Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What’s next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type “McDonald’s” before I can actually navigate there?
Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What’s next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type “McDonald’s” before I can actually navigate there?
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at?
I understand that my circumstances are unusual but I would absolutely pay $20 a month without a moment’s hesitation.
I would pay $50, but I’d really have to believe in the project.
It’s worth noting that presently mozilla earns $0 from my not using google, and not seeing sponsored tabs.
I thought Google pays (or paid?) Mozilla just to be the default engine out the box, regardless of whether you change it or not.
Another point is that it’s so easy to turn those things off (the sponsored shortcuts too) that I wonder if it would be worth the cost of launching an alternate version behind a paywall while making sure it works only for people who pay (which could be seen as DRM anyway, with potentially massive backslash). So I imagine the end result would not be that profitable (whether they decide to paywall it properly or not). Those who wanna donate and have no ads can do that already, those who want a cleaned up version of Firefox can have that and from neutral and independent third parties which I’d argue is better than if it were Mozilla who did it (and you can donate to Mozilla while using those too)… so I’m not sure it would make sense.
But it would make sense to have a donation pool specifically to fund Firefox development. That would be something interesting, considering Mozilla does other things besides Firefox. But I expect they don’t do that because they probably fear all donations will move there and they don’t want to lose funds for other things. We might need to create a separate organization if we want an independent fund for Firefox-based browsers.
You might be right about Googles agreement with Mozilla. I had assumed it would be based on the number of searches performed with a mozilla user agent but that’s just a guess.
I’m not sure why exactly but I just feel very uncomfortable with the idea of donating to Mozilla. I absolutely believe in the importance of Firefox’ existance, and if I felt I was contributing to that then I would donate. I think with the situation as it is making a donation would feel a bit like voting - my own contribution isn’t going to effect the outcome, and I don’t really agree with mozilla’s behavior anyway.
On the other hand, if Mozilla declared that they were going to spin off a separate org exclusively to develop and maintain firefox, and would have no ongoing relationship with google nor advertising of any kind, would focus on privacy, and were going to survive entirely on subscriptions, I feel like that’s something I could get behind and feel happy to contribute.