Yeah, that’s been the case for like 10 years now.
The focus should be on securing independent funding. This means paid services or increased independent donations. Some ideas:
- Mozilla VPN - essentially a wrapper over Mullvad, but the landing page doesn’t give a good reason to choose it over Mullvad (e.g. container tabs); choosing a server per site should be front and center
- email - I know they tried at some point, but they really should integrate with something like ProtonMail (e.g. FF-specific TLD with service through ProtonMail)
- password manager - they have their own solution, but it’s FF-only; perhaps have a cobranded Bitwarden that integrates with other Mozilla products cleanly
- ad blocker - Mozilla should work with major websites to drop ads and let the user choose between privacy-respecting ads (served by Mozilla based on local browsing history) or anonymous payment (Mozilla would host something like GNU Taler, which you’d load through a method of your choosing)
The last I think could be truly disruptive.
2 points
Honestly Mozilla could be a hugely profitable company. There is clearly a market for privacy and freedom tech.