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 structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts.
Why do I think this? Three reasons:
- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.
- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.
- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.
If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being.
Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.
I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support the devs but also fund other people accessing the same features that draw me to firefox in the first place.
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.
> fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was
Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].
(I’ve donated to Mozilla before and recently brought in friends who gave 6+ figures. I’ve been encouraging them to, and they’ve been successful so far in, charging back for those donations.)
> 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 priorities.
They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
> 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 contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.
However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.
That doesn’t seem unreasonable for a drive by PR to an enormous project. I contributed go an open source rust project a few years back and my first PR took weeks of back and forth. My second and following ones were merged in days.
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 $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.
As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.
I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.
I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.
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.
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 this, whether it’s 100k or 100M
The use for donations could be for a single person whose job is to check the upstream code for any antifeatures (telemetry, ads, product placements, online service defaults, Google as paid default search engine, etc.) not in the user's interest and revert them, as well as bundling any useful extension like uBlock Origin and verifying them.
That needs minimal effort compared to building a browser, because it doesn't involve doing any of the hard work, but just removing code that serves to line the pockets of those doing most of the work at the expense of the user.
I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.
"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 country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.
As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.
Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. 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). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc.
Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.
Idk about others, I’d pay one time for specific features done once and never touched again. Cause I can measure my suffering and workarounds costs, and I have a sense of efforts and ownership.
I’d even pay for forks of software that simply allow to modify their basic internals without providing any specific features, so I could augment them with programming without hard reveng (which often fails with no result). Like setting custom shortcuts in firefox.
But software doesn’t offer that. It wants me to pay monthly money for features I don’t really like on average, and they may take away anything in the next update, irreversibly. Just because someone felt like doing so, cause users can’t take away paid money in return.
I guess I wanted to say that “willing to pay” depends on what you are selling. And what “they” are selling is usually some no-guarantees always mutating fad rather than features you need.
There’s another nuance in supporting existing software even without new features. These costs are already way above all limits and must be forced down by re-designing text and image scrolling to where it should be, complexity-wise.
FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.
If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people here — myself included — would contribute. Being able to help out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time seems to have a magical effect on some people — again, myself included.
Herein lies the problem. Multiply this by 10 countries, add in accountant fees and legal fees, HCOL adjustments, and you’ve spent $20k very very quickly before you’ve written a line of code. You might suggest “only do this if there are more than X donations from a country”, but now I need to bookkerp this which again takes away from the core goal of writing code for Firefox. Maybe I hire a fractional accountant to manage it? Now there’s an annual overhead to cover.
How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things
It could be interesting to do this and raise money in the same way that Mozilla does -- by selling the default search engine. The difference being that all of the money would go to improving Firefox instead of all the random not-Firefox things Mozilla currently does with it.
The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big % of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and then to justify their job as the company crashes down from bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried to do.
Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).
Because historically that money has been squandered on C-suite salaries, irrelevant acquisitions (Pocket), and development that has nothing to do with the browser (like failing to make a phone OS).
Zen looks like Arc Browser, but Firefox-based and open-source. Exactly what I'm looking for!
The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy.
But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-working Mac version, but Windows version which is barely usable and no Linux support. The creators decided to focus on some sort of "AI agent" browser.
So I came looking for alternatives that would be cross-platform, have working adblockers, and preferably be open-source. There are some "Firefox transformation" projects like ArcFox, but they are clumsy to set up and usually only copy the general look, not the actually useful features like nested folders. There are extensions like "Tree style tabs" but they work a different way than Arc.
I've been using Zen for a few months now and love it. There are some rough edges (the article mentions how customizing it is confusing because multiple mechanisms affect different parts of the app). However, it's getting regular updates, and once it's set up, it's really a pleasure to use.
Apart from the elegant, minimalist user interface, I particularly like how it implements workspaces. It makes it super easy to switch between personal and work contexts.
Same here. My main gripe has been address in the latest update - the icon! The old stylised 'Z' just didn't look a like a browser icon when alt-tabbing, and I had to think about where my browser is, rather than instinctively going straight to it. At this point my brain only seems to accept that browser icons are circle-based.
The vertical tabs and side-by-side tabs are fantastic
I tried Sidebery for a couple of months off the back of multiple recommendations and while it has some decent features, I found it surprisingly lacking in terms of basic features like "close multiple tabs". I also found it regularly would semi-regularly prevent me from clicking on tabs which was frustrating until I restarted the extension or Firefox.
