What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to. The negativity spiral, deserved as it may be, seems to then tip a lot of people (self-proclaimed) towards going with Chrome when that is still the worse option. Looking at Firefox' market share, I feel bad for the shit it gets and what it has to pull to try and stay relevant (.: to pay the devs). At the same time, I would also not mind an unmozillad firefox, perhaps in exchange for a certain donation amount per year.
I currently don't donate much to Mozilla because they keep making the experience worse time and again (I'm still salty on a daily basis because the new mouse gestures "extension" is crap compared to the "add-on"-based one from before Firefox 57), because donating adds your email address to their spam list, and because I can't tell them to spend it on useful things like Thunderbird and Firefox rather than developing yet another VPN frontend or buying Pocket. Having a Firefox subscription that gets rid of their ads would not limit what they can spend it on, but it would send a clear message of what it is that I'm wanting to pay for. Wouldn't solve all problems but I wonder if this might help.
If Mozilla becomes as bad as Google, then there's no reason to choose them over the larger and more stable platform. That's why we hold them to a higher standard—if they can't meet that standard they have no reason to exist at all.
Money donated to Mozilla isn't used to develop Firefox: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/
I'd be fine paying or donating to help Firefox development, but I can't.
Yes, because FF’s only advantage left is that they’ll actually respect your privacy and control of your machine. They have nothing else! If you want a browser that’s the fastest, or has full featured addons, or is mostly like to work on sites where you need it, sorry, Chrome has them hopelessly, irrevocably beaten.
Privacy is the one area where they could actually claim to be better and yet every so often they’ve shown willingness to abandon that advantage for the slimmest of upsides.
Imagine if google injected random stuff without permission in a site like ycombinator, people would go absolutely nuts and google would be considered diabolic, yet for some reason all other browsers have done similar stuff and they somehow get a pass?
We have already accepted Google as the “bad guy”. “Good guys” are held to a different standard. If Mozilla want to be a “bad guy” too, they will lose to Google who has the better product.
LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) is essentially this: Firefox, with the telemetry and Mozilla adware disabled. And you can use homebrew or other package managers to handle updates (instead of getting spammed by update dialogs every day or two in the browser itself).