@cwebber Uhhh

Ads on the front page I guess, via the pocket acquisition.

Their reselling of Mullvad.

@ari Mozilla really, really shouldn't be in the business of overselling privacy through VPNs. While VPNs do mask your IP address to sites you visit, they're still a central target for surveillance...

It's really unfortunate that "a VPN is (mostly) another ISP" is not well understood...

@cwebber Oh absolutely, and they completely know better. The only good VPN ad is the one Tom Scott did where he was like "A VPN company tried to sponsor a video but they wouldn't let me actually explain what a VPN does and what it does and doesn't protect against, so I'm just going to explain this anyway and not mention the VPN company."

@cwebber @ari Mozilla's VPN is really Mullvad though. At least in the US, VPNs are at least "a better ISP".

@soapdog @cwebber Apparently not enough. Mozilla's been terrified of losing their revenue stream there for years, especially in light of their now approaching rounding error market share.

@soapdog @ari Hopefully that's what is meant then. Firefox *is* where Mozilla's focus should be.

Historically lots of weird moves to try to find new "products" by Mozilla though that haven't seen to gone anywhere.

Firefox is really important. I hope that's where the focus stays!

@cwebber @soapdog I agree, but "New focus on economics. Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges."

makes it sound like they're either going to pull a Netscape and try to sell Firefox, or they're going to focus on the things they charge money for like the VPN.

@ari @cwebber @soapdog

>pull a Netscape and try to sell Firefox

I almost wonder if that would work. Obviously it wasn't great for Netscape, but back then there was a lot of competition from free browsers. Opera and Internet Explorer were (for their time) very competent browsers, while the other, less featured browsers were still very usable. Savvy users wanted free stuff.

Now, there is no competition, it's either Firefox or Chrome. The smaller browsers are nearly unusable, at least for the vast majority of websites, even Safari struggles. If Firefox doubled down on privacy and security, you might find people willing to pay. Could that be enough? I don't know. But it's an interesting idea.

@rdh @cwebber @soapdog I seriously doubt it. There are already plenty of websites which are more than happy to totally ignore firefox users and tell you to use chrome if you're not. People aren't going to pay for a browser that doesn't work on the sites they use.

@cwebber @soapdog @ari But also, no user pays for Firefox. And where Firefox does make money is shrinking - and also has been affected by COVID because IIRC, it's tied to some diminishing ad-related search traffic.