Donations are a drop on a hot stone, browser development doesn’t pay, and the only two other companies do it either because it supports their ad business, or because it’s a selling point for their hardware and yet another way to lock their users in.
They could sell premium features. Seek funding from governments - they have a lobbying nonprofit and instead of lobbying for open and we’ll funded web they (sometimes) lobby for questionable things.
And I mean yeah, donations are a pain but there’s still plenty of healthy open source projects that run on donations (both monetary and of developer time). Or they could seek out corporate donations and develop features wanted by large companies (who would be probably interested in the privacy sell too), though it might be too late for that.
Basically do something - anything. But no, they take Google’s money with no alternatives in case the faucet stops.
Meanwhile the leadership lays off engineers and takes huge bonuses for it.
Donations are a drop on a hot stone, browser development doesn’t pay, and the only two other companies do it either because it supports their ad business, or because it’s a selling point for their hardware and yet another way to lock their users in.
They could sell premium features. Seek funding from governments - they have a lobbying nonprofit and instead of lobbying for open and we’ll funded web they (sometimes) lobby for questionable things.
And I mean yeah, donations are a pain but there’s still plenty of healthy open source projects that run on donations (both monetary and of developer time). Or they could seek out corporate donations and develop features wanted by large companies (who would be probably interested in the privacy sell too), though it might be too late for that.
Basically do something - anything. But no, they take Google’s money with no alternatives in case the faucet stops.
Meanwhile the leadership lays off engineers and takes huge bonuses for it.
Premium features? The internet will explode the moment Mozilla adds anything premium. People really hate paying for free stuff.
No alternative besides the Microsoft money they took a few years ago, or was it yahoo?