So, trying to unpack the OP's multiple questions a little:
1. Preventing Firefox going out of business
-> as noted by others, Mozilla is actually doing decently well financially, and continues to dedicate a large part of its resources to Firefox
-> however given some of its revenue sources, maintaining a certain share of users is important to maintain that state of affairs
2. Driving more adoption of Firefox
-> Most users have pretty simple browsing needs, and a non-negligible share still don't know what a browser is (we all know a few I wager) while still using one daily,
-> Competing browsers have semi-exclusive or exclusive distribution channels for their products which help drive their adoption (Google.com, some Android flavours, ChromeOS / Mac and iOS / Windows, Bing, Outlook & Office)
-> Thus as with any product, driving adoption could be done by:
--A. offering a killer feature many (actual) people care enough about to download the browser for - for most people, this would need to be significant speed or friction reduction (Adblock, etc) which Firefox already does well but perhaps not significantly well enough
--B. get users early, i.e. partner with websites, apps and influencers that reach younger users to promote/recommend Firefox and its features, notably on the privacy and personalisation side (themes, meta filter, Adblock, password and history sync, etc) - think some viral Tiktoks on the benefits or simple product placement
--C. get a series of not-just-tech ambassadors to promote the browser along with the work of the Foundation, which may be done cheaply as they do have commendable initiatives
--D. Partner with like-minded organisations to recommend each other's solutions where possible, e.g. Automattic or such
-- etc etc
Firefox has been my daily driver on all devices for 20+ years. I personally feel it's never been as good as it is now: it's fast, the memory woes are gone, the sync works like a charm, password suggestion and management is seamless, the Android version is great (love the bottom navbar option).
Probably not perfect - what is - but I just wanted to share a more upbeat comment here, and perhaps one more geared towards the majority of users, who will be less technical and choose their browser's (or better said default to their browser's) for vary different reasons.
I've been enjoying my Nothing Phone (1)a great deal. Very few pre-installed app - I believe just a reskinned version of the weather app; full Android experience and the updates have been very impressive so far.
Also, incredibly cost-effective.
Curious to see if you considered Shadow Tech[1] as well, given the similar price point ($30/month) and possibly wider use case (whole cloud pc instead of just the browser)?
The first thing to determine, as with any challenge, is goal definition and scope. What do we mean by "fixing the Earth", and for what stakeholders.
A few potential goal definitions which can be wildly contradictory:
- maximise the probability for Earth to remain habitable until cosmic conditions (the Sun's decline) dictate otherwise, for humans,
- ibid, but for for as many species as possible,
- identify and implement the most optimal way to coexist as a species toaximised learning and knowledge advancement,
- etc.
It feels like long-term, multi-national, consequential fundamental research could be undertaken on an interesting scale with such a budget. This in turn could highlight scenarii of different ways forward to inform and influence policy-making. It may be one of the best ways to spend it.
In French you have a few interesting options, notably:
- LeBonCoin.fr (“the good corner”, a Craigslist type site that’s used for everything from second-hand selling to job hunting to meet up organising),
- LesNumeriques.fr is a decent tech review media with in-depth tests and a VERY critical community providing good balance
- Gazelle which has now become backmarket.fr (also exists across other countries like Spain and the U.K.) and offers vetted second-hand tech gear - great for bargains and avoiding buying new for ecological reasons,
- LeMonde.fr/Les-Décodeurs is the fact checking arm of the French paper Le Monde and has some really interesting visualisations and articles
- Presse-Citron.fr was one of the first tech blogs in France and continues to be a reference
- priice.fr is a price comparison site I’ve heard good things about but haven’t used myself yet
- danstonchat.com is the French version of Bash.org for IRC fun
- Legorafi.fr is a satirical paper with lots of hilarious fake news - often quite timely - akin to The Onion (it’s a play on words on the famous French paper Le Figaro)
- Gandi.net is a registrar and hosting site which I’ve been using forever - they’re awesome
LeBonCoin is actually a fork of the Swedish original site Blocket.se, visit it and you will see similarities. Both are today owned by the Norwegian umbrella organisation Schibsted afaik.
Yes, http://segundamano.es/ was the spanish version but it looks like the merged it with another site. https://www.finn.no/ is the norwegian version but it was developed seperately. https://www.tori.fi/ is the finnish one. Such listing sites are big business and they make a lot of money of them.
They have done similar stuff with Prisjakt.nu and made a french version: https://ledenicheur.fr/
I think there are even more still but I am not certain.
Presse-Citron is definitely more aligned with the tech establishment, but it remains useful for general tech news - and the comments are still rather sharp.
CanardPC is a GREAT addition, excellent build! About so much more than games too.
