I'd say it's because it is the nature of bureaucracy to expand. An open source browser doesn't need to make money, but a foundation tends not to maintain an unerring focus on a single, specific goal.

The only thing Firefox users hate more than Mozilla taking money from Google is Mozilla making money from other sources. Why can't the Mozilla team just be ascetic hairshirts who make exactly the browser they want and bring XUL back while they're at it. /s

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit that owns the for-profit Mozilla Corporation.

Step 1 is get rid of the for-profit corporation that pays its CEO 2.4 million dollars a year to lose market share. That's 24 well-paid developers, or double that from lower-income countries.

The foundation had a revenue of $441 million in 2020. We know that in 2014 ~90% of their revenue come from its search-engine deal with Google. That means that without Google they'd have ~44 million to work with these days (or more).

That's a lot of devs, before even considering non-search-engine sources of revenue. Personally I don't mind ideas like the VPN. I do mind the stupid grants the foundation does unrelated to a web-browser or acquisitions like pocket.

> That's 24 well-paid developers, or double that from lower-income countries.

That's a stretch even if we don't count the additional overhead.

For a non-profit that (already) runs a mass of volunteers? Surely you jest. The CEO of the blender foundation makes around 100k. They develop one of the greatest open source success stories on 2 million a year. That's less (for the whole project) than Baker makes (2.4 million). There's no excuse for the shitshow that is Mozilla, none.

Couldn't they take the Google money, invest it, and pay developers purely from the interest? Like a university endowment?

How many years of Google money would it take to support ~500 staff purely for making Firefox in perpetuity? That's maybe ~$50 million/year?

This[1] says endowments target ~7.5% annualized returns. So a very conservative 5% return could pay for ~500 staff with ~$1 billion in Google bucks.

[1] https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2023/Higher-Education-...

> 2.4 million

Try > 5.6 million. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...

Firefox is the only thing that makes money. The problem is that the money made by Firefox was not invested back into Firefox. As a result market share fell. Less market share leads to less money from search deal.