[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.