I'd rather buy a browser as a company's primary product, not donate to Mozilla which makes a browser and does many other things, many of which I disagree with and would rather not fund.
I'm confused here. Seems to me that if you want these kind of features in a browser you want exactly what funds. Also, even if you paid for software with these features, it's likely a good portion of the money you pay will also go towards things you disagree with as well.
Controversial != useless. I don't like they wasted money on Firefox OS or Persona; I don't want to donate to them if my money goes there instead of to Firefox. In fact, why not let us decide where exactly our money will go if we donate?
Just to be clear: other than the Mr Robot promo your main criticism is that their politics don't align with yours?
Because I think when people ask about Mozilla controversies they're thinking about situations in which Mozilla has "broken character" by e.g. risking users' privacy, not activism that is absolutely in line with Mozilla's stated goals (whether you personally agree with them and their interpretation thereof or not).
Opera started as a paid browser and nearly went bankrupt. They even had ads on the free version. Barely anyone paid for it and the ads killed adoption.
Heck, even Netscape Navigator started out as shareware. It was "personal use only" but most commercial users never bought a license. It was eventually defeated by Microsoft Internet Explorer, which was free for commercial use even before it shipped with the OS.
If there is any chance someone will attempt a paid browser again, it will most definitely be based on Chromium (or maybe Firefox) rather than written from scratch and no website will make any effort to test on it (just like barely anyone ever tested on Opera).