It is time for Mozilla to stop messing around. They are losing user trust extremely fast. A silent FireFox update that cripples the browser? No active update was done since yesterday and this morning: a broken browser. Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser! I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap. I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an op…
Unless you are a billionaire, you can't afford to. Developing a decent browser takes enormous amounts of money, good luck funding that of voluntary donations or monthly fees if in most technical aspects superior free alternatives exist. Firefox is failing badly on a few hundred millions a year; I'm sure you could do better with a CEO who isn't just a parasitical non-entity, but I doubt better enough to make that idea viable.
> This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.
A pipe dream -- the web is a dead end. If you want something that can live off donation support (as opposed to selling off its users as cattle), you need a new set of protocols. The whole web stack is such a clusterfuck of layers upon layers of crap with one dominant player who can always add more of it when it suits them to slow down competitors (including bugs you need to replicate for compatibility purposes) that there is not the slightest chance of some grassroots alternative emerging.