True but they are looking in all the wrong places. Including pocket "featured headlines", vpn services that are just a resell, just lowhanging fruit that does nothing but annoy the users that still care about them.
Meanwhile they try to make the browser as mainstream friendly, not understanding that the mainstream has long given up on them and they only have the last remaining bastion of hardcore privacy users left. Whose user patterns they're not seeing because they focus too much on telemetry.
I think since they became Mozilla Inc they started thinking like big tech and are slowly becoming just like it. But because their foundation origins the declining marketshare is not ringing their alarm bells like they, in a real company, would.
If they really wanted to diversify and get me to pay for something, they have to do more than just resell mullvad. I'm a mullvad user but I much rather pay for that directly as it gives me a lot more features. I love mullvad but I want to use it in more than just a browser.
What I'd want to see and would pay for:
- A service like Apple's iCloud Private Relay that really makes browsing more anonymous (rather than a basic VPN which they offer now, that's too little too late).
- Paid Sync storage (with full E2E so I have no reason to self-host)
- An archiving service of webpages (also E2E). Because onenote sucks more and more
Basically things other than 'quick wins' but that need some serious vision and development. Right now they're thinking way too much like a lazy CEO, doing a quick tie-in with another service hoping for some takeup or some cheap marketing benefit.
If they want to diversify and get people to pay they really have to offer some real benefits that are a gap in the market. Those exist but they need some more work than just a quick joint marketing effort.