[macspoofing]

> What Mozilla is good at ...

Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.

[gkoberger]

They do work on it. A lot.

But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.

[viraptor]

> You can't charge for it

They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a subscription. But they don't let me.

[enlyth]

Doesn't Firefox make them the lion's share of their profits just from the Google payments?

If they let Firefox atrophy to the point it will have no market share, let's see how that works out for them

[Wowfunhappy]

> But the issue is browsers don't make money.

What?! Browsers might as well be money printers! Have you heard how much money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari?

The higher Firefox’s user numbers, the more money Mozilla can make from search engine deals. Conversely, if Mozilla keeps trying to push a bunch of other initiatives while Firefox languishes and bleeds users, Mozilla will make less money.

If you don’t like this form of revenue… well, I don’t know what to tell you, because this is how web browsers make money. And trying other stuff doesn’t seem to be working.

[tigroferoce]

You can and you should. There are people that are happy to pay for email, for search, for videos, for news, for music. I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.

The idea that software is free is completely wrong and should be something that an organization like Mozilla should combat. If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.

[beej71]

They could make it so we could subsidize development like with Thunderbird.

[account42]

That should not be a problem for a nonprofit which the Mozilla foundation supposedly is.

[autoexec]

I might be in the minority here, but I actually like Thunderbird.

[dabockster]

I've daily driven Thunderbird for over a decade. You have very few options for having a single program manage multiple email accounts outside of Outlook and Thunderbird anymore. Maybe Apple Mail on Mac (and whatever Microsoft is preloading on Windows these days), but that's it.

[mmooss]

I assume they work on Firefox 10x more than anything else. Is there data?

[glenstein]

>Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed 12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.

[roenxi]

> They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.

Is that comparison supposed to make their management of the code base seem better or worse? Chrome, Linux and Rust are arguably colossi in their niches (Rust having the weakest claim). Firefox's niche is Chrome's and it doesn't do that well. It used to be that at least Firefox had it's own little area with more interesting extensions but obviously that was too hard for them to handle - yes I'm still grumpy about ChatZilla.