Unfortunately in the world of OSS, neither of those are enough to pay the bills unless you have a lucrative partnership (i.e. Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox, which is now no longer the case).
Fully agree, that is why I usually put money on the software I care about, it isn't about using stuff from others freely while expecting to be paid myself.
However, there is the whole issue about the money that they were spending on CEO salary, the related bonus, and all the activities about who knows what, instead of Firefox and Thunderbird.
I would gladly pay $2-$5 a month without thinking for ff/tb if they committed to open accounting with user voting and a ruling council headed by devs and technical thought leaders. I think at least 1-10 million other people would too!
The empowered userbase would then direct Mozilla to make other solutions for their most pressing needs (maybe search or email or anti tracking) instead of the lame ideas they have wasted resources on
That is more or less how Thunderbird works. Donations fund a development. Members of the community elect the Thunderbird Council. It would take a huge rework of MoCo (Firefox, Sync, VPN, etc) to function in that way.
They aren't a business trying to maximize profit. The idea of being a non-profit is to invest in things that are important but not profitable. Should all non-profits drop everything that's ... not profitable?
> A lot of people wondered that
It seems pretty obvious why they would do it, and it has been widely admired. I hadn't heard comments like yours until the pile-on in on this page.
If Mozilla cares about their pocketbook, they could reevaluate how much they are spending on their CEO and AI companies. The victims of their monetary incompetence are always their own employees. I'd say Mozilla is just another company now, but even the average for-profit will lower the CEO salary if the company underperforms.
I don't know why they chase other products when they could take both of those and have some sort of premium additions to charge for. I pay for my mail clients, my calendar clients, and would pay for a browser with extra features / extensions.
Focus on the things people are using and not on becoming a VPN provider.
That said I like, and use, Firefox for all of my work related tasks. And I have nothing against them having "too many employees". A non-profit providing jobs is not a bad thing and feels like the best of both worlds.