The Mozilla Foundation minus Firefox doesn't seem like a good use of charitable funds compared to say, the EFF. For example, they funded this hit piece on P2P technology [0] and a browser extension to solicit complaints about YouTube recommendations [1]. Meanwhile they're laying off key developers and gutting the future of their core product, while paying execs bloated salaries to manage this array of white elephant advocacy projects.

[0] - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/fellow-research-decen...

[1] - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter...

How is donating directly to a project "perfect"? That's a pretty normal expectation, imo. Framing something normal as "perfect" is definitely a fallacy.

Would you really be OK with donating to a cause whose major service is their most visible one and for your money to instead go into mostly, completely different things? I'm not and therefore I won't donate to Mozilla. I donated to other projects with clear goals, limited scope and visible results - there are quite a few of those. If the firefox team decided to split from Mozilla or a team decided to build a browser upon a new browser engine (like quantum or whatever that new rust browser engine is), I'd be glad to donate directly to the project.

Mozilla leadership has proven that they are too scatterbrained and insensitive to reality to be trusted with donations. Their priorities aren't aligned with the ones stated by the org. I try my best not to give money to people like that.

But you cannot even donate to the Mozilla Corp (those who actually coordinate Firefox development), but to the Mozilla Foundation, which AFAIK does advocacy.

I honestly don't know if how much each 1$ donated to the Mozilla Foundation contributes to Firefox development, if at all.

Does earmarking for donations exist in the US, i.e. could you donate under the condition that the money is only to be used for development of Firefox?

Yeah, they used to do that for Thunderbird. I assume it wasn't worth the hassle, and unless you are donating a serious amount of money they won't agree to take on the risk involved.

Once upon a time, someone affiliated with Thunderbird project maintenance/governance posted a detailed reply to HN describing how hard it was to get Mozilla to release funds that it had been been collecting from Thunderbird donors. That comment is obviously not lost to the sands of time, but it has proven quite difficult to relocate.

It sounds like there was a period of time where the donations just sat there before a system was developed to allow Thunderbird total control. It's somewhat understandable, at the time Thunderbird shared many resources with Firefox but if some of the donation money was used for Firefox they'd break the terms of the donations.

This is nothing more than apologetics, and not even good apologetics. Instead, speculative apologetics, i.e. no solid footing by which to understand the premise.

Compared to "I'm pretty sure I read once things were bad." Sometimes things are hard, Thunderbird didn't seem very upset as they decided to stay with Mozilla during the period.

It's not "perfect vs good", it's "completely useless vs good".