LeBonCoin became annoying since they put contact details behind a login wall. What made it successful back in the day is the simplicity - just post an ad and have interested people call you. Search for something and you can directly call sellers.
Great question and something I’ve been struggling with as well. A few things I like to do to make “down time” more productive:
- listen to podcasts and take notes, which I then turn into mini mind maps (it helps me remember concepts and linking ideas together)
- I do brand and marketing work, so I often use phone time to doodle early logo concepts, draft storyboards, start composing shots for photo shoots... etc. I find the constraints of the small screen quite interesting as it obliges me to veer towards simpler designs (I use Google Keep which allows for zooming in and out easily, and seamlessly integrates with the laptop version)
- whiteboarding (again in Google Keep or Miro) is also something I love to do on a phone, usually for processes and/or identity systems where I’d collate references for a projects into a single document for future use
- photo editing / story editing using VSCO and Over is a great way to use phone time productively. I often prepare visuals for blog posts or social stories that way,
- financial planning (probably less creative than the rest, but also a good way to spend phone time and many workflows are actually faster on mobile): I use a virtual bank (Monzo, in the U.K.) so I use phone time to label/categorise spend, visualise budgets, pay anything that needs paying and create simpler invoices with a Google Sheet template and pdf exports to Dropbox
Many more options, but these are my major uses. Looking forward to reading the other answers!
I always feel like salary comparisons are a little biased by a slightly US-centric definition of a comfortable lifestyle (e.g. including a car, parking, bigger house requirements, etc) as well as underestimating some built-in benefits of other countries like free healthcare.
Are there good sources out there that would afford a holistic cost comparison of a typical London lifestyle (Tube, 1-bedroom in Zone 1-2, weekend abroad in Europe, etc.) vs SF, LA or NY for instance?
Otherwise agree that long-term the work from home trend could be slightly more concerning, but this won't materialise as soon as most think. There is still a lot of value in being physically close to networks of influence and decision-makers, which in the UK would very much still remain in London.
I get the impression US salaries usually come out way ahead for software people (in other fields, not so much).
The only point where it starts to get questionable is when you consider stuff like, how much would you pay to live in a city that doesn't have needles all over the sidewalks, or, what is the value of living in a society that isn't brutally unfair and visibly dystopian?
Personally, I put a pretty high value on abstract stuff like fraternity and equality, and I feel like it has a really good effect on quality-of-life, but I can also see why people just go for the biggest paycheck. If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.
US is a nation of immigrants where you can basically fully integrate in a matter of months.
In non-English speaking countries this is impossible. If you put a lot of weight on fraternity and equality you have to consider that if you move to France or Germany you will always be "that foreigner who moved here".
Just something more to consider. Although I do agree also with your post.
You're absolutely right. There are, however, bubbles - I don't know about France, but there are few cities in Germany where you aren't made to feel 'foreign' unless you go to a government office or something. Of course you do occasionally bump into racists, and the concept of integration in Germany is, well, 'assimilation' (literally), but like most countries in Europe, it's very variable.
While this might be true, this is not what I've experienced. I lived in the US for 7 years. I went to school there, worked there and paid taxes. But I had to leave because I didn't get the H1B visa. So while people couldn't tell I was a foreigner, as far as immigration is concerned, I was always a foreigner. Even if I would have gotten the H1B visa, as someone born in India, it would have taken me 20+ years to get a green card...
Yes of course I by no means implied that there are no obstacles involved in immigrating to the US.
The OP was talking about the more social aspects so I wanted to remark about an often overlooked aspect.
Yeah, I understand what you mean. I just wanted to point out that often this aspect is also overlooked when it comes to immigration in America. The social aspects mean nothing to me when I could never be certain about my status in the US. In fact if I'd not integrated as much socially, I'd probably be much happier in life right now after having been forced to leave. On the other hand I completely agree with you about the social aspect. I'm worried about how I will fit in to Europe once I move there, and whether I will always be considered a foreigner. I'm trying to convince myself that it's the better choice for me since I was forced to move there. But at the end of the day, I can't help thinking that Europe just doesn't have the same diversity and open culture as California did when I lived there. Who knows, maybe I will be pleasantly surprised when I go there. However, like I said before, in Europe I have certainty about my immigration status. As a highly skilled migrant, I don't have to keep worrying about "What happens if I don't get the H1B visa", "It's been 10 years, and I still haven't received the priority date for my Green Card".
>If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.
Your example is also about a bubble. It's not social context but your own personal sense of happiness that you're talking about as I see it. You can have clean streets and little crime but be a dystopian society. Singapore and Japan come to mind. Muslim refugees in France would see society very differently than a native french person. Talking about others living in bubbles seems to me to be just a way to makes oneself feel better about the bubble one lives in themselves.
