Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives.
Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would.
In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process.
If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee.
Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole.
That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla.
The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.
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 complete.
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 more valuable product. It is where we spend most of our day in. It is what we use to work and create value for companies we work at. So 10M people at $5/mo should not require such a stretch of imagination. The only question is is Firefox that good as a browser right now, and what would need to change?
Besides what is the alternative for Firefox? What good does its leverage in web standards group bring it? Even at the price of free, it is losing tens of millions of users every year and the death spiral of user attrition will drive its market share to the ground eventually. It clearly signals a need for a radical turn.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-millio...
This is a competitive market. There are reasonable alternatives. Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0.
(It's actually not, you're paying with slightly less personal data for Firefox than the alternatives, and there are substantial externalities like the effects of monoculture, but none of that is going to change the big picture.)
Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay, but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled, and will abandon your product when it changes in any way they don't like.
The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors, in order to add switching costs and reduce the fidelity of alternatives. And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web.
Good luck with that.
I believe I am arguing that we underestimate the willingness of people to part with their money when there is a right product.
> Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0.
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.
>Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay,
I think you are speculating, so let me speculate as well. If Firefox does not make a radical turn, it will become irrelevant in 3-5 years.
> but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled
With YT Premium, the one thing I request is that the one killer feature that I pay for (no ads) works reliably. So yes, I can agree that users will feel massively entitled to get what they paid for, but that is up to Firefox to define and control.
> The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors
I agree! Firefox lost a lot of the product innovation and leadership mindset it had until roughly 2010-2011. Bringing that back would help (and the right business model could do it).
> And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web.
How does making Google a default search engine in Firefox help that mission? Firefox should do it because it believes Google is the best default choice for their users and the open web, not because it gets paid to do it (if compatibility with its mission is what Firefox is striving for).
Yes, because de facto YouTube has no viable competitors, so I am not feeling that analogy.
If I want to watch YouTube videos specifically, I have to go to YouTube. People don't use YouTube because they necessarily like the experience of how YT does things, they use it because it has the content users want. Browsers aren't like that. Both Firefox and Chrome on a high level provide the exact same content.
Sidenote: adblockers and such are nice, but, as others have pointed out alread, non-tech savvy users won't bother. And the situation on mobile devices and smart TVs (which account for a growing percentage of YT consumption) have a pretty non-simple adblocker story (or non-existent, if we are talking about using native YT app on a mobile network).
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 tech savvy.
While some tech savvy folks may choose to pay rather than use such add-ons is one thing, but the "great unwashed masses" don't have information about such add-ons, perhaps encouraging them to purchase something they wouldn't purchase if there was more perfect information availability in the market.
I'm not claiming that's the case, but it seems a reasonable supposition.
An excellent point. I mostly watch YouTube on a computer with ad blockers, and I also have a DNS-based ad blocker (Pi-hole). And the combination does block many ads, but other add-ons are required to block the video window ads as well.
I don't use YouTube enough on non-general purpose computer devices enough to care about that. As such, I didn't consider that as a reason to pay for Premium.
Thanks for expanding my view on this!
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.
A reasonable point. And I don't necessarily disagree.
Although "Video of stuff I want to look at" may be more compelling than "some icon I click to view the intarwebz," when they see essentially the same thing unless they take specific steps to block ads/tracking.
And that goes double for Android phone users.
My hypothesis was orthogonal to your thesis, but I agree that the data I outlined certainly supports yours.
They could build themselves to be the independent alternative to conglomerates.
They could be the alternative, offering services above and beyond the browser. I think their VPN service has been a modest success for them. I'd love for them to have moved into the same space as say, 1Password and other cloud based services of that nature. They are the independent 3rd party that works on all platforms. That is what I think their position could be. They're a trusted entity with known good track record of caring about privacy and their users, why wouldn't they move into markets where its a natural extension of this is a win?
And what does the world look like if Brave "wins" (meaning becoming Google size)? Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them.
Worth noting is that people would run ad-blockers even if all ads in the world are privacy-respecting. Users simply do not want ads on the web pages and eating the bandwidth.
> if Brave "wins" […] Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them
No, Google’s business model is gathering humanity’s largest hoard of data and monetizing that through targeted advertizing. Brave doesn’t show any of their most traditional ads unless the user explicitly opts in, and then it doesn’t come with comparable tracking.
I have what looks like a promotion for Crypto.com, Binance, Gemini and FTX.us in Brave browser, on default settings even though I never turned them on. For few of these I never heard and I certainly do not have any interest in crypto. Not sure why these would even belong in a web browser on default settings unless there is some kind of a deal/partnership going on?
Both Google and Brave have the same business model. They make money when a user clicks on an ad.
The execution may differ and maybe only because Brave is still new and relatively small and did not feel the same kind of shareholder pressure Google withstood for the last 20 years. That is why I said, imagine a world in which Brave "won". It would not be the same company it is now (compare Google from 2000 to Google today).
Brave Talk and Brave News are ad-funded as well but I haven't tried them so it's hard to say.
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 off by default.
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.
As far as web ads go, a lot of people's objection to them is not seeing ads (though the ads themselves can obviously be very invasive and bothersome), but to things like tracking and fingerprinting, which the company is adamantly against. The attempt is to have ads, but also have privacy, which IMO is the correct move. It's not like we can run everything on subscriptions.
> Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.
This is not exactly true. They have separate functions for an adblocker, an ad delivery system that's entirely separate from the websites you visit, and a tipping system for sending BAT to creators.
I'm not terribly fond of crypto, so I use Brave as essentially a degoogled Chromium with a built-in adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since it's not an extension) and is available on mobile, and who run an independent end to end encrypted sync service. It's pretty nice.
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.
10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue as 200M users monetized with a Google deal. Now, would 5% Firefox users convert to paid users is a different question. If not, then perhaps Firefox as a product (or as an idea) may not be as good. But I think they would, and even if the percentage is lower, it would at least set Firefox free. And that is a good position to be in for any company.