozilla should sell two products:

1) Storage a la iCloud

2) Payment processing a la Paypal

And for marketing purposes they should get into discovery of free/open web services, a la old school Yahoo.

As a web site builder, I don't want to have to manage credit cards. As a user, I don't want to have to trust random web sites with my credit card info. I also don't want to be redirected to Paypal, I just want a secure wallet that can be used on web sites with a drop in <paymentframe recipient="[email protected]" usd="8999" description="BonsaiThing Pro 1 year subscription" /> or similar.

As a web user, I want to be able to store my photos, downloads, music, documents, etc conveniently in a little cloud-synced folder. I want to be able to quickly give fine-grained access to different web apps to different parts of that space. Photo app wants to access my photos? Great. Github wants to access my repos? Fine. Photo app wants to access my repos? No.

And the discovery thing... There's a ton of free software out there. Mozilla basically has shut the door behind it. "Thanks for the install. Good luck finding other Free tools to use with it." They should be building a directory of other free software that can be used with Firefox. I should be able to use my Mozilla account to post reviews, to discuss new apps that are voted up, etc. That will allow enthusiasts to start engaging socially with the brand in a way that Mozilla (not Twitter or Apple or Facebook) can control the identities.

From there maybe there is some social identity service, but if it's just a way to engage the community—great. Like Hacker News is to YCombinator, Mozilla should provide a place for us to discuss and share web services.

If they want to get into search, that's great. Write a new shitty open source search engine that any web site can federate with. Use Google for now, but use that money to dig us out of the hole Google put us in.

I think storage is probably too costly to implement

But they can readily "become a PayPal" by bundling a digital ethereum wallet like metamask in the browser by default. Even if it's limited to max $50 / month, it could revolutionize the way we consume web content. And it also acts as an anonymous digital identity. Both ethereum and firefox enjoy trust by the community, that helps. But, we re more likely to see these from another browser like brave.

Could you explain a bit more? Why are you confident either would be profitable?

1) would be competing with google drive, onedrive and icloud, which are all funded by very big pockets and have other revenue sources. Furthermore, even dropbox has trouble competing with this.

2) Again competition by paypal, apple pay, google pay, ... . Also, banking business is quite far removed from what they are doing and hard to do while being a non-profit.

In both cases they’d have to bet on growing the Free Software pie. It would be the beginning of transitioning the company to trying to support the Open Web as an institution, supporting open source webservice developers on an equal tier with open source browser users.

No idea if that pie can realistically grown. But unlike their current strategy, it would be in line with their mission statement.

i like the gist of both of your ideas but i'm not sure they are feasible for firefox, since both are expensive services (in different ways) that are a bit outside the competency and mission of firefox.

i could see firefox providing hooks for 3rd parties to make those services easier to integrate however (and maybe charging a fee, e.g., to certify the 3rd party). that would fall squarely in their wheelhouse.

That’s the point though, to take on something with real cost (and real value), occupy the Open Source segment of that market, and then grow that segment.

Netscape was trying way back when. Mozilla probably has some PTSD from those days so I don’t have high hopes.

Someone else will eventually come in and be Mozilla on the services side. Might as well be Mozilla.

Integrate metamask by default in firefox before facebook pays them to integrate libra.

Integrating chunks of chromium code into gecko should massively reduce their maintenance costs. E.g spidermonkey is sub-par to v8 since so many years. If mozilla invested the money it invest into spidermonkey, into v8, the web would be faster for everyone. Should I repeat? The web would be faster for everyone. Nodejs servers too and also electron apps. We would also get new js features, faster. But mozilla doesn't seems to get the point of open source. They have a reinventing the wheel cognitive disease that is going to stay.

I, for one, am happy that there are multiple competing JavaScript engines. And that’s coming from someone who put in work to improve one you haven’t mentioned.

We don't need JS to get 2% more faster, the limits of those speed improvements were reached, web assembly combined with a compiled language could offer more speed.

I would like to see Firefox move faster in implementing good web APIs, like the lazy loading of images, push for HTML and CSS improvements(like let me customize the numeric text input arrows with css instead of forcing me to use a JS library) .

Maybe the Rust rewrite will make Firefox better achitected so you could have a node version based on Mozilla technologies or you could easily use the web assembly VM in your application without having to load the full Chrome code.

Wasn’t Netscape the case study of why you shouldn’t do a full rewrite?

AFAIK Firefox is not doing a full rewrite but incremental refactoring then attempting to swap components.

The unfortunate truth is that writing a browser is almost impossible because of the complexity, IMO we need a new version of the web that breaks compatibility, make everything strict(no longer ignore errors and guess a fix for them) no more 12 ways to center an element , for the legacy web we can use the existing engines

Write websites with Wasm, render UI with WebGL or something similar. Implement JavaScript as a compiler to Wasm (which runs on Wasmitself), implement HTML+CSS renderer as a library which runs on Wasm as well. So basically your browser need to implement Wasm and WebGL which sounds reasonable task. Well, that's simplification, of course, it need to implement some HTTP API like XMLHttpRequest, local storage API and so on, but it's manageable.

Here's an example of website written with Rust and rendering all UI to canvas: https://makepad.github.io/makepad/ it works right now and it's very fast and smooth.

IMO tech for next generation web apps is already here and it's great.

Implementing an html rendered that is compatible with all the css rules and it also implements all the extra workarounds that the current browser implement ( like handling illegal markup is not trivial) markup . I mean think about it, you hit invalid html markup and what do you do? You need to continue but now you need to check what Firefox or Chrome do for each case (missing end tags , P inside span, weird nesting of elements ) I would not want to implement a browser that is compatible with the current garbage.

There was also an article earlier this month or previous month from a Firefox developer about font/text rendering, in case you missed it rendering text in a way that works with all writing system is super hard.

Just compile Firefox or Chromium to Wasm and provide necessary adapters.

Well, I'm joking, of course, it's not that simple. But it should be possible in the end.

The point was to reimplement a browser. Imagine you want to make an ebook reader,this device needs not to eat too much batteries so you want to implement a basic css and html renderer not to re-skin Chrome.

Some ebook publishing platforms will perform checks and reject your epub(mobi or similar format) if is not respecting some strict rules, this makes it a pain if you have random html that works on web but you want to package it as epub because now you need to find all the bugs(or similar stupid DOM elements) and fix them as best you can.

Which is a lesson they learnt well. So they’re treating Servo as a research project, chunking it into libraries, and retrofitting those libraries into the Firefox mainline.

The point of opensource is to follow along with the leader?

It is to make synergies through code sharing. Let's fork the Linux kernel into a redundant implementation and take half kernel developers in order to slow down progress by a factor of two.

That's a bad comparison.

They're not forks. Firefox's is a separate implementation. The equivalent would be asking BSD to merge with Linux.

I suggest you take a look at Blink’s history ;)