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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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Is that really YOU that is reading this?
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday October 13 2017, @07:04AM (1 child)
If what you get from those premium services is like the "improvements" you got for free in the browser, then no thanks.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @08:02AM
If only the abomination known as Australis had been a paid update...
Ha ha, who am I kidding. They would make more money from a paid option to remove it.
(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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Subsentient on Friday October 13 2017, @08:34AM (8 children)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @09:44AM (7 children)
Pale Moon's Mac implementation is a slow, single-threaded resource hog that doesn't release RAM even when closing all tabs.
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Friday October 13 2017, @02:25PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday October 13 2017, @02:40PM (1 child)
And Yahoo Mail doesn't work on it :( (I use Pale Moon extensively)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @03:16PM
That's just anti-hacking protection kicking in.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Friday October 13 2017, @06:45PM (2 children)
Wow....not based on what I'm seeing. I recently moved from FF to pale moon under Gentoo on my very old x86 system (with 2GB of ram) and as far as a can tell, everything is faster...many sites dramatically so.
Yea...maybe pale moon still has some of the flaws of FF I suppose...but I think you may have lost track of just how far over a cliff the Mozilla devs have sent FF in recent years.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday October 14 2017, @12:01AM (1 child)
I think you missed the "Mac" part of the original observation.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday October 14 2017, @02:07PM
Yes I did. Sorry for the noise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @08:40PM
1. Sell a Mac
2. Buy a Linux box for a quarter of the price.
3. Enjoy a working browser.
4. Profit = Left over money. Use to purchase cleanser to remove the family of apple stickers you stuck on your Subaru.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday October 13 2017, @08:44AM (3 children)
I'd be happy to pay a reasonable amount for the continued existence of Firefox and Thunderbird, so long as they remained FLOSS. As Red Hat demonstrate, it is entirely possible to exist on service revenues. Maintaining and updating a large code-base to track Linux kernel changes, Windows changes, and other platform changes is hard; and distributing copies in a secure manner is a value-added service, and neither are cost free. The GPL only allows you to charge for distribution, and doesn't mention other services, which is a pity, considering that there are important FLOSS projects crucial to the Internet and many businesses that have difficulty in getting funding. There ought to be a way in which popular FLOSS software could get reasonable funding in proportion to its use without having to go down the proprietary licence route.
It is unreasonable that programmers producing good quality FLOSS code are poorly rewarded, when dreadful code hidden behind proprietary licences gets heavily monetised.
I do not have a proposed solution, as I understand it is a hard problem, especially if you wish to preserve FLOSS principles. I just feel the current situation is inequitable and leads to unstable projects.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @09:32AM (1 child)
And they prominently demonstrate the damage which gets done in pursuit of increasing those revenues: systemd
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @03:48PM
The internet changed from an experiment to capitalistic based economy worried about increasing shareholder value long ago.
Look no further than google and facebook.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @12:57PM
donate, and tell others to donate.
that's what I did with EFF and FSF.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @12:12PM (4 children)
is if they're going to force the services on us. I've already got Pocket and a bunch of other junk I can't stand polluting my context menus.
Hopefully it's opt-in, or at least opt-out at the basic level.
Beyond that, I'd be open to subscribing to services as long as they keep everything as separate as possible. I don't want telemetry history linked to other accounts. I don't want chat stuff linked to email services. And so on. I used to trust sites that did that kind of thing, but in the past 20 years we've learned they can't be trusted.
(Score: 4, Informative) by urza9814 on Friday October 13 2017, @03:44PM (2 children)
Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday October 14 2017, @12:02AM
Never even noticed that button until now. Clicked on it to see wtf a "Pocket" is, then headed right over to about:config to turn the thing off - thanks for the pointer!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @07:15AM
Happen to know how to remove the "Share This Link" context menu and the "Share this page" menu icon?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @07:21AM
There is a way to remove unwanted items from (context) menus. This is how it at least worked at some point http://kb.mozillazine.org/Menu_customization [mozillazine.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @12:32PM (1 child)
Firefox's browser share is almost nothing and continues to drop.
They continue to waste money on God-Knows-What.
I think they will disappear when the checks stop coming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @07:54AM
I was kinda thinking that was exaggerating but looks like you're right, at least if you trust these clowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_usage_share,_2009%E2%80%932016,_StatCounter.svg [wikipedia.org]
Pretty scary, shows how much leverage the goog monster has. And getting everybody using its browser has made it very much more powerful. I think goog is the #1 privacy threat of our time, still way above failbook.
I personally use Firefox (and Thunderbird) every single day and think both are great products. Makes me sad to see Mozilla so lost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @04:44PM
If they mess it up, the community can always fork the code and start from the ashes of "Freemium"