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CEO Chris Beard revealed in an interview with CNET that Mozilla may start offering "freemium" services in the near future:
There's another side as we start to look at products that we could potentially offer. Some of them start to look like services, exploring the freemium models. There'd be a free level always, but also some premium services offering.
That Yahoo! money has to run out at some point.
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Mozilla May Begin Offering Freemium Services in the Future
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Friday October 13 2017, @07:02AM (17 children)
I suppose something has to keep funding all the zany non-technical projects they come up with in the name of social equality/justice/whatever.
If they'd just stuck to developing solid software they might've had more money left. Then again, I'm getting old, grouchy and cynical about these things, so what do I know?
(He writes, in a firefox instance gobbling ~5gig of resident ram despite only 27 tabs open)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Friday October 13 2017, @08:22AM (5 children)
I think a lot of this blame lays in webmasters linking a lot of crap into webpages with scripts. Even my phone is getting overloaded on a lot of modern pages, and when I began analyzing my own laptop because of slowness issues, it was the complexity of the webpage that was doing me in. I routinely get hung-up in YouTube now when javascripts attempt to load HD ads and HD video simultaneously.
I believe NoScript has bought me three or four more years of usability on my single_core 3GHz celeron.
Remember when you could surf the web on a 90 MHz Pentium just fine?
Now a days, I imagine Soylent News would be one of the very few sites that a 90MHz Pentium could still load.
These pages are nowhere as simple as they used to be, and they are growing yet more and more complex by the day.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday October 13 2017, @08:47AM (2 children)
The resource efficiency of Soylent News is one of the nice attributes of this site, in my opinion.
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Friday October 13 2017, @11:14PM
+1 on that!
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheB on Monday October 16 2017, @09:40AM
and the site works perfectly without javascript.
Soylent can show/hide a comment tree or spoiler tag using css. No other site I visit can do that.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @02:46PM
I recently revived a 133mhz Thinkpad, from 1996, and it is challenging to even get a browser to run on it--well, aside from what I had installed on it already (including IE, since that was baked in at the OS level...) Netscape Navigator did OK for many sites, but once it looks like its for a mobile and makes those giant background images and stuff that slides around, it can't handle it at all.
It's like the more mobile something is, the more poorly it peforms due to all of those javascripts that run trying to figure out how to best monetize the visitor. Most scripts just hang on it.
No script doesnt work on it because there is no browser that runs on it that can also run no script; most java scripts don't run either but whatever manages to run seems to hang a lot.
It used to be that a mobile view of a website was low bandwidth; now it takes more just based on the captures... constant refreshes, stuff set to do not cache... etc. oh and trying to load in 64MB of RAM--a whole lot for windows 98.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday October 13 2017, @06:06PM
486/33sx with MS-DOS 6.2 and Win 3.1. In fact, in those days, I was on gopher. Then the WWW appeared.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @10:47AM (8 children)
You know that some major open source developers are taking money donated for the intention of making quality software and funneling it into their own pet political projects. Gnome almost went bankrupt doing just that.
Unfortunately, this is probably not all that well-known in general, especially as politics continues to creep into open source software at a steady rate. Eventually, if unabated, the entire thing may be crippled. Mozilla's a particularly bad case; it's supposedly being eaten from the inside out and has been for some time. But it's not the only one.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Arik on Friday October 13 2017, @01:19PM
"Almost" can be the saddest word in the language. :(
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Friday October 13 2017, @04:06PM (5 children)
t is the usual Prog program though.
1. ID a respected institution
2. Kill it
3. Gut it
4. Wear it's carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
5. Institution fades away, Progs can't understand why.
6. GOTO 1
This needs copypasta into most political threads these days because again we see a respected organization doing important work infected and consumed by SJWs, now unable to do the original mission. Now it is in an active effort to destroy the original goal of an Open Source browser because they want to monetize it. They aren't even doing it to self fund the project, that might even be semi-understandable; but to be able to keep doing political crap like the $100K they just dumped into RiseUp, an Antifa related group. Or the recent buyouts of stupid crap like Pocket that nobody wants but they insist on bundling. Free Software / Open Source projects should never be in a position to be buying up companies, they have delusions of becoming a 'player.'
