People keep saying things like this, but the truth is that direct contributions to any ad-supported system contribute more like 1%-10% (at best) of their income.
You are not the majority you think you are.
The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Let's assume that half of it was dedicated to Firefox; e.g. $60M/y. It would take 500k users paying $120/y (aka $10/mo) to support their favorite browser. The current audience of Firefox is approx. 170M users; it would take about 0.3 percent of the audience to be paying users; 0.6% if you lower the rate to $5/mo.
This is how any freemium works.
Even more funnily, someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors. Eventually the developers might stop needing the paycheck from Mozilla, and thus from Google.
Firefox is under corporation, not foundation. Mozilla Corporation expenses are $400M+, not $100M.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
(I don't enough knowledge about freemium economics to figure out if the stated numbers would work out or not)
If we adjust to these numbers, we need to quadruple the number of paying users, up to some 1.2% of the total user base. Let's add a safety margin, and bump it to 2%.
Still does not look impossible to attain.
I had the same thought. I dont think such an org would be able to pull in nearly the same amount of money as Mozilla does, but even a few million dollars a year would fund a lot of development work.
Now that's not some optional donation scheme, there are real tangible benefits to being a paid subscriber, so idk how that could fit into something like Firefox.