Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

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Looking in the internet I see that "94% of Mozilla revenues came through royalties received by search engines to be featured on its Mozilla Firefox browser" I am afraid that at some point Mozilla can be forced to comply and cripple ad blockers too.

Hopefully someone will decide to come up with a totally new browser. I remember times when BitKeeper told Linus that they will somehow try to charge for using their tool to keep Linux kernel source code (can't remember the story, but they managed to irritate Linus, delicately speaking).

Linus sat down and started coding... and created Git.

Unfortunately browser is a more complicated piece of software, but maybe this is also a problem we should solve.

Alternative sources of income are growing - the share of search engine deals was down to 86% last year, apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/rcc7m6/mozilla_aga...

Perhaps Mozilla should put the more advanced features and customisation options behind a monthly subscription. I know people dislike monthly subscriptions, but the browser is perhaps THE most important tool you can use. Maybe it's time we start valuing it properly.

The share of those profits that goes to Firefox development is far less than one might think, especially if one consider the many millions that goes to management of Mozilla foundation. Firefox would be a very different project if all the royalties received by search engines featured in the Firefox browser went to improve Firefox.

As long profits from Firefox does not goes back into developing Firefox, a monthly subscription wouldn't change things.

> Hopefully someone will decide to come up with a totally new browser.

The enormous complexity of browsers these days makes this almost impossible.

A better solution would be for Mozilla to direct all funding directly to Firefox and try to find other ways to monetize the browser.

Brave is trying one approach but now they are also tied to the underlying Chromium engine. I am not sure what the effort will be like to try to maintain a fork that ignores Manifest v3.

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