Preservation of Digital Art, Firefox blunders (again) and Channel decisions - Exclusive Weekly patroncast - Episode 47

The answer is not easy, that’s for sure... but I think they don’t do anything good these days... maybe offer paid services (such as Mozilla VPN for instance), or other paid services, is a good way to go (ProtonMail does thus, successfully I think : paid users help building a service that can be used for free) ! Maybe change Mozilla to a complete non-profit organization (not as a company anymore) is another way to go, to reduce some taxes ? They also could make a "pro" version of Firefox for businesses, easier to maintain, and with technical support for extended periods of time (a lot of Linux companies - Redhat, SUSE, Canonical and many others - do this) But heading towards advertising and data collection is not a good way : it is against their own message about privacy, it makes them look just like other companies such as Google or Microsoft. And no, not all browsers have ads integrated... I think quite the opposite : Chrome does not really have ads in the browser I think, it collects data for Google, which then makes ads.

What is Firefox supposed to do then? Offer a paid version? How are other browsers development being paid for? They all have ads in them, no?

narF

Hi again :) About Firefox, since I encountered several crashes recently on OpenSUSE, and with their changes you talked about, I decided to do what a lot of people do : I decided to give Vivaldi a try... It hurted me to switch to a chromium-based browser (and not completely open-source I think) , but it is also refreshing : their Android version is way more complete than Firefox (at least on tablets), their desktop version innovates (tab stacks for instance), and their sync service seems to encrypt your bookmarks... But it hurts to leave Firefox, one of the only non-Chrom(ium) based browsers. But as you said, they don’t go on the right track right now !