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Let me pay for Firefox

(discourse.mozilla.org)
802 points csmantle | 4 comments | 13 Jul 25 08:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.643s | source
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MzHN ◴[13 Jul 25 09:38 UTC] No.44548880[source]▶
Yes! My pet peeve is people keep saying "no one would pay" or "it wouldn't work" but the thing is, as far as I know, it has never been tried.

For example Thunderbird is fully funded by donations.[1]

Of course Thunderbird's budget is in a different magnitude than Firefox but I'd guess the amount of users is also in a different magnitude.

[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

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1. michaelt ◴[13 Jul 25 10:08 UTC] No.44549038[source]▶
> as far as I know, it has never been tried

Opera, up until 2000, was trialware that nagged users to pay. At that time, they were one of the first browsers to support tabs. In 2000 they put ads for non-paying users, and from 2005 they removed ads and survived entirely on Google money. Then in 2013 they became yet another Chrome-based browser.

Obviously, that was quite some time ago at this point. Perhaps paid web browsers' time has come again?

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2. rounce ◴[13 Jul 25 10:18 UTC] No.44549103[source]▶
Weren't they also (at least in part) acquired by Chinese investors at some point in the not too distant past?
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3. throw8394i4484 ◴[13 Jul 25 10:21 UTC] No.44549121[source]▶
Opera corporation had most of income from embedded devices. Presto engine (and something they had before) could run on low end CPU without MMU and floating point math, with a few megabytes of memory! Browser wss just a side gig for them.
4. arp242 ◴[13 Jul 25 11:16 UTC] No.44549441[source]▶
Yes, Opera has done a Theseus and is nothing like it was.