You might be right - that said, there's no comparison when it comes to poverty between where I live now (east germany) and where I come from (London). Poor people in London are simply far more poor, even though London is far more wealthy than east Germany.
What I was initially pointing at was, if you think about the portion of pay one gets, and the portion of pay that goes to the state, I think high taxation is often worth the money in terms of quality of life, because it delivers goods that are simply beyond anybody's budget otherwise. Jeff Bezos can't go on a 4am walk through LA without a shadow of worry, but I can do that in my city. That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.
Obviously money on its own doesn't solve deeper issues - and Europe has a lot of problems, especially around questions of nationality and belonging. But I think in the narrow sense, of what you get for what you pay, high tax - welfare state societies are generally competitive even for very high earners, just because they deliver a lot of things that you literally can't pay for, no matter how rich you are.
>That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.
Sure he can, his multiple well armed guards will ensure he is safe even in the worst part of LA at 4am. He also has multiple homes and I guarantee you that his suburban homes have little crime around them. Cities aren't primarily where the well off live in the US and the places they do live are very safe.
The typical London lifestyle for people with a respectable income -- tech money, not finance money -- is more like living in Zone 3 and working in Zone 1. I think there is a lot of proportionality between standard of lifestyle and income between London and expensive US cities, a similar level of income buying a similar lifestyle (adjusted for local context). A big difference is that high incomes are much more widely distributed across industries in the US than London. If you are a middle manager in a boring industry like publishing, you aren't going to get £150k in London but you can in the US, even outside the big cities. The diversity of people that can afford an upper-middle class lifestyle in the US is much greater. Even dialing back US standards of lifestyle to something contextually appropriate, the kind of work that affords a "comfortable" lifestyle is much narrower in London.
An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes. London does this better than many European cities but it still has a long way to go. Living on a tech salary in London is a bit like living on a good non-tech salary in SF or Seattle. Comfortable in the abstract but there is visibly a tier of people that the city culture values much more.
>A big difference is that high incomes are much more widely distributed across industries in the US than London.
[...]
>An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.
The way I've explained this to people is that it's entirely possible in the US to rise to the top of your profession in any industry without ever moving to NY or LA, except maybe finance for NY and film/television for LA.[1] The equivalent is possible in Australia, Canada, and Germany, but impossible in the UK or France.
[1] And even here there are exceptions. For the entirety of the century that Hollywood has been "Hollywood", the creative types in LA have worked under control of the money men in NY. This is still true, except that the money men are now also in Dallas (AT&T), Philadelphia (Comcast), or Tokyo (Sony). In finance, one can become a managing director at a New York investment bank while always based in a regional office like Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, or San Francisco (I think Byron Trott never left Chicago during his Goldman career).
> An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.
I find this super interesting, especially when linking salary back to how much society values that job type. For instance it seems that many European countries value societally their teachers and professors, yet it is a rather underpaid profession, all things considered. Similarly, a maitre d’ would be quite well regarded in France or Italie, yet would not command a high-salary.
Thus it feels like your point on there being more diverse sectors being cogent with a comfortable lifestyle in the U.S. rings true.
Veering away from the main point, but I wonder if, as pointed in other comments, that is somewhat balanced by less people being, comparatively, in the poor and very poor category. That is to say, less of a difference between top lifestyles and bottom lifestyles overall. I would need to properly research that though, as salary alone won’t give us that variance.
A large part of the income distribution differences result from wages being very compressed around the median for a given occupation in Europe. For most occupations in the US, the top 5% earn much more money than the median person in their occupation (or the population generally), even for occupations like waiters and cleaners that we don't think of as high-paying. This creates a different set of expectations culturally; everyone knows at least a few enterprising people that make a surprising amount of money doing nominally low-wage, low-status work and therefore having access to a visibly comfortable life.
I think "poor" is relative to cultural expectations, so I am not sure how to measure that over different geographic regions. The infamously poverty-stricken regions of the US, like Appalachia or Mississippi, really do have serious systemic poverty but even the middle-class there is often viewed as poor by the standards of other regions. However, the lifestyle afforded by the 40th percentile household income in most European countries would identify as "poor" in much of the US, despite being definitionally middle-class. In much of the US, "poverty" is primarily associated with social problems like drugs and crime, not economic resource issues per se outside of a few sparsely populated regions, which isn't that different than what I see in Europe. I grew up in abject poverty of non-social kind, which is pretty rare in the US. In hindsight, I think the government did a reasonable job of handling that case.
>as underestimating some built-in benefits of other countries like free healthcare.
