And it's not like they need to sell ads to make money.
This can only generate bad PR without getting anything in return. Whoever authorized this change is essentially working against Firefox.
What if a fork was funded in a kickstarter like way, enough ideally to pay the salaries of the development team.
I'd happily pay ~$20 per month knowing that the money was going where it should.
Not at the moment, but long term they need to diversify their income. They lose users and the management doesn't work for free.
The VPN thing was a nice idea but too niche to count. I don't want a VPN linked to my browser anyway.
I'd pay for Firefox Sync though. I'm surprised they never made that paid.
Remember when you could make Firefox look and behave exactly like you wanted it to? Because I sure as hell do.
Looks like they are very well paid. So much that they had to let go 250 engineers last year.
Actually, they likely do need to sell ads if they want to keep Firefox alive.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...
Tl;Dr: Mozilla gets no less than $400 million yearly from Google just by keeping it as default search engine.
I was happy to donate to Mozilla in the past, and would do again even knowing about the agreement with Google; I want to support them. But I'm donating to support development and promotion, not to make some rich execs even more richer. If that's the case, then I'll use my wallet elsewhere.