While donating to Mozilla Foundation is a great cause [1], none of those funds go to funding Mozilla Corporation, and thus Firefox.

If you want your funds to go toward MoCo (and thus Firefox development), your best bet is to subscribe to Mozilla VPN or Pocket Premium.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/

What does the Mozilla Foundation do if it doesn't develop Firefox? What do they spend their money on?

"The not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation supports open-source apps, web literacy curriculum, gender equality in tech and more."

Found on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/

The salary of their senior employees[1]

1 - https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704

Money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation (which they do via dividend payments), and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.

I don't disagree with your concept in theory, but I also don't think there is any evidence to suggest that MoCo's trademark royalty payments (as IIRC that's how they are structured according the financial docs) to MoFo are adjusted based on MoFo's donations.

Has that been mentioned in a meeting somewhere?

(301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24122250)

I wonder how many more people would donate if they knew the donation would be spent on making Firefox better and not on political activism.

I'm not sure why anyone would donate to a company paying an exec a $2.5M salary. They're exploiting donors.

I don't particularly care for the CEO, seems like an activist weirdo if I'm being honest(embodies idealism in an unproductive way).

I hate to say it, but this is one of the reasons I stopped donating. Mozilla was getting a bit like EFF-lite and I've had enough of the EFF's non-mission nonsense as well.

That doesn't work with their current structure. Foundation can receive donations, Corporation (itself a subsidiary of the foundation) can sell products (like Mozilla VPN).

AFAIK non-profits can receive donations bound to a specific purpose - they just don't like the accounting headache?

I wonder why the current structure is set up like that. I mean I don't think it's by accident – if it were set up like that by accident, surely, it could have been set up so people could direct donations directly at Firefox, if the CEO wanted that.

The structure is set up that because it reflects the goals of Mozilla. Firefox the browser is not the end goal, it's a means to making the internet a better place. And that's what the Foundation is about. The corporation also pays dividends to the Foundation in order to help fund their efforts, because it's the Foundation's work that matters more (in the long term) than Firefox.

It was established precisely so that the Corporation could pursue commercial operations that the Foundation legally couldn't before that, like business partnerships.

Also Mozilla Foundation didn't qualify as a public charity since it received less than 1/3rd of its revenue via donations, though I don't know if it can be considered as one now (15 years after the split).

Do this! I procrastinated on switching from Chrome to Firefox for several months because I wasn't sure how much time and effort it would take. I set up a monthly donation to Mozilla during this time because it was easy and supported browser diversity.

When I did finally switch, it turned out to be pretty easy and fast to transfer my bookmarks and passwords to Firefox, and there are some features like the built-in containers and add-ons like Tree Style Tab [0] that I find pretty valuable.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

As some have pointed out above, the donations don’t go towards the browser by the way.

TST is pretty valuable, is it supported at all by Mozilla? They seem not to make it easy to use it.

After hearing how their corporation is run and what their execs spend on flights I'm not convinced they deserve it.

Would rather they fall and a Phoenix rises out of the ashes for a second time.

While donations is a noble cause, it is a merely a drop in the ocean in the sea of money provided by Google.

I wonder how much of their money is from donations though, does Mozilla release these numbers?

> You will contribute to saving the world.

Cringed a bit there but to each to their own.

I wonder if it would work for companies/services to offer perks to their users in exchange for donation to Mozilla? It's a weak example but if, for a $50 donation, you could get an icon on your HN profile -- and that shows up with your comments -- that you're a financial supporter of Mozilla that might drive donations. Granted, HN is a pretty small community but if, say, Facebook offered a perk level for supporting Mozilla it might get the network effect going perhaps.

I would happily pay for a “premium” Firefox experience, even if that premium was only cosmetic. I have received so much value from Firefox over the years that it would be an honour to support them directly.

Yes I know I can donate. But I want to pay, and that’s different somehow.

Pay for their VPN! https://vpn.mozilla.org/

I signed up on day 1 and have really liked it. Works much better than the other vpn software I've had. And having it on Android too had been great

Huh, no Linux (or Mac) version yet.

Reddit has been somewhat successful in this regard, but it doesn't feel like the most stable business model.

Indeed, I do an occasional one every now and then, also for Thunderbird.