I doubt it will be shared with the contributors, how would they get it to them? To get everyones address and mail a check to them seems like something firefox would not do. Especially if the contributors may not have a bank account.
Provide a good service and there is no reason why you should not be able to monetize just as FF is doing no, even if it was intended to done without making any money.
Almost all browser that are distributed for free have some kind of deal to bundle their browser with some service/toolbar. That's how they get the money. Firefox is no exception and it should come as a suprise that they actually earn revenue from searches. If I'm not mistaken Opera has taken the same path. That's why they have started making their browser available for free.
My FF does not crash. And there are nice extensions to save session just like Opera. The main reason to switch Opera to FF for me was the memory problem of Opera but i should accept that when i install my plugins and open 40-50 tabs at the same time FF is not different than Opera in terms of memory usage. I applied some tricks to limit memory usage but there is no perfect solution so far.. And i think FF earns too much money. Google again made a perfect decision to support FF. But for a product like FF, i think that money is too much! There are better/bigger organizations like Apache than Mozilla. And with this much money there is no remaining reason to not to beat IE. I think M$ does not spend so much money to IE. Congradulations to both Google and Mozilla.
FF 2.0, AMD64 optimized moox 3rd party build. No crashes whatsoever. But back to topic...what WOULD speak against developing whatever application/extension and code a tracking ID into it ? Assuming i have a disclaimer and wording it fuzzy..so it doesnt sound "shady" or whatever. As you say... many programs come with some deals/bundles anyway. I'd just be interested if that would be somehow against TOS...and actually i cant see why it should. It doesnt really matter whether people go on a specific site voluntarely and click ads....or people use some software (voluntarily) and click ads or whatever within the software. Oh....the possibilites here are endless...now from a view of software....from writing a whole new OS with imbedded tracking codes, or a new tcp/ip stack tunnelling people's traffic through software and adding some tracking. (Ok.. this is a little far fetched ) Or just some very simple tools marketed as "search engine" software...maybe where people can research certain things they're interested in....with links coming up, resources, ads..and needless to say every single click on those links/ads would bring in cash
I'd take a bite here. I usually have close to 50 tabs open in Opera and can't see how in any form you can get FF use the same memory levl as Opera does with plugins. Note I use both and can tell you one thing, FF is not very memory friendly. I can actually burn a CD, while browsing using Opera with 50 tabs open while having programs like Dreamweaver open as well. I can tell you right now, I have had FF and Opera open with many tabs and FF has never been equal to Opera's memory performance. Your FF does not crash? Seriously, have a look at every FF vs other browser thread in this forum. Even the FF zealots admit FF having memory issues and crashing. You have been lucky so far. Your other comments raise valid points though.
Well, it is actually against the ToS. That is if I read and understood the below ToS entry correctly.
The Mozilla foundation gets all the money. They are the ones who pay the developers to work for FF , put money in promotion, develop other technologies (Gecko,XULRunner,etc). About 'against the TOS': they have a special agreement with google,can't be bothered to search for it right now .
Half the free software/trials wouldnt be as bad if they didnt have google spyware/toolbar junk bundled in
That money goes to funding bandwidth, servers so on and so forth. Im sure mozilla like wikipedia has expences in many places(look at wiki, there travel costs more than there premises ) Theres also stalls at various computer conventions (CES was $10,000 for a premium stall i think the last time I looked. On my note for memory, open the task manager, look at the memory. And Opera releases memory when you minimize it. (dont start about how I can customize it if I want blah blah blah, why is not not like that out of the box?). IE7 is more memory efficent than Firefox. My friend loaded an ajax page, that turns over every 30 seconds or so, it used 30% of the CPU while idling! (which computers, all of the ones on campus + my 3 personal computers + all my friends and all there computers) Anyways, back to firefox being super rich, did you never question why google was giving you $1(upto a $1) for each download of firefox with there toolbar? Gee why dont they do that with IE7 and Opera im sure thoes companies would love that kind of exposure! Pierce
My firefox has never crashed, and I have not noticed any memory problems compared to IE. They are about the same. I would pick FF over IE any day but since I have not used Opera I wont discuss it.