>I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding.

I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises.

If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go.

Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be.

I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.

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gldrk 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets.

All this shows is that Mozilla is even less efficient than Wikimedia! There are projects such as Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses. Of course Rust has a selling point and Firefox doesn’t, but whose fault is that really?

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glenstein 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies.

Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox.

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gldrk 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains.

Point taken. Rust + LLVM is almost half of Firefox though, and probably at least equivalent in terms of necessary skill. It is also not clear how much of that code could be removed without much loss of functionality.

>Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies.

This is called having a selling point. If Firefox offered anything besides not being Chromium, people would work on it without getting paid by Mozilla.

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glenstein 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There's no such thing as a developer tooling subsidy for a web browser.

	▲	gldrk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Okay. KDE is absolutely comparable to Firefox according to https://openhub.net/p/kde. Tiny fraction of the expenditure. I’m not even sure what their selling point is, but it’s a lot better than Mozilla’s.

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aloha2436 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses

You could argue LLVM is technically of a similar level of complexity, but operating a browser requires far more actual business than developing a compiler.

More to the point, those organisations get enormous amounts of "free" labour in the form of contributions from large corporations that benefit from them, in a way that Firefox absolutely does not.