100% agree with that. Maybe Mozilla's greatest skill really is in PR and that it is a rotten organization inside (which so many comments on HN seem to imply), but I don't buy that. When you try to do good, you always put yourself in a vulnerable position. As soon as you make a single mistake, people love to point the finger and criticize for being a hypocrite and not living up to your standards. When an evil company does something good, we applaud them. When a good company makes a mistake, we bash them.

As a consumer of the web and a developer on the web, Mozilla is one of the few "big" players in the web ecosystem that I see who are really fighting for keeping the web open.

We were just having this discussion with a friend the other day, on the topic of the anti-trust hearings. What if the web didn't evolve to be open like it was today, but instead had followed the evolution of the mobile space, dominated and fully controlled by only two players? What if it was impossible to run a website from a server in your bedroom but instead had to submit your website to some corporation and wait a couple of days before some semi-human reviewer approved it (or not)? The transformative power of the web on global society would never have been as big as it has been if it had evolved in that model.

For that reason alone, I applaud Mozilla and I decided to start donating today. I would hate for the web to be under the tyranny of some corporation because that would be such a loss for humanity. And we need people and organizations that put up the fight against the Googles of this world.

For what it’s worth I just signed up for the VPN service today. Hopefully that helps a bit.

Does the Mozilla foundation fund browser development?

Why would one donate to an organisation the fires workers whilst paying millions to execs?

We have heard this argument many times from Mozilla advocates on HN. I don't buy it. To me, this sounds like an argument for the status quo. It may be a rational descriotion of the reasoning what Mozilla is continuing to pursue, but essentially it argues, "No one can do better. Therefore, don't change anything". Well, if the comments in this thread (and many others) are any indication, there are some users who want change. Mozilla is not "good enough" for these users. Things could be better.

No one knows what would happen if things changed. Sometimes we have to take risks, experiment. The portrayal of Mozilla as being like a little boy with his (Firefox) finger in the dike saving us all from being flooded over by the (Google) sea is an oft-told fairy tale.

It is arguable that Mozilla is already "dead" and has been for quite some time.

Google already has a "monopoly in the web", and they in fact control Mozilla by being its essential source of revenue.

The "non-profit" bit is also getting old. Is it supposed to mean something by implied comparison to other non-profit organisations? Mozilla is a corporation, it has employees doing the same work as Google as it tries to maintain faeature parity, including gathering data on users through telemetry. It is dependent on Google, it relies on the sale of web advertising in order to be able to pay those employees. Web advertising is the very thing that Firefox users want to be protected against.

How is that preventing Google from enjoying a "monopoly in the web"? Google could pull the plug on Mozilla at any time. As others point out, it probably prefers to prop Mozilla up instead.

My suggestion is to release a different sort of browser, smaller. In fact, release multiple browsers, each with a different focus. These specialised browsers could use pieces of Firefox code but would be small enough any user could compile in a short time on an underpoweered computer. Of course they could also be more secure what with reduced complexity and attack surface.

There are so many annoyances with the web that could easily be solved by going in a different direction, away from advertising and the idea of a web browser as an "all-in-one" program.

I believe there are markets for this, although no one knows the size of them, because users are coerced to use the same handful of overgrown, corporate-sponsored web browsers, forever increasing in complexity, insecure and in need of a patch.

At this point in web history, trying to achieve 100% feature parity with a corporate-sponsored web browser funded by advertising is a waste of time, IMO. What is worth the time are features that those corporations will never pursue. These are the most interesting things Mozilla has been doing with Firefox.

I am typing this using a text-only browser that I can edit and re-compile in minutes. Much faster than Firefox; no ads, tracking or telemetry. I certainly do not need a major web browser to read HN or the sites posted to it. Using the same program to read HN as I use for, e.g., internet banking, is silly, IMO. I actually have better ability to read sites posted to HN than some readers who consistently get thwarted by crazy web designs, phoney paywalls, etc. There should be many browsers in between linemode and "modern" browser. There should be a spectrum of choice of user-agents, each with different feature sets, not always the same ones.

Ironically, Google supports the Mozilla project

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-i...

Which means as Mozilla dries up, its only support is "Google."

Meaning, soon to you, a chromium firefox based browser no different as to Edge, Brave or whatever else is out there.

tl;dr Mozilla is propped up by Google. Google is no bueno.