if they asked their advanced users to pitch in $10/mo to keep at least some of that talent and to ween off google revenue, i doubt any of us would have had issues. but they did the most absurd thing possible :(
it has always been impossible to donate directly for firefox or any specific mozilla initiative. any donations just got black-holed with questionable sideshow shit continuing to happen. i stopped donating at that point; that's not how i want to "vote with my wallet".
I specify in the note where I want the donation to go to when I send a donation (e.g. "for Thunderbird"); I have received notes back from the Thunderbird team referencing the donation, which satisfies the question in mind as to whether my donation preference was respected.
> Except when they fired basically all their talent.
That is an extreme exaggeration. From firing about 25% of their workforce, to 'basically all their talent' is a looong way.
> Mozilla should've always been structured as a co-op.
Please fork their software and start one. If you are successful, I will say I always believed in you, if not, I will say that you should've always been structured as a social purpose corporation
The problem being that forks work for ideological differences, not for resources differences.
If you forked Firefox and made unambiguous improvements, Mozilla would presumably incorporate them, because why wouldn't they? Then everybody would get your improvements from firefox.com instead of notfirefox.com because that's what they're familiar with, and with Mozilla's default search instead of yours, so they still get all the money.
