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> How should browser development be funded?

One of the most common Mozilla complaints I see on the web is that you cannot fund Firefox development directly. People want to give money to it, but cannot.

Which makes sense, I guess. Anecdotally, Mozilla is by far the company I know with the most vocal users that get completely ignored.

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Come now, let us be realistic, no one and nothing funds browser development other than advertisement:

https://ladybird.org/#sponsors

That is provably false. Safari isn’t funded by advertising, neither is Orion, or LibreWolf, or any number of other smaller open-source browsers.

According to news stories, Apple received $20 billion dollars in 2022 from Google to make Google the default search in Safari.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...

Which is easy money that Apple uses for the company as a whole. They don’t make Safari because of Google’s money nor is it likely they would stop developing it if that money was no longer paid.

None of those appear to be advertising companies.

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