This kind of thinking appears to be prevalent. "Firefox does one specific thing which I construe as evil. Therefore I use the competitor which also does this thing, plus dozens of others which are anti-competitive and generally destructive to the ecosystem."

"The coleslaw in the Jedi salad bar has raisins. Therefore I joined the Sith. Their coleslaw also has raisins."

You misunderstand. The vast majority of people who complain about Mozilla on HN are Firefox users. We're the ones with the highest level of investment in the idea of an open web, so we're the ones who've stuck it out until Firefox's market share is all but gone. But because we care so much, you'll also frequently find us on here complaining that Mozilla is drunk driving their company and does not seem to realize that the only thing they do that actually matters is maintain the one independent browser engine.

Nice speech, but the argument about VPN costs is just as spurious as it was a few comments ago. Why has this passionate concern drifted into nodding along to such ridiculous arguments?

I too am I Firefox user, I too am invested and concerned with, say, adtech. Somehow I've managed to avoid saying crazy things about VPNs.

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Edit: replying here because it won't let me add a new comment. I'm not making the positive claim in the VPN argument. It's puzzling why "based on no information" would cut in favor of an argument asserting VPN has unprecedented costs without substantiation but not against it.

Also, as I've already pointed out and the other commenter has (as well as commenters in previous threads whenever this comes up), what we know of ordinary costs to run VPNs would not imply any expense on the order of magnitude necessary to make the argument work. Which is a legitimate challenge to speculation that would presume otherwise without substantiation.

And once again I have to emphasize that this is completely detached from any cause and effect argument about what missing browser feature would have otherwise been developed but for the resources spent on a VPN. The idea that there's a legitimate open question about whether a re-wrapped VPN is costing millions or tens of millions in losses is not the reasonable argument you seem to think it is. And it's not because reasons, like the ones mentioned here.

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Edit 2: This was originally about whether the VPNs were a cost sink on the order of millions or tens of millions of dollars. But now it seems to have changed to whether the VPN generates enough revenue that it's a positive way to contribute. Not sure when that happened.

Your VPN argument is based on, as far as I can tell, no information. Do you have numbers for what percentage of the VPN subscription goes to Mozilla? If not, you have no reason to believe that it's an effective way to contribute to Firefox dev.

I want a way to contribute to Firefox, not a VPN, and if 90% of the subscription goes to Mullvad that's a waste of money.

Apparently it's letting me reply now although it wasn't previously.

I'm just going to note that for whatever reason the goalposts appear to have shifted here. Originally, I was replying to a commenter who was claiming without substantiation that the VPN was a massive financial sink that was part of the reason for Mozilla's loss of market share.

Meanwhile, the argument you seem to be making is that you want information that supports the contention that it's a significant revenue raiser for Mozilla which is not the claim that I was responding to. If you're also doubting that the VPN is a huge money losing bet, then we're probably in agreement.

Fair. I wasn't actually responding to your initial comment or defending the specific claims of the person that you were replying to—just responding to the person who mischaracterized the source of most anti-Mozilla rhetoric.

So yeah, my beef with the VPN as a solution for monetization is different than OP's, and I wouldn't try to defend a position that claims that it's an active money sink. My argument is just that unless they have an extremely favorable deal with Mullvad it's most likely an extremely inefficient way to make money from someone like me who would be straight-up donating monthly if it were an option.

>just responding to the person who mischaracterized the source of most anti-Mozilla rhetoric.

I can't agree that it's mischaracterized given that it literally was the source of comments in this thread and just one of numerous instances of that argument I've seen across HN (if you check my user profile, at this point the first two or three pages of my comment history are responding to arguments of this type) and even you seemed to think it was close enough to something you agreed with to be a suitable jumping off point for a different argument borrowing from the same rhetorical momentum.

Sometimes it's the VPN sometimes it's AI, sometimes it's Pocket, sometimes it's about the blockchain, sometimes it's about their VC fund. Generally the idea is that these side bets supposedly siphoned away developer resources and are there reason for the loss of market share which involves a critical misunderstanding of real drivers of market share. So it's quite a prevalent argument. And so far as I can tell, baseless.

So as I said previously, I too care about Firefox and I too am concerned about issues related to ad tech and somehow I don't end up going off the deep end and nodding along to crazy arguments about the VPN.

The one thing that is both expensive to maintain and that its users don’t pay a dime to use

Mozilla hasn't tried to get users to pay for or donate to Firefox. They can't complain users don't pay for it when they haven't once asked them to.

The VPN service is probably the most sensible thing they could lean into. It's basically all margin and it works nicely with the privacy messaging.

> It's basically all margin

Is it? Do you have a citation for this? From what I understand it's a white labeled Mullvad VPN, and I haven't been able to find numbers for what percentage of the revenue is taken by Mozilla and what percentage goes to Mullvad.

I don't know any details of the revenue split, but I'm talking about the act of running a VPN service itself as being low overhead compared to the costs. Paying mullvad obviously reduces the margins, but it doesn't have the kinds of organizational overhead that would come with say, running an advertising company on the side like Mozilla now does.

Previously the argument was that the VPN was an example of "throwing money into open firepits", but now we're talking about the extent to which it generates revenue.