Year: 2022

What is a free browser good for when in fact the development and marketing for it is paid? What are the Chrome and Edge Browsers good for? What would happen if the web standards get so complex that the only browser remaining to implement them is the Chromium Engine, sponsored by Google and Microsoft? The standards would be controlled by Google, a company that is controlled by their income from advertisement.

The web is humanity’s most important communication and knowledge sharing plattform today. Whoever controls the way we browse the web, controls the minds of humanity.

I want control to be fairly distributed amongst humanity. I want to pay for my browser software. I want to buy the product, I do not want to be the product, my attention and mind being controlled and sold by advertisement companies.

That’s why I urge Mozilla to offer a paid version of Firefox.

The web was created as patent-free system where anyone can publish, edit, and read. This is essential, anyone must be able to implement a browser or web server. Things get too complex currently and this kicks out unpaid open source developers working for Firefox – they can’t catch up with commercially backed Chromium developers. The standardization work has been taken away by Microsoft and Google from neutral W3C and slowly moved into their own hands, into the hands of the chromium developers. I contributed to the W3C, I appreciate open standards. You want to be able to plug in any electric device into a wall socket and expect it to work, like electricity, there should be no entry barrier to the web.

I want thousands, if not millions of users to pay for essential software like browsers, to be customers, to get a service that helps them, to incentivise browser developers to work primarily for the users and not for the shareholders or advertisers.

I want to pay to let humanity’s knowledge remain free.