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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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(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Friday October 13 2017, @07:41AM (10 children)
OK if they want to sell some storage solution that integrates with their browser or if they want to start their own VPN service who am I to argue. As long as I can opt out of it, even tho I don't use Mozilla Firefox, but I guess I'm somewhat dependent on it since it forms the basis for Pale Moon fork.
As long as they don't go like Candy Crush (or other games of that kind) "freemium" and start charging for opening extra tabs, or more "surf time" or other basic features, or as in they take features already available in the product and now instead limit them and start to charge for them to be "unlocked" to their previous state.
At the same time I do wonder how much "freemium" they cam really go for, it's not like there isn't a wide range of other browsers out there that are only a simple download click away -- Edge, Chrome, Opera etc etc (they might all have various issues to but that is besides the point at the moment).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @07:47AM (9 children)
I can't even imagine what they could offer that people would pay for. Secure web mail?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday October 13 2017, @07:54AM (8 children)
I don't know either. They do mention things like VPN, Secure Web Mail and cloud storage in the article. So I guess it's those things, that said there are already products like that around that also integrate into or with Firefox so I don't think there is a giant market for that unless they somehow break all those extensions or addons. If they do that might indeed piss even more people off and drive them over into the hands of Google Chrome, which already has like a 60+ % market share in the browser desktop market at the moment. So one wonders how many tricks they dare to use considering there is stiff competition around.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday October 13 2017, @08:09AM (2 children)
Note that there's an imminent breakage of a lot of extensions, and some of them cannot be reimplemented with the new extension interface. The temporal closeness makes one wonder if this is really a coincidence.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @10:02AM (1 child)
>wonder if this is really a coincidence.
omg, why would you even think that this roll-out/announcement is a coincidence?
i certainly don't want to school you, and please don't misunderstand me, but are you a millenial??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @08:37PM
If you aren't 50 then then those 50 or older consider you a millennial.
Its the modern day equivalent of whippersnapper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @08:31AM (3 children)
With VPN, they would need to operate it outside of the U.S. or keep no logs. Zero [bestvpn.com].
Secure web mail would need to be cryptographically impossible for Mozilla or NSA to access.
Cloud storage would be a mistake for Mozilla. They could just partner with an existing cloud storage service and integrate it in the browser.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday October 13 2017, @10:39AM
So those things seems somewhat hard for them to achieve on their own. So unless they want to have like deals with others or become some kind of service reseller that sort of just leaves that other scarey door, the one where they take all their freemium ideas from the mobile gaming market -- first 5 tabs are free, wanna unlock 5 more that is $5, you can only run 3 addons unless you unlock more addon slots which is another say $5, don't want to have scrolling adds at the bottom of the browser window? that is another $5 ... Personally I don't think Firefox could survive that kind of freemium but one just never knows.
I recall the desktop MMO Star Wars The Old Republic when it went freemium, you had to pay to unlock extra action bars, character slots etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @02:07PM
FTFY.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @05:09PM
Why would a browser need integrated cloud storage?
Everything it does involves data pulled from the cloud already; why put it back?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @10:51AM
Actually, Firefox users don't have to go to Chrome. Firefox is sacrificing the guts of its browser to bring Chrome to them. Soon Firefox will be using the core of Chrome, and use all Chrome plug-ins, and in the end be yet another Chrome knock-off.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the only answer that Firefox developers have to Firefox's problems is burning the thing down with fire, and then scoffing when users protest this "fix." How dare the users want Firefox to still actually be Firefox?
The thing I don't get is precisely who is making a lot of cash off of Firefox gutting itself. Google and Microsoft are unlikely, since Firefox's mere existence helps to stave off anti-trust inquiries, I'm sure.