"The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen. "
Maybe you have not noticed that money actually matters? Mozilla maintains a global infrastructure for serving Firefox updates and new installs; they have to pay developers to keep up with bugs, vulnerabilities, and new web standards; they have to pay lawyers to deal with the various legal issues that come up when a project has millions of users across multiple jurisdictions; etc. Donations have never been sufficient for Mozilla to do the core development work on Firefox, which is why they signed those search deals.
I don't agree with this point of view. I think that world is slowly evolving towards an age where this point of view is outdated.
There are things for which it makes sense to try and find a different model then traditional profit driven. A web browser is one of those things. It should be a neutral window into a neutral network.
Why doesn't Mozilla try to master donation marketing the way Wikipedia does? I am sure Firefox would have an active and regular donors would the large community of enthusiasts knew that otherwise it would be heading either towards EOL or towards making it commercial
Wikipedia does not require anything like the technical staff that Mozilla requires, and even Wikipedia has struggled to get by with only donations. Wikipedia does not run on end-user devices and does not have to deal with all the things that entails. A critical vulnerability in Wikipedia is a problem for Wikipedia; a critical vulnerability in Firefox is a problem for everyone who uses Firefox, and it needs to be fixed by someone who is not going to suddenly be swamped at their day job. Wikipedia can ignore new web standards that are not useful for Wikipedia itself; Firefox has to support most web standards to remain useful as a web browser.
The best case for a community-driven Firefox would be for big companies to provide support, either in the form of money or in the form of labor. That is more or less the model that has propelled the Linux kernel. Unlike the Linux kernel, there are few if any companies out there who can point to Firefox as a strategically important project that they are prepared to pay someone to work on, especially given the existence of good, actively-developed alternatives (including Chromium for those who require open source).
Having to pay lawyers for legal issues shouldn't be a reason to lay off 250 employees. It certainly can cost a lot, if they are getting service from top-legal firms, working on billable hours. But they can choose to stick retain lawyers for important matters such as IP-rights, etc., get help from the community for other legal matters and work. For example debian has the debian-legal mailing list, where a lot of lawyers hang out and are ready to help. I certainly would like to contribute if any questions regarding my area of expertise popped up.
Big law firms also do a lot of pro-bono work. Since Mozilla is a foundation they might also try to exercise these channels.
If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it.
Covid-19 crisis shouldn't affect Mozilla, everyone is still using browsers while working at home.
There are also other ways to raise money for a corporation, for example Mozilla can go public to raise money to sustain their workforce and finance important infrastructure updates such as Servo engine.
"If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it."
Debian receives hardware to test and develop on, infrastructure, and other non-monetary support from various corporations that view Debian as a project with strategic value to their businesses. Debian also benefits from only having to package software and forward bugs to the appropriate upstream maintainers -- including Mozilla. I mentioned the lawyers at Mozilla only as an example of something they actually do need money to pay for, and I strongly suspect that Mozilla's legal team has more work to do than Debian's but do not have any first-hand knowledge. Technical work is probably a larger expense for Mozilla than legal, just by the nature of developing and maintaining a web browser that has to support the modern web (which is more application runtime than document delivery).
"Mozilla can go public"
At which point they will be beholden to their shareholders and will have to be even more revenue-focused, which is what I was replying to in the first place.
Maybe you have not noticed that money actually matters? Mozilla maintains a global infrastructure for serving Firefox updates and new installs; they have to pay developers to keep up with bugs, vulnerabilities, and new web standards; they have to pay lawyers to deal with the various legal issues that come up when a project has millions of users across multiple jurisdictions; etc. Donations have never been sufficient for Mozilla to do the core development work on Firefox, which is why they signed those search deals.