Wouldn’t need to take their money if donations were to get high enough (though it might be easier to have a collective org that all kinds of open internet groups could join and donate to). At the moment FF is the only browser that isn’t relying on Google’s Chromium while also being a real player that isn’t OS specific like Safari is. All the FF alts may have their own very good points for making their forks, but they aren’t building anything from the ground up. Which puts them in the same spot as all the Chromium based forks with regards to relying on base code needing to stay current. It is of course possible for the Chromium forks to join with FF (and any of its forks that can put their issues with Mozilla aside on this issue) to call for protections.
IE/Microsoft was pulling the same kinds of shit before Chrome, Firefox, and Safari were able to show what could be possible with both actual demands for standards to be followed and that the internet should be open. The open standards are what allowed so many devs of all classes/nationalities/ages/etc to create so many cool things when barriers like money and copyright are removed. Now Google is the Microsoft of the internet and they only respect the rights of corps and rich fucks that don’t create anything. Just digital rights versions of landlords. We wouldn’t have the options we have now if we waited for those copyrights holders to stop us from just doing shit with technology.
The sad part is that you can’t donate to Firefox directly. Only to the Mozilla Foundation, which, I think misguidedly, is trying to become a political advocacy entity. They want to talk about “hate speech” online. They want to make their own AI thing… ugh. I would never deny that society and the internet has big problems. But it seems the organization has been overtaken by people who want to play political games rather than just making free software.
If they focused solely on making a killer browser they might actually be able to dethrown Chromium or at least become more than a niche player.
Wouldn’t need to take their money if donations were to get high enough
You can’t even donate to Firefox directly. Donation money goes to the corp., which means it goes to CEO pay raises.
Isn’t that what Google does when they pay for being the default? Real and honest question because I would imagine that the money from them would just as easily be used the same way you say donating to the Mozilla Foundation would be used. No money going to the foundation would also mean that the only way to fund the projects would be completely on relying on Google. Or at least that is how I understand it, and I am more than ready to be wrong. And if donating to the foundation means nothing. Then what about paying for the optional stuff like the VPN/Relay? Even if it goes to the foundation, it (at least per what they state and ideally does) claim to use funding to push into the politics of internet related projects. Which is also important for being able to fight legal battles like anti-trust (again ideally since I am not defaultly saying funds can’t and/or aren’t used incorrectly).
No money going to the foundation would also mean that the only way to fund the projects would be completely on relying on Google.
No. You could just directly donate to the developers (not to Firefox, there’s a difference). Though that requires the developers to take the firsts step: any web developer worth their salt knows how effed up the system is with donations going to corps, and will open up their own tip jar / donations box in a system like, dunno, Paypal or ko-fi.
