For how often it comes up one would think a $5/m subscription plan would be worth it just to not have the constant complaints about it. Even if 0.0001% of the MAU users (so ~2,000 die hard users) did a $5/month subscription that's $5*12*2,000=$120,000/y. Surely that's enough to implement it if they find pop-up ads for their VPN service over other pages worthwhile.

Instead the current pitch is "buy this $5/m VPN, of which we'll get a small cut of from reselling Mullvad, and still get all of the ads you were complaining about in the browser anyways".

> I think many people overestimate how many people would pay for Firefox.

I certainly would never pay them if they keep doing that kind of shit

I absolutely would if the money went to development of Firefox and not to the different activism projects. But that isn't an option.

But you’re the minority. Firefox is already free and has what, like 3% of the market share? If it became a paid browser it’d lose like 98% of its users (if we consider an industry standard conversion rate of about 2%).

There is a difference between "paid" and "accepts donations", but as people pointed out, Firefox does not accept donations (the Mozilla Foundation does, but that goes towards activism, not towards Firefox development/MDN).

Exactly. Allow me to donate to Firefox development.

Money pays devs, not market share. It's obvious in a small market with few competitors (my company pays 10k € /yr for a simulation software seldomly used), but it's still true imo in a large market with many. Competitors that uses tracking and have more users, will often have more money for dev and advertisement, and there is the risk that webdevs won't care for the browser (already happening), but it still can work. But it needs to be noticabely better or pertains to uses cases not coverred for it works.

I've been donating to them every year for the past 5+ years. Given them every benefit of the doubt... Even defended them. Then this popup came up on all my machines this morning, so no more.

Now to find another browser... Maybe some Firefox fork or something? Like WTF every other browser is Chromium... Man this sucks, I'm about ready to quit the internet.

No you haven't been donating to them. You probably donated to a Mozilla foundation that is related, but no dollars went to funding Firefox.

The Mozilla Foundation should really sever all ties with the Mozilla Corporation. There’s no way that they should want to be associated with such a scummy company as a public charity.

Mozilla Corporation CEO: Mitchell Baker

Mozilla Foundation Chair: Mitchell Baker

If it helps, I've been using LibreWolf as a secondary browser for a while and haven't noticed issues:

https://librewolf.net

Thankfully Firefox needs nothing else than be popular and they can forever sell the default search engine for many many millions a year, which I think is a perfectly fine way to fund its development.

Unfortunately they hired a bunch of incompetent executives who would much rather starve Firefox development while spending all of the money on realizing their big business vision where they acquire useless startups then ruin the browser by turning it into a marketing platform for the aforementioned. Besides bonuses and big salary bumps, of course.

I don't think people with realistic expectations have any illusions. Servo couldn't get 10k per year for infra alone.

Most wouldn't pay or donate, but some would.

Thunderbird, for example, gained a new life because of donations: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

I guess the question is if you can get any significant number of users to pay more than Mozilla would make off of ads for the same users. If you can make $1/mo off of most users and $5/mo off a smaller set of users, the smaller set doesn't have to be that big to make it worth doing financially.