[aleppe7766]

Even non users should donate to Firefox: the presence of a independent browser in a market dominated by browsers following the agenda of this le that huge tech company benefits the whole market. Of course using it (or any other independent browser, but only FF has a chance to stay in the double digits) and contributing to its market share would be even more beneficial. Apple’s Safari will never effectively stop Facebook’s sneaky spyops as Facebook is a core partner for Apple’s richest platform. And Chrome, well...

[martin_a]

As far as I know I can not donate to or for Firefox development but only to Mozilla. And we all have seen and heard and read what they will use the money for (hint: massive paychecks for the C-level) and how their priorities are set.

So: While I love the product, I very much dislike the company. And that's why they won't get any money from me.

[passthejoe]

Mozilla is definitely NOT equal to your average open-source project like Debian or LibreOffice. The development on those projects is done entirely by volunteers. Maybe some of those "volunteers" are paid by companies to be contributors, which is the case with the Linux kernel.

But Mozilla is a large company. It may be a nonprofit, but there are HUNDREDS of millions in Google money funding the company and paying salaries for the 1,000 (??) or so employees, including, as mentioned above, a very well-compensated C-suite.

Firefox and whatever else Mozilla produces is funded with this very, very large pot of money. Could they run the Mozilla operation on $10 million (or $20 million) a year and invest the rest ($90 million to $390 million) a year in an endowment that could ensure Mozilla's independence in perpetuity? They could do that, but like many nonprofits, the "profit" goes to a large number of well-paid people. I can't think of another open-source project with such enormous funding that isn't part of a for-profit company.

Red Hat isn't asking individuals for money to fund Fedora or RHEL development.

I don't know what crazy universe a company -- even one hiding behind the framework of a "foundation" -- gets $100 million to $400 million a YEAR from Google -- and still has the chutzpah to ask individual users to make a contribution.

I love Firefox, and I absolutely agree that browser diversity is important. I use Firefox daily. But Mozilla is a huge outlier -- a "nonprofit" dragging in hundreds of millions and spending it. Do you think Debian collected more than $1 million last year? I'm not sure it did. It sure didn't get $100M or $400M. Mozilla is a huge company. It just doesn't have shareholders.

[kovac]

C-suites and layers and layers of managers are a cancer in this industry. All they do is talk, virtue signal and "strategise". Firefox needs to part from Mozilla. You put 6-10 engineers and a good technical lead together, they'll fix this madness in 6-12 months.

Like mentioned in "bullshit jobs", most of these managers (not all), are there to create bullshit and deal with bullshit created by those like themselves. It's the tech leads, engineers, DBAs, sys admins (and teachers, nurses, doctors, garbage collectors, etc) who should be driving Rolls Royces.

I used to use Firefox. After I learnt about Mozilla and their corporate structure, I changed to Brave. Now I use Brave and Vivaldi mostly.

[faitswulff]

I hope they end up spinning that off into its own nonprofit focused solely on browser development.

[Barrin92]

If the situation is so bad that Firefox is seen as necessary to prevent the internet being dominated by Google et al, there should be regulation that prevents those companies from privatizing the standards of the web.

It honestly doesn't seem reasonable to ask people to donate to a fundamentally commercial software product for the sole purpose of fixing a broken ecosystem. It's like as if Ford was starting to write laws and regulations for road usage and we'd start donating money to Volkswagen

[aleppe7766]

Totally agree, in theory. In practice US regulators are too short sighted, incompetent and possibly corrupt (in that they benefit from the status quo, and are heavily lobbied) to deal with the situation; also, if Firefox dies, it’s another thick nail in the web’s coffin.

[IshKebab]

I don't think there is any way to donate to Firefox.

Even if there were, they can never survive on donations. Google gives them around $400m/year. The Mozilla Foundation only gets around $3m/year in donations. Hell, Wikipedia only gets around $100m/year in donations and they push really hard for it and literally everyone uses Wikipedia.

When you understand the scale of funding it's pretty obvious that donations are irrelevant.

[syshum]

Unfortunately the overt political stances of Mozilla, the questionable executive Pay Packages, the continued reduction in their support for developers, and their clear mis-steps when it comes to user trust and privacy preclude me from supporting the Mozilla Foundation with monetary contributions.

I think we need a new Foundation that will fight for the Users of the Open Web, Mozilla is not that foundation any longer and in fact their continued existence I believe prevents something new from raising up from their ashes

We need a new Phoenix Project

[hkt]

I wonder if they should, actually. I suspect a large part of what keeps the money flowing to Mozilla is the fear at Google of antitrust proceedings against them if Firefox dies. Maybe I'm wrong and Safari is independent enough, but I do wonder, especially with IE dying as an independent browser, whether or not it'd cause antitrust issues in the EU.

[DocTomoe]

Given the questionable decisions Mozilla has made in the last weeks, I feel that donating to them is wasting money on politics, not making sure a critically-necessary product will continue to exist.

I'm using Vivaldi now. Yes, it's Chromium-based. But it comes with preinstalled anti-tracking / anti-ad filters, and it's crazy fast.

[mdoms]

Every few months I open Firefox to see if they have fixed pinch to zoom on Windows touch screens / track pads, an issue which has been underway for literally years[1], and every time I go away disappointed. It's one of the most basic operations on a modern computer, supported by every other browser and almost every other piece of software, and it utterly beggars belief that it doesn't work in FF. There is zero chance I contribute my hard earned cash to such a poorly run project.

1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1461360

[nuker]

> Apple’s Safari will never effectively stop Facebook’s sneaky spyops as Facebook is a core partner for Apple’s richest platform

Safari was the first browser to cripple 3rd party cookies with ITP.