… I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job …
Edit:
Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:
- As long as Firefox is sponsored by ‘we are not a monopoly’ Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
- For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if ‘we’ accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
- This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
- Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
- This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
In general I agree: Open source projects are super hard to monetize and too much work does not get donations, flowers or even thanks.
For Firefox specifically I am not so sure, especially when Thunderbird seems to be doing good with their donation based model.
As long as Firefox is run by Mozilla throwing millions at their incompetent leadership, I will not donate a cent to Firefox.
If Firefox would get forked by some developers I’ll happily donate money to them and given Firefox high visibility/importance, this might work out, like Thunderbird did.
You can’t donate a cent to Firefox anyway, the Mozilla Corporation does not accept donations. Thunderbird is also developed by a for profit company under the Foundation, but does accept non-tax-deductible donations.