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Comment by leodriesch | Hacker News Reader

This just makes me worry a little bit that Firefox will take a similar route to Brave and introduce multiple streams of revenue into the browser, disguised as features that the user would want. E.g. Brave Rewards, Brave VPN, Sponsored Wallpapers.

These just clog up the interface and make it feel sketchy. I just want a normal FOSS browser, but I also understand the whole financing issue.

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Financing is only an issue because they make it one.

Mozilla has tons of money, but they just

1. spend too much of it, 2. on the wrong things, 3. and always want more.

Maybe if they would spend it on the right things, Google would stop paying?

I that case, Google not paying would be good for Firefox.

Sad to say but this thought has struck me too.

I’ve used Brave as my daily driver for years, and not once have I ever been even mildly inconvenienced by the optional BAT token feature. If it helps fund the browser, I’m glad- that’s better for me. I understand why people dislike it, but the outrage seems superfluous.

I largely lost my trust in Brave after the absolute shitshow where they were hard-redirecting domains globally that you hand entered through their affiliate link redirects - you'd enter example.com and the browser would be hardcoded to not load example.com

And they do need to do that. Browser makers having alternative revenue streams and reasons outside the browser-as-a-window to exist is necessary. One reason Firefox was losing market share is that it was just a window. Google, Apple, MS all provide a competitively good window but have other footprint on the web and can provide integrated services as a result.

One of the best parts about Brave is that they are trying to build independent revenue streams from things like integrated Jitsi features, an independent search engine and the like. Vivaldi builds in things like mail clients, RSS readers and a rudimentary notetaking tool.

In that vein, Pocket is a really good thing, and also helps combat link rot. The vocal Firefox userbase is moronically hostile to add-on services though, even if they are the ultimate key to Firefox's health.

http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...

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