Assuming that every user would donate is wildly off-target. I'm sure Mozilla could raise respectable numbers too, but I'm not convinced this is what we should focus on to get things to change.
I'm not sure what point you're refuting, since the original post says:
> I don't think every user is going to pay $1
The comparison is an illustration of the average donation necessary per user, not a prediction that every user will donate the mean amount.
As noted below, Wikipedia raises that amount because that's what they need. They could easily raise more if they wanted or needed to.
Mozilla already does have a donation drive; the question we're discussing is whether it would be beneficial (and practical) for Firefox to shift its business model to rely more heavily on user donations.
Currently, Mozilla does not raise more because they don't need to - it's not their primary source of funding, and so they're not as aggressive with their donation campaign as they could be.
As a comparison, the EFF received only $13 million in annual donations according to their last annual report: https://www.eff.org/document/fiscal-year-2013-14-audited-fin...
The EFF is hardly a relevant comparison. Most Firefox users have no idea what the EFF is, but most Firefox users do know what Firefox is. (And even if they don't, and just know Firefox as "the Internet", as some users don't understand what a browser is, it's still a lot easier to tell them what Firefox is and why it's important than to explain to them the work the EFF does and why that's important.
I am not speculating here; I am speaking as someone who donates to both Mozilla and the EFF and reminds his non-tech friends and family each December to do the same.
The challenge with getting a critical mass of Firefox users to donate is not in convincing users that their web browser is worth ~10¢/month, but in the friction required to get them to make a payment the first time[1].
[1] (This is the exact challenge that basically every non-profit ever has faced with recurring donations. Some are better at solving it than others.)
How much does Wikipedia (something normal people actually care about) raise?
(That's the Wikimedia Foundation and does not include the local chapters such as Wikimédia France.)
In other words, if every Firefox user paid $1/year, donations would more than surpass the amount that Mozilla makes from Yahoo.
I don't think every user is going to pay $1, no, but just to put that into perspective, it's not a prohibitive sum of money.
EDIT $1, not $5: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/