This is a difficult problem. Donations wouldn't be reliable/stable enough to fund the company, and selling a different product (SaaS, consulting, etc.) would realign Mozilla's incentives to have its best people working on its revenue generator instead of the browser.
I know this'll be an unpopular suggestion (and it's not something I necessarily want), but the elephant in the room is _selling_ Firefox: I would be happy to pay for their browser provided it was more polished than the competition. I would even pay a yearly fee. (Again, not ideal, but I'm just brainstorming.)
Or maybe find a way to sell an "enterprise" Firefox to nontechnical companies who are privacy-oriented? I'm not sure how realistic this is.
The only other way they're going to be able to do this is to find something as creative as reCAPTCHA's business model [0]. With so many users, maybe there's an idea there.
I know this'll be an unpopular suggestