Agreed, I subscript to random Mozilla products like VPN and Relay to pay them but I dont need those and would hate to have them waste extra development time on improving those services. I would rather fund the browser directly.
Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.
a) It’s insane how little we pay for browsers given their utility.
b) Many people would be happy to pay extra for a browser to support free access for others (The Guardian was a decent example of that IIRC).
Going by the 2023 financial report (getting the 2024 report requires to submit a mail address?!), Mozilla spent over 500mil in that year, 328m on salaries (page 5).
Even the most successful online annual fundraising drive that exists, Wikipedia, raises less than half of what Mozilla gets annually from search licensing. And Mozilla in a best case scenario probably can't match Wikipedia's fundraising for a number of reasons.
It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.