[toyg]

> Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor,

Uhm, that's not the impression I got, as a total outsider. Things like FFSend or FFNotes were thought up as extensions to the browser model; others were attempts to cook up de-facto web standards (Persona, deuxdrop); others were just moonshots (FFOS).

In the early years, Netscape's needs definitely played a large part; after they got the Google money, though, they've mostly done things "because they could".

[floatingatoll]

Persona was also known as BrowserID. I've never heard of deuxdrop before though!