I believe that money goes to the Mozilla Foundation, which uses it on the initiatives you can see at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/

Although the Foundation wholly owns the Corporation (we call them MoFo and MoCo internally), money donated to MoFo does not go towards paying MoCo employee salaries as far as I am aware.

Is that not because Firefox currently pays for itself (via Google search revenue)? If the idea is to change that equation, there's surely no reason why money couldn't flow the other way?

i wonder why mozilla hasn't tried a premium pricing model? the premium version of firefox could have a yearly subscription of, say, $24. it would have all privacy features turned on, the best privacy addons installed, and all analytics/telemetry turned off, by default.

i would even pay a whole $3/month for that! =D

The brand risk of having firefox associated with the free version would be horrendous.

To have a premium product, you need to have a non-premium product, and given that most users would use the non-premium product, firefox would quickly become associated with a browser that has the actually desirable features turned off...

Which would probably be even worse than their low market take up at the moment (and I am typing this on firefox).

I agree. Maybe they could differentiate the two versions with a badge or some adornment in the UI which appears grayed out in the “free” edition. I guess it’s the same as asking for donations but maybe not as blatant. Also not sure why they stopped selling merch. I would buy some right now.

Because if they suggest anything to remove the whales then their paymasters will veto it?

The people who would pay for a subscription are surely some of the most valuable for advertising to, and FF in its current form exists because of advertising.

They don’t want that but you are free to do so yourself, it’s free software.

It was said earlier today that because of American tax rules donation money cannot go to software development.

So donation money goes to outreach and similar. Which is useful but doesn't fund Firefox.

Someone please correct me if this is wrong.

There is nothing about how charities work under US Federal tax law that would produce this result.

Tax-exempt charities (which must by definition be non-profit, but not all non-profits are charities, and not all charities are tax exempt!) must spend money in a way that's aligned with their mission, and there are rules on how much they can spend outside that. (The really big no-no has to do with political lobbying and the endorsement of candidates for public office -- a relic of a more civilized age when apparently we thought that should be left up to individuals. But I digress.)

The Mozilla Foundation is a California corporation with tax-exempt status under US Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3), which covers "public charities, private foundations or private operating foundations". There are slightly different rules for each category.

I'm not sure what category Mozilla Foundation is; my suspicion is they are either a public charity or a private operating foundation. In either case, there's nothing that would prohibit them from funding software development, as long as it doesn't unfairly benefit someone involved in the organization's governance.

Their 2016 financial statements (I couldn't find anything newer) are available:

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...

tl;dr: In 2016 they spent over $250k on software development as a line-item, out of about $500k in revenue total. It's by far their biggest budget item.

> Their 2016 financial statements (I couldn't find anything newer) are available:

> https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au....

> tl;dr: In 2016 they spent over $250k on software development as a line-item, out of about $500k in revenue total. It's by far their biggest budget item.

The numbers are actually $250 million and $500 million. All the tables this report (as well as a newer one I have to search the link for) list the figures in thousands.

I'm told that this is incorrect and that the FSF has been doing it for 34 years, the EFF does it, the ACLU has done it and others have even paid for proprietary software development (their apps etc).

i worked for mozilla, your donations pretty much do not go to coding firefox. there are side effects where it will affect code, or someone that gets employed by foundation that will now have money and free time to code for firefox for free, but its not like "your dollars go to hiring a sw engineer".

the donations are still useful though because if there were none mozilla foundation would die, and in turn, mozilla corporation would also die or be sold as its fully owned by the foundation

That would be weird considering they accept donations on behalf of thunderbird https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

I don't think it's for those reasons, but the outcome is the same -- money donated to the Mozilla Foundation will not be spent on software development on Firefox, which is done by Mozilla Corporation. (I'm pretty sure it will fund Mozilla Foundation software developers, though, as well as all of the initiatives they list on the home page.)