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @04:24PM (3 children)
Sounds like you're projecting the GOP SOP on to your "enemies". Not surprising. Mozilla had plenty of problems, but your wacky dystopian version is not one of them. They are struggling against the giant Google and pressure from the industry, hence why they decided to bundle DRM into the browser. The problem is our society, corruption of mozilla is a symptom not a cause.
To be clear, our society's problem is the worship of the almighty dollar at the expense of freedom. If we don't shift our focus then every project is doomed to follow because the money players are simply too powerful. Linux was targeted and shot with systemd because the writing was on the wall, it was getting too popular. You can blame "progs" if that helps you sleep at night, but you do yourself a disservice.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 13 2017, @05:07PM
Oddly enough, Giant Google's best play against Mozilla was dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into it, effectively paralyzing the project. They can't even commit to their diversions [soylentnews.org].
Now Mozilla is slurping up Yahoo/Verizon money:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3099804/it-industry/verizon-must-pay-even-if-mozilla-walks-from-yahoo-search-deal.html [computerworld.com]
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3146969/web-browsers/mozillas-revenue-jumps-28-in-first-full-year-of-yahoo-search-deal.html [computerworld.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @08:08PM (1 child)
The GOP and progs are different ends of the same serpent. Open your eyes man.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @06:58AM
Try reading something before writing...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @08:29PM
Typical Repug comment. Blame everything on liberals who are defined as people you don't like.
Dude, grow up. Its gotta suck being a 12 year old in a 50 y/o body.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @06:55PM
The current social politics shit is just a symptom, not the cause though.
The mismanagement is executive staff on down and it has been that way in large part thanks to obscenely high management salaries since the 90s. They thought the money they were getting meant they were doing things right, rather than realizing (or caring) that it was all a bubble and working on the personal introspection and self improvement necessary to help guide the rest of the company so they could avoid future messes like the ones that lead to Netscape being owned by AOL, then eliminated and having to negotiate to become the Mozilla foundation.
The politics, whether conservative or liberal (since that guy who got ousted was ousted for funding a political position by an amount that REQUIRED disclosing it... IE making it an official public position he was taking which didn't coincide with the employee base of the company and might have resulted in different choices of president if it had been disclosed before he was chosen for the position) have long trumped the technical aspects of the organization, most of the successful ones of which were flukes rather than intentional successes. The amount of software engineering that went on at Mozilla was far less than the software programming. And the quality of the programming was in line with that expected from Microsoft, barring projects which started/forked outside of Mozilla's direction (see Seamonkey, Phoenix/Firefox, etc.)
(Score: 2, Informative) by higuita on Friday October 13 2017, @08:01PM (1 child)
well, my firefox, have 80 tabs open and its using 800MB, including youtube, AWS, kibana and twitter... either you have a memory leak in some add-on or you are browsing those "infinite" web pages, that keep loading things when you scroll down, full of animated gifs, videos, pictures, etc. Those pages can kill many browsers if you keep scrolling for too long :D
I do use umatrix to block most junk, but most of the time this "low" memory usage is because, firefox just drops the unused memory
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday October 13 2017, @11:58PM
Oh, if I was to restart the browser it'd come back with ~1.2gig in use. No manner of gc/minimize-memory-usage makes a dent while it's running though. It has to be a full restart.
And note that this is on my work system, and despite running NoScript. The open tabs are gmail+calendar, a few google spreadsheets and small docs, the internal slack, a couple of CI build pages, and a handful of documentation sites. Off the top of my head I don't remember the precise distribution of memory usage between the tabs, but there aren't any serious outliers (Jenkins on auto-refresh used to be, so I killed the auto-refresh). It does account for all the memory in about:memory, so it's not a bona fide leak.