If you want to advertise, have a newsletter that people can opt into.
If you need money, allow people to pay for just Firefox.
Everyone gets angry and has an opinion of how this sucks. There's no way for this to work out for Mozilla. Nothing they do will work or make everyone happy.
Google won.
The VPN pop-up isn't an effort to provide funding for a dying browser. This is greed, pure and simple.
A single revenue source is incredibly risky and they're foolish if they aim to rely on search sponsorship revenue alone.
Since when is it greedy to want to raise capital for the expensive thing you're building? I think it's lazy to waste momentum and let it peter out into nothingness. At least this is an attempt to stand on their own legs.
Why does Mozilla draw this ire when literally every entity out there is hustling against the gradient of entropy? We single out Mozilla to lambaste.
The thing I'm angry about is that Mozilla isn't trying hard enough, and that when they do try, they're not playing smart. They're making bets that I perceive to be foolish - "ethical AI", "VR/metaverse", etc. These are not good synergies or paths to profitability. They're wasting their limited resources on things outside of their scope, that do not matter to their core mission, and that won't turn a profit.
As I see it, the web may not even have another 15 years left if AI takes over question answering, content generation, etc. Maybe it's foolish to even try to prop up Mozilla at this point. The world has moved on and left them in the dust.
Mozilla is simply an antitrust defense strategy for tech giants. Not a good place to be in as the gravity starts to move away from websites.
Correct, but there’s a better way to reduce that dependence:
- Stop bleeding money on bullshit unrelated to the core mission.
- Build up an endowment with that sponsorship money to the point that the income it generates is sufficient for their needs.