>Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.

What should they do instead? Their "Program" (ie. non-management) salaries alone are $200M+ per year. That's not something you can replace with a Patreon.

Judging by the features they have been adding into Firefox lately, I would guess that actually just maintaining and updating the browser doesnt cost anywhere to $200m per year.

They have something like 700 employees working on Firefox. To be honest, I have no idea what they do — take a look at the commit history and you’ll see that the core group of engine contributors is quite small — but $280,000 per employee including benefits, HR, office rent, and other overhead actually isn’t bad at all.

For me, the best option would be to be able to donate to Firefox engineers directly, but not to Mozilla, they do too many things, I don't stand for those, just the Firefox browser...

You may just end up with the "tipped cashier" effect where wages are driven down on rationale that they will be tipped.

Now if you buy a self serve coffee in a paper cup the cashier whose sole job is to take your money, expects a tip because their wages are shite.

I wonder why they haven't tried that yet:

Firefox Support Edition, for $10 a month you get nothing (or maybe some Sync stuff) but all the funds go to Firefox exclusively, and your copy will show a pretty star on startup or something else.

Patron Edition: for $20 a month, same thing but you also get the VPN from Mullvad.

160M users. If 10% subscribe, you get $160M every month. I'm a marketing genius.

>160M users. If 10% subscribe, you get $160M every month. I'm a marketing genius.

Can't tell whether you're serious or being sarcastic. A 10% conversion rate for a free product would be the most successful marketing campaign in history. Typical rates are in the low single digits, and that includes goods/services that people have no choice but to pay money for (eg. drop shipped goods from china or SaaS products).

This. I’m starting to wonder if it could be possible to raise some funds and hire people to work on Firefox (and Firefox only). Maybe partner with the FF forks to help raise money? I don’t really know how that would work.

Money is fungible. Every dollar you donate earmarked to "Firefox engineers" can theoretically be offset by the Mozilla foundation/corporation moving one dollar to something else. This eventually breaks down if the sums are large enough, but at the scales that individual donations can muster, it'll probably hold.

Right. Governments have used the same tricks with lotteries and bonds allocated to specific programs. People vote for these revenue generating methods to fund the programs, and the governments can then divert the money that was previously funding the programs into less popular sinkholes.

Exactly, which is why buying a homeless drug addict a coffee and a sandwich means he can shift that money into drugs.

And why "humanitarian aid" to countries at war allows budgets to be shifted to weapons instead of food and medical supplies.

Sometimes you just can't do the seemingly obvious "right thing"

To be clear, it's likely funded by people using Google search as the default on Mozilla.