In the end I found good old Tree Style Tabs was better. I just wish it had an easier UX for creating named tab groups.
Have you compared the experience to using Sidebery? Every FF alternative I've tried comes up short to the power of what Sidebery can do with tree style tabs.
The Zen fork should be based on the Mullvad browser, which is itself a fork of Firefox, or the Tor Browser, same thing I guess. Or they should collaborate. It would be nice to have the UI improvements on an already more privacy focused fork.
I recently did this exercise as well. There are a lot of browsers not mentioned that you can find here,[0] but there's one big missing one imo.
The Tor browser is forked from Firefox to support the Tor Network. On top of the actual tor network it's filled to the brim with novel and unique privacy enhancing features. Mullvad (the VPN company) recently did a partnership with Tor to create the Mullvad Browser.[1] It's exactly the Tor browser but without the onion protocol part. Instead it just has all the anti-fingerprinting and privacy enhancing features.
I ended up going with that browser as it's the strongest privacy-focused Firefox fork option
Tangent, how does “mullvad” sound to native speakers (and non-natives too)? I can’t tell why, but it feels like such an unfortunate combination of phonemes that I avoid even looking into it subconsciously. Can barely force myself to pronounce it, is that just me?
To native Swedish speakers it will look and sound like just another common Swedish word. And in the context it will even sound like a relevant choice of name.
/me is Danish, and the Danish equivalent would be ‘muldvarp’.
> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant.... According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page
So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement).
Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer.
I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I was just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.
Yeah "donations" is not the right word, it's more like "sponsorship"... It does work though, I haven't heard of CubeSoft before I used Floorp and I have one of its PDF tools installed now. This is how advertising should work, not the tracking ads Mozilla (and idc if they're trying to make it "privacy-preserving" or the data aggregated, it's still tracking), Google, and co. want
I take your point, but it is worth noting that gifts, services, and goods are often exchanged for money and termed "donations" when the dollar amount greatly exceeds what one would normally pay, with the understanding that the proceeds go to a certain cause/group/organization.
Our local grocery duopoly (Australia) not only charge for placement, but are now demanding that suppliers pay for transport between the supermarkets central and regional distribution warehouses, but will only take delivery centrally.
That's on top of some products (eg bread) being actually stocked on the shelves by the supplier.
Basically supermarkets are just local distribution warehouses with everything else either paid for by the supplier or the purchaser (eg shelf picking/checkout).
The ecosystem of forks is currently healthy but what concerns me is a lack of Firefox browser support leading to lagging in standards support over time as the browser goes out of fashion for ideological or marketing reasons that this article touches upon.
All forks depend on a strong Firefox base and no fork seems to do heavy lifting in terms of web standards, or as a prioritized feature. Instead, they focus on enhancing UX or adhering to open source ideals, but this does little to improve the core browser. :-/
It remains to be seen if we’ll have a new Phoenix moment out of Firefox…? Or does that future belong to Ladybird?
Firefox seems to be good enough - is there anyone who wants to fork Firefox out of a frustration over how it handles some web standard and a feeling that they could do it better?
Hard forking a browser and implementing all future features on your own is daunting enough that even Microsoft - a company with more engineering resources than all but a handful of others, and for whom having a branded browser is existentially important - decided not to do it and just to reskin Chrome.
So I expect that any truly new browser comes not out of a desire to improve Firefox or Chromium, but from an independent, not economically useful, hacker-driven desire to create something cool. Either Ladybird or someone's RIIR project.
Microsoft contributes a lot of web standard implementations upstream to Chromium. They are not just letting Google do all the work as your comment makes it sound like. They could have chosen to do the same with Firefox, which means the reason to fork Chromium and not Firefox had other reasons.
Hmm, yes. My point was that there’s no pressing need for this in forks because Firefox is (still) pretty alive and well and they strongly depend on the important standards work being done there.
But in a future where a critical mass of people moved to forks because they were dissatisfied with Firefox? I think the community is too small and fragmented across forks for that.
Firefox has made a few headlines over the past year for privacy-unfriendly moves. That's the context you're missing, despite it being in some of the first sentences of the linked article.
> Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take it for a test drive.
Are the others that much more descriptive in their features on their website?
IMO Waterfox being around for 14 years warrants a bit of a closer look as to why it’s still around after so long…
FWIW, I too bounced after looking around the website and not seeing any concrete information about how it's different from upstream (long before reading this article). Maybe you could add a short bullet point list right on the home page, it shouldn't require much work?
well, a browser owned (and de-owned) by an internet advertising company is enough for me not to ever touch that. We already have a chrome, which is one of the reasons we're in this mess to start with.
Well, System1 was/is a search aggregator. That falls under ad-tech but at the time no-one cared about the former and only the latter.
Lots of browsers make search engines and lots of search engines make browsers, so it made (and still does) make a lot of sense.
I understand seeing ad-tech and immediately expecting the worst, but a quick Look into what it actually meant and I never understood why people were so in arms about it?
Yeah, I'm pretty uncomfortable with Waterfox because of that episode. In the HN thread the creator responded to complaints about this privacy-unfriendly turn by saying that they "tried to stay away from branding Waterfox as" being about privacy or user control. That's fine, but an immediate turnoff for me even now that the advertising company is apparently out of the picture.
If Waterfox isn't about privacy or user control, who knows where it gets sold next or what the dev adds to it next?
Edit: I just realized that the dev is the one who wrote the grandparent comment. Maybe you have an explanation that would help?
I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites. One person complained that their meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).
I can confirm that. I switched to using LibreWolf as a work-dedicated browser parallel to Firefox Developer Edition.
In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following:
- no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off)
- timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer)
- login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox)
- WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)
I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.
Unchecking resistFingerprinting in the settings disables these. You can also use the new firefox FPP settings to enable most if RFP stuff but opt out of specific stuff like dark mode, timezone, etc. You can even add per-site exceptions.
I used to have terrible time with forgetting my keys, or letting the cleaner in when I wasn't home. Then I just stopped locking the door and never looked back. It's so convenient and saves me precious time. What can I say, it just works!
Are you not using librewold-overrides.cfg to disable/enable features that you want/need? All of the things you mentioned are just flags you can set in the file to turn them on or off.
https://librewolf.net/docs/settings/
I've run into this (it's in Librewolf, but is more obnoxious in Mull/IronFox on Android where I actually use this), where the privacy protections prevent the Jackbox games like Drawful from sending the contents of a drawing to Jackbox's servers. Both browsers don't fail - they just upload a rainbow pattern every time.
I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for the big blue "E" in the bad old days.
Can definitely attest to this. Librewolf is my daily and I run it pretty aggressively (uBO options/lists, strict blocking DNS, etc) and sometimes I'm left scratching my head where things break. Recently had an aha-moment that felt triumphant when disabling the limit cross-origin referers, as silly as it sounds. Alas, I guess I prefer it this way.
That is, as so many things with tech, a matter of giving proper UI for humans as much priority as the feature itself.
It would be solved with something as simple as a "Privacy Blocks" drop-down menu that was prominently shown in the browser, that could visually warn about which feature is being accessed by a website (WebGL, UTC time, scripting...), and that let the user enable/disable that feature in that specific website with just 1 click.
A bit of telemetry (albeit kinda contradictory in this case) would allow to collect data on which sites tend to require which permissions, and proactively warn the users, like "Hey it seems most users of Google Calendar .com tend to disable time clock privacy; would you like to do so too?", that'd remove a lot of worries from users upon accessing an important site and not knowing which privacy settings might be breaking it.
I also ran into this, but it was manageable (after a bit of research of course).
Would love to see a "startup"-Dialog, where they explain these features in a bit of detail with a choice of three modes...
Finger printing and privacy protection:
- [x] Full - best for privacy (default)
- [ ] Moderate - most features work, but may break some websites
- [ ] Off - just behave like normal Firefox
The last option would be for firefox users who just want a browser working like before. Although this might not be the target audience, I think this could support funding.
However, I also ran into the issue of Librewolf deleting ALL cookies by default when it closes. I would also love to have Domain whitelist for this:
- Delete all cookies except the following websites: a.org, b.com, c.net
Oh, and another tip: Don't go to there matrix channel with your first class account, they have a spam problem and Element is nowhere near prepared for it with any settings to prevent getting spam invitations. Once you were in, you get spam invitations all the time.
Librewolf is pretty aggressive. That would be ok if it was just defaults that you could disable if you wish but I couldn't find out how. Too opinionated.
Amazon equivalent in Poland - Allegro was notoriously blocking me in Librewolf; I was served puzzle captcha or blocked from browsing at all due to "suspicious activity" 98% of the time.
Librewolf Lite / Light REALLY should be a release too. Less aggressive, more friendly to people who are moving towards a more secure experience. E.G. let session managers work properly, allow that 10 year old password database in the browser to be used during the 30 year transition* (I exaggerate, but until there's a bulk import tool to MIGRATE) to a stronger password manager. Generally don't enable the tiny fingerprint gains (~1/20th of world population, but they can already fingerprint that from the IP you're using and/or ping ANYWAY, so just leave the damned time zone on!) which have a huge trade off in annoyance for the end user.
Yes, I want a 'de enshitified' version of Firefox. Not a browser for someone trying to write impactful news stories who needs to follow a strong opsec.
I'm not convinced that "trusting the browser about the timezone it says it's in" is a dark pattern when it's done in service of scheduling meetings that the user directly requested.
The biggest issue with forks, which is pointed out in the article, is Mozilla still does the heavy lifting. None of the forks have the resources (and probably interest) to fully fork Firefox and make it their own codebase to maintain.
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
These projects to my knowledge do not release patches by themselves but as you said, rely on Mozilla's work - they take Firefox, strip it out of few features - namely one's that raised concerns, toss in additional stuff from other projects and include own branding. So perhaps these are more "customized derivatives" or "spin-offs"?
Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary. Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.
Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.
Readit News
The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
Why do I think this? Three reasons:
- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.
- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.
- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.
Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.
I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
Deleted Comment
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.
Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].
(I’ve donated to Mozilla before and recently brought in friends who gave 6+ figures. I’ve been encouraging them to, and they’ve been successful so far in, charging back for those donations.)
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
Dead Comment
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 priorities.
They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
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 contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.
However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.
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 $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.
As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.
I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.
I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.
I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve this, whether it’s 100k or 100M
That needs minimal effort compared to building a browser, because it doesn't involve doing any of the hard work, but just removing code that serves to line the pockets of those doing most of the work at the expense of the user.
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 country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.
As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.
Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. 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). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc.
Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.
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.
I’d even pay for forks of software that simply allow to modify their basic internals without providing any specific features, so I could augment them with programming without hard reveng (which often fails with no result). Like setting custom shortcuts in firefox.
But software doesn’t offer that. It wants me to pay monthly money for features I don’t really like on average, and they may take away anything in the next update, irreversibly. Just because someone felt like doing so, cause users can’t take away paid money in return.
I guess I wanted to say that “willing to pay” depends on what you are selling. And what “they” are selling is usually some no-guarantees always mutating fad rather than features you need.
There’s another nuance in supporting existing software even without new features. These costs are already way above all limits and must be forced down by re-designing text and image scrolling to where it should be, complexity-wise.
How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things
Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).
The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy.
But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-working Mac version, but Windows version which is barely usable and no Linux support. The creators decided to focus on some sort of "AI agent" browser.
So I came looking for alternatives that would be cross-platform, have working adblockers, and preferably be open-source. There are some "Firefox transformation" projects like ArcFox, but they are clumsy to set up and usually only copy the general look, not the actually useful features like nested folders. There are extensions like "Tree style tabs" but they work a different way than Arc.
Apart from the elegant, minimalist user interface, I particularly like how it implements workspaces. It makes it super easy to switch between personal and work contexts.
I highly recommend it.
The vertical tabs and side-by-side tabs are fantastic
In the end I found good old Tree Style Tabs was better. I just wish it had an easier UX for creating named tab groups.
Dead Comment
The Tor browser is forked from Firefox to support the Tor Network. On top of the actual tor network it's filled to the brim with novel and unique privacy enhancing features. Mullvad (the VPN company) recently did a partnership with Tor to create the Mullvad Browser.[1] It's exactly the Tor browser but without the onion protocol part. Instead it just has all the anti-fingerprinting and privacy enhancing features.
I ended up going with that browser as it's the strongest privacy-focused Firefox fork option
[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/firefox/
[1] https://support.torproject.org/mullvad-browser/
/me is Danish, and the Danish equivalent would be ‘muldvarp’.
So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement).
Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer.
I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I was just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.
It’s not tax deductible, though (and even if you didn’t get anything in return, I don’t think Floorp is a registred charity anyway).
Made me realize I never deduced all the open source project i gave to tho.
That's on top of some products (eg bread) being actually stocked on the shelves by the supplier.
Basically supermarkets are just local distribution warehouses with everything else either paid for by the supplier or the purchaser (eg shelf picking/checkout).
All forks depend on a strong Firefox base and no fork seems to do heavy lifting in terms of web standards, or as a prioritized feature. Instead, they focus on enhancing UX or adhering to open source ideals, but this does little to improve the core browser. :-/
It remains to be seen if we’ll have a new Phoenix moment out of Firefox…? Or does that future belong to Ladybird?
Hard forking a browser and implementing all future features on your own is daunting enough that even Microsoft - a company with more engineering resources than all but a handful of others, and for whom having a branded browser is existentially important - decided not to do it and just to reskin Chrome.
So I expect that any truly new browser comes not out of a desire to improve Firefox or Chromium, but from an independent, not economically useful, hacker-driven desire to create something cool. Either Ladybird or someone's RIIR project.
But in a future where a critical mass of people moved to forks because they were dissatisfied with Firefox? I think the community is too small and fragmented across forks for that.
Maybe Ladybird indeed then…
IMO Waterfox being around for 14 years warrants a bit of a closer look as to why it’s still around after so long…
(Just to avoid c+p massive blocks of text)
And yea, I did use waterfox like a decade ago.
Lots of browsers make search engines and lots of search engines make browsers, so it made (and still does) make a lot of sense.
I understand seeing ad-tech and immediately expecting the worst, but a quick Look into what it actually meant and I never understood why people were so in arms about it?
If Waterfox isn't about privacy or user control, who knows where it gets sold next or what the dev adds to it next?
Edit: I just realized that the dev is the one who wrote the grandparent comment. Maybe you have an explanation that would help?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343476
In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer) - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)
I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.
For example, my config is at https://codeberg.org/accelbread/config-flake/src/branch/mast...
It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy.
Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside.
The time zone thing causes confusion with office 365, as well. It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch me off guard once.
The default should be privacy if you install a browser that focuses on privacy.
It’s a position, not a fetish.
I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for the big blue "E" in the bad old days.
It would be solved with something as simple as a "Privacy Blocks" drop-down menu that was prominently shown in the browser, that could visually warn about which feature is being accessed by a website (WebGL, UTC time, scripting...), and that let the user enable/disable that feature in that specific website with just 1 click.
A bit of telemetry (albeit kinda contradictory in this case) would allow to collect data on which sites tend to require which permissions, and proactively warn the users, like "Hey it seems most users of Google Calendar .com tend to disable time clock privacy; would you like to do so too?", that'd remove a lot of worries from users upon accessing an important site and not knowing which privacy settings might be breaking it.
Would love to see a "startup"-Dialog, where they explain these features in a bit of detail with a choice of three modes...
Finger printing and privacy protection:
- [x] Full - best for privacy (default)
- [ ] Moderate - most features work, but may break some websites
- [ ] Off - just behave like normal Firefox
The last option would be for firefox users who just want a browser working like before. Although this might not be the target audience, I think this could support funding.
However, I also ran into the issue of Librewolf deleting ALL cookies by default when it closes. I would also love to have Domain whitelist for this:
- Delete all cookies except the following websites: a.org, b.com, c.net
Oh, and another tip: Don't go to there matrix channel with your first class account, they have a spam problem and Element is nowhere near prepared for it with any settings to prevent getting spam invitations. Once you were in, you get spam invitations all the time.
A user.js entry may help. user.js runs on startup of Firefox/Librewolf, so keep this in mind for your usage application.
the setting is: "privacy.resistFingerprinting", as in: user_pref("privacy.resistFingerprinting", true);
Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.
Yes, I want a 'de enshitified' version of Firefox. Not a browser for someone trying to write impactful news stories who needs to follow a strong opsec.
I parse this not as LibreWolf breaking anything, but instead as,
"LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are working against broken, dark-pattern websites"
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary. Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.
Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.
The effort for entry is quite high for those...