Agreed, I subscript to random Mozilla products like VPN and Relay to pay them but I dont need those and would hate to have them waste extra development time on improving those services. I would rather fund the browser directly.

Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.

I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w...

Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.

a) It’s insane how little we pay for browsers given their utility. b) Many people would be happy to pay extra for a browser to support free access for others (The Guardian was a decent example of that IIRC).

And they claim to have at least 200 million users. If 1% pays a yearly fee of 10 dollars, surely that's enough to fund development.

Going by the 2023 financial report (getting the 2024 report requires to submit a mail address?!), Mozilla spent over 500mil in that year, 328m on salaries (page 5).

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/

I'm in favor of it, but that would raise about 4% of what Mozilla needs.

Even the most successful online annual fundraising drive that exists, Wikipedia, raises less than half of what Mozilla gets annually from search licensing. And Mozilla in a best case scenario probably can't match Wikipedia's fundraising for a number of reasons.

It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.