Yeah, afaik firefox development is carried out by mozilla corporation (the for-profit subsidiary of mozilla), but your donations goes to mozilla foundation, which spends the money on "advocacy".
I think I can agree to disagree with most people replying, I consider it highly misleading that they prod users to donate when using Firefox, and don't mention that Firefox is not funded by donations: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
A few years ago, I certainly thought the funds went to development. And I can't say I'm a big fan of most of their initiatives (most of which have been abandoned Google-style).
Hypothetically, Development funds would be ... salaries. Misleading presentation seems to me as a different issue than "but they spend X% on salaries", so where did you want to go with that.
Can you answer the question that was posed? Is the amount of spending on salaries too high, or too low? It’s impossible to tell what point you are trying to make.
I'm sorry, on further consideration, you're right about the salaries.
I think with some charities (like feeding children), my expectation would be that the salaries would be very low, and the costs of providing the "good" would be the bulk of the expense.
But in the case of an advocacy/software platform, you're right that salaries would be expected to be a large part of the expense.
As someone who's used Firefox for close to 20 years, their recent activities have left a sour taste in my mouth, and I suppose I'm a bit biased as a result. For the last five years as everyone switched to Chrome, I continued to use Firefox, and encouraged others to use the same.
I believe that the Firefox project has been somewhat mismanaged, which has resulted in a large drop in users. For example, they could have started including an ad blocker by default - they would probably have killed Brave's business that way. If they care so much about privacy, it seemed like a no-brainer.
I guess I was reaching for reasons that their budget was lavish... but that wasn't true. My real concern is with the fact that donations to the organization don't, and cannot, go to the browser.
When I first saw a notice to donate in my browser years ago, I certainly thought my money was going to development. They want to encourage an "open web", privacy, etc, and I think those goals are all very important. The continued dominance of Firefox was probably the best way to actually achieve those goals.
Talk is cheap, and I'm a bit sad that the browser share is now dwindling. We have many other organizations making blog posts/activism for the open web, but Firefox was the only one actually doing something about it, which is 1000x as valuable as far as I'm concerned.
So when they encouraged me to donate, and I thought it went to development, and realized it was going towards this kind of "activism", I felt betrayed and tricked. I still stand by that sentiment. We have plenty of activists and journalists who fight for the open web via words - all for free.
I feel that by existing, Firefox took up most of the market share for that, and by encouraging donations, they created a desert for other browsers to rise up. If another organization had forked Firefox and taken over with hundreds of millions in donations, I doubt the market share would have dropped so sharply. For example, they wouldn't have been "forced" to do privacy-bad things like selling ads on the new tab page. By claiming to be "the" privacy-focused browser, they soured any efforts to make a new one.
All this to say, I'm mostly sad about it. I miss Firefox, and I wish we had a strong fighter still in the arena. I'm doubtful Firefox can turn it's product and reputation around at this point given their corporate structure. Cheers.
I don't like these big budgets for foundations and groups for the public interest either, but in my opinion Wikimedia definitely shouldn't be compared to Mozilla here.