If you're at FAANG (which the original post was talking about) then there's little advantage of free healthcare imho. You get top of the line company paid for healthcare. You can see a top specialist in a week with no referrals needed and someone almost as good same day.
That’s a really good point. My understanding however was that you still need to pay some parts of the treatments, even with top healthcare?
I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better). The same would be true, I believe, for child birth for instance (again, I could be wrong as relying on second-hand accounts in both cases).
Agreed on the type of specialist you would get in the U.K., although in my experience it’s always been very feasible to see top specialists when warranted, even on public healthcare. You would typically get faster access for non-essential care on a private basis though.
Overall, it seems from Yours and other comments that the salary multiple in U.S. tech specifically may still be significant and would probably make these moot.
>I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better)
UK, yes. In France, aren't there copayments? I thought the French system typically covers 70% of hospital bills.
That's not true. For example in Germany there is an explicit difference between statutory healthcare and private healthcare. Private healthcare will get you to the front of the line and will give you easy access to all services. With statutory healthcare you will have to go around searching for specialists who have time for you, as most will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked".
> most [specialists] will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked"
I don't deny that this does happen, but it's not as inevitable as you make it sound. I've seen about a dozen separate specialists over the years for various reasons, and have never had such problems. There were a few outliers where I had to wait several weeks for an appointment, but that was only for non-urgent matters and I was never refused service. In most cases, I can get an appointment within 1-5 days of calling the doctor's office.
My suspicion is that such overload as you describe is a regional issue, so if, as an immigrant, you need to rely on certain specialists because of chronic ailments, it may be worth to investigate the availability of the relevant specialist doctor beforehand.
>That is a given for every resident in most European countries.
Based on what I've heard it's not a given in the UK for example. Need non-guaranteed GP referral (ie: they may say no) for a specialist and there's often a long waiting period.
Agree direct comparison is tough and multifactored and would be highly individual (how do you put a price on being a 2 hr train ride away from Paris whilst having much better job opportunities than Parisians). However, given that compensation in US is a large multiple higher I think it would be easy to agree it's better overall. For comparison Big Law pays 20-30% lower on average in London vs. NYC and finance pays marginally lower (outside of quant finance where London pays a lot lower than NYC as hedge funds don't have to compete with FANGs for tech talent that wants high pay).
ProtonMail [1] Plus user for the past 4 years now with my own domain. They've since added the VPN, which I find excellent and use all the time.
They have most recently added ProtonCalendar and ProtonDrive [2], which were the features I was missing the most. Thus, I moved everything over and pay for the bundle of all products which comes at just under EUR 8.00 a month (Mail, VPN, Calendar and Drive).
As mentioned by others, the webmail and UI of all 4 products is minimalist, but it is snappy and pleasing (to my taste, at least). The mobile apps on both iPhone and Android work very well, just missing threaded messages on the Android one.
Finally, of course, end-to-end encryption, hosted in Switzerland and abiding by stringent national privacy laws [3] and out of the US, 5 eyes network as well as EU realms.
1. Preventing Firefox going out of business -> as noted by others, Mozilla is actually doing decently well financially, and continues to dedicate a large part of its resources to Firefox -> however given some of its revenue sources, maintaining a certain share of users is important to maintain that state of affairs
2. Driving more adoption of Firefox -> Most users have pretty simple browsing needs, and a non-negligible share still don't know what a browser is (we all know a few I wager) while still using one daily, -> Competing browsers have semi-exclusive or exclusive distribution channels for their products which help drive their adoption (Google.com, some Android flavours, ChromeOS / Mac and iOS / Windows, Bing, Outlook & Office) -> Thus as with any product, driving adoption could be done by: --A. offering a killer feature many (actual) people care enough about to download the browser for - for most people, this would need to be significant speed or friction reduction (Adblock, etc) which Firefox already does well but perhaps not significantly well enough --B. get users early, i.e. partner with websites, apps and influencers that reach younger users to promote/recommend Firefox and its features, notably on the privacy and personalisation side (themes, meta filter, Adblock, password and history sync, etc) - think some viral Tiktoks on the benefits or simple product placement --C. get a series of not-just-tech ambassadors to promote the browser along with the work of the Foundation, which may be done cheaply as they do have commendable initiatives --D. Partner with like-minded organisations to recommend each other's solutions where possible, e.g. Automattic or such -- etc etc
Firefox has been my daily driver on all devices for 20+ years. I personally feel it's never been as good as it is now: it's fast, the memory woes are gone, the sync works like a charm, password suggestion and management is seamless, the Android version is great (love the bottom navbar option).
Probably not perfect - what is - but I just wanted to share a more upbeat comment here, and perhaps one more geared towards the majority of users, who will be less technical and choose their browser's (or better said default to their browser's) for vary different reasons.