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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Firefox, please ask on first launch — as you do for telemetry — if the user is ok with ads. The default being opt-out and later on a “sorry, we hear you, this was a mistake” doesn’t sound good.

Mozilla Corporation, please figure out a way for users to directly donate to support Firefox. Not everybody realizes or knows that the donations on mozilla.org go to Mozilla Foundation and not to Mozilla Corporation. Not everybody knows that Firefox is primarily funded by a search partnership agreement with Google. The direct donations to Firefox may not be a lot, but I’m sure it could pay for at least one programmer a month, if not more.

Mozilla Corporation, expand the availability of Mozilla VPN to all the countries that Mullvad offers its services in. Keeping it restricted isn’t helping anyone much.

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Mozilla's "default search provider agreements" are worth upwards of $400 million a year. Mozilla Corporation doesn't need any more money, but they're a corporation...

Mozilla is sitting on around a billion dollars in assets and continues to have revenue around $400 million a year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio...

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

Mozilla has had weasely language regarding their advertising agreements since at least 2014 when they announced their "ongoing search strategy," saying that Yahoo was going to be their "long term strategic partner." They then breached their contract with Yahoo in 2017, presumably because Google offered them a deal they couldn't refuse to be reinstated as the default to coincide with the Firefox Quantum release.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-feature...

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/promoting-choice-and-inn...

If you look back on Mitchell's words about protecting Mozilla's independence from, e.g. Google: https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

... it would seem that 14 more years of eating out of Google's hands(with ever growing sums) has softened their resolve.

  "The things that make Mozilla and Firefox a success [are] the product, and the community that cares about it."

  First and foremost, we would protect those things," Baker said. "If the protection of those things would come into conflict with Google, or any of our search partners, we would opt for the community who built Firefox and love Firefox."

... would that it were so.

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