They are in a tough place.

They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.

The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.

I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.

> They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari)

They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".

> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome

Very few people go to that page anyway.

> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.

They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.

Firefox has 1.4 billion in reserves and no debt.

If they stop paying tens of millions to their management, they could easily afford paying devs in perpetuity just from investing that money.

> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.

We all know how that was paid for. Google. But instead of taking that money stream and investing it 100% into making it the best browser ever, they pursued a myriad of fancy distractions. Yes, making a sustainable browser project is hard. Making a sustainable browser project while being constantly distracted by side project and political activism [1] is even harder. I am not saying if Mozilla stayed focused the win would be guaranteed. But I am pretty sure doing it like they are doing it guarantees failure.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need...

> how to pay for that

I would not mind to pay for the browser, but they will not let me.

I've donated to thunderbird since they made a promise that won't go into other weird/stupid mozilla ventures.

I'd gladly do the same for firefox, but they have not given the opportunity.

If I had the cash back then I'd do the same for B2G/firefoxOS.

Doesn't Mozilla foundation have millions of dollars, including paid for by Google? "Linux" is better capitalized, "Wikipedia" is sort of open source, what else ranks above Mozilla?

Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.

The series of own goals is a bigger problem. They should spend their $ on FF and allow direct donations that only go to FF and not to their hobby projects.