Firefox app on android. Never seen this before until today. But Firefox is now putting ads in the app?
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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They get some small donations from some users... and Google.
It being open source means nothing. Open source developers still need to eat. It just means that you could remove all the things you don't like.
I don't get ads in Blender 3D.
Or Krita.
Or OBS.
You are severely underestimating the development burden of a modern web engine.
You're severely underestimating the development burden of an industry standard 3D modelling program, much less the Swiss army knife that Blender 3D is.
If The Blender Foundation can operate with donations from big corporations like NVIDIA and AMD without selling out, then Mozilla has no excuse.
They're very different models though, currently blender has a bunch of sponsors and companies who contribute, firefox doesn't have that, because the project is structured differently, and it's a different type of software.
They're both mature software packages with a ton of features. There are two gigantic obligations that a browser & especially web engine have that creative software don't: massive security exposure and constantly changing web standards. Both create development burdens that are both non-trivial and time-sensitive. Many FOSS projects update at their own pace, which is simply not an option for a modern, feature-complete web engine.
Mozilla gets fucking loads. Way more than it can spend on Firefox. Like a certain online encyclopdia.
https://nerdschalk.com/85-of-mozillas-revenue-at-risk-firefoxs-survival-threatened-by-potential-loss-of-google-search-deal/
Ads are greedy, unwanted, and symptomatic of the culture there. They can fuck right off imo. And most open source software manages to avoid ads, why do you think that is?
And freeloading is the reason why we have an ad-based economy... Do you donate? Do you work for free?
I have worked for free on OS projects, I have donated to OS projects. None of this changes my opinion that Firefox should not have ads
Then what should it have? You haven't donated to it, so what do you do?
From Google. And if that deal disappeared, Mozilla would probably go bankrupt or rely on a worse deal from another provider. Neither would be good for Firefox development.
It makes sense that Mozilla wants to branch out, diversify. It just sucks that they're terrible at doing it. Would have been cool if Mozilla operated like Proton or any other privacy-orientated service provider.
Because they have scruples and usually have financial issues as a result.
Firefox would be better off without Mozilla at this stage. The donations mozilla receives from individuals supporting firefox would pay for a large dev team easily. Google is a total red-herring and this money is spraffed on exec pay afaict, and they should be ending this today, as has been said by many other people
If that was true, then why don't we have a fork of Firefox being developed by the community that is better than Firefox?
The only thing we have now are forks of Firefox. Sure, some are better, but all still rely on Mozilla's upstream contributions. If Mozilla stopped supporting Firefox, these forks would be dead. They just add some features and UI changes. They are not working on web standards, fixing implementations of those standards, or security fixes.