[getcrunk]

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

[kbrosnan]

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.