'Forbes reports: Firefox is exploring subscriptions and other "value exchange" services to ease its financial dependence on rival Google, according to the browser's lead developer. Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue. Although Mozilla only last month renewed the search deal, ensuring Google remains the default search engine for Firefox in the U.S. and other territories, the company is keen to explore other ways of raising revenue, including charging users for services. Mozilla's partnership with Google is an uncomfortable alliance, not only because the companies distribute rival browsers, but because their values are markedly different. While Google generates the vast bulk of its revenue from online advertising, Firefox's developers expend much of their effort creating tools that thwart advertisers, including the automatic blocking of third-party tracking tools and social-media trackers. "At Mozilla, we tend to believe things are at their best when users have this transparent value exchange," said Dave Camp, senior vice president of Firefox at Mozilla. "The advertising model has become a default way to fund things on the internet and to fund products, and we're pretty interested — not just for financial reasons, but actually for health of the internet reasons — to explore how can we do better for users than advertising." Mozilla recently began charging users $4.99 per month for its VPN product and Camp says the company is exploring other subscription products. "We don't have any immediate plans in the Firefox team to do add-on services or anything like that at the moment, but we're going to look at other ways to get some value exchange going on," said Camp.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/06/0122206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/