My comment is targeted to the developers of Waterfox and Librewolf - they're already making a browser, so the hard part is done.
I'm wondering why don't they try to step it up further by selling a paid version alongside their open source product. What is the worst that can happen? Nobody pays for it and they continue making $0 just like they are happily doing now.
https://buymeacoffee.com/waterfox wasn't hard to find that. (they also make money from search). Put your money where your mouth is and donate.
Librewolf doesn't want to deal with the administrative overhead of donations - which if they'd only get a few donations makes sense. It likely costs several hundred a month just to hire the accountants and lawyers needed to get the paper work right (you can do it yourself at cost of time doing other things. Often you can find accountants and lawyers who will donate their services, but it is still several hundred dollars worth)
A paid version needs to offer something on top of it, which is usually in one way or another proprietary (such as a proprietary service).
Something like this is regarded as the enshitification process, so what typically happens is they (e.g. VC) want to do such after they lured in their users. Which Firefox has (or arguably: had), but Waterfox and Librewolf have not.
Good thought experiment.
It ain't the first drama or controversy with regards to Mozilla, who have had a long tendency which didn't occur recently (and included the time Eich was there). Nostalgia just makes people forget the bad.
And making a browser that's actually financially viable enough to pay for your time and effort without pissing off your user base because of paid features is even worse.
Especially in a crowded market, where we're arguing extensively about a browser that has 2.54% of the market share. Chrome (67%), Safari (18%), Edge (5.2%) [1]
Most of those also have a browser mostly as add-ons, bundling, ecosystem value, or trademark / brand name trojans.
Admittedly, if you're looking to make a browser, there's a lot of various prior attempts that remain in existence, yet have never really received that much attention. [2]
Personal preference is that somebody would implement a scripting language alternative other than Javascript. Anybody heard of TCL lately? It's supposed to be a browser scripting language alternative according to the w3.org specification [3] Really, almost anything other than Javascript as an alternative. Just for some variety.
sph|1 year ago
I'm wondering why don't they try to step it up further by selling a paid version alongside their open source product. What is the worst that can happen? Nobody pays for it and they continue making $0 just like they are happily doing now.
bluebarbet|1 year ago
The hard part is the rendering engine and security. Both are done by the maintainer of the upstream source, i.e. Mozilla.
bluGill|1 year ago
Librewolf doesn't want to deal with the administrative overhead of donations - which if they'd only get a few donations makes sense. It likely costs several hundred a month just to hire the accountants and lawyers needed to get the paper work right (you can do it yourself at cost of time doing other things. Often you can find accountants and lawyers who will donate their services, but it is still several hundred dollars worth)
Fnoord|1 year ago
Something like this is regarded as the enshitification process, so what typically happens is they (e.g. VC) want to do such after they lured in their users. Which Firefox has (or arguably: had), but Waterfox and Librewolf have not.
Good thought experiment.
It ain't the first drama or controversy with regards to Mozilla, who have had a long tendency which didn't occur recently (and included the time Eich was there). Nostalgia just makes people forget the bad.
araes|1 year ago
Especially in a crowded market, where we're arguing extensively about a browser that has 2.54% of the market share. Chrome (67%), Safari (18%), Edge (5.2%) [1]
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Most of those also have a browser mostly as add-ons, bundling, ecosystem value, or trademark / brand name trojans.
Admittedly, if you're looking to make a browser, there's a lot of various prior attempts that remain in existence, yet have never really received that much attention. [2]
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline...
Personal preference is that somebody would implement a scripting language alternative other than Javascript. Anybody heard of TCL lately? It's supposed to be a browser scripting language alternative according to the w3.org specification [3] Really, almost anything other than Javascript as an alternative. Just for some variety.
[3] https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/scripts.html
rat9988|1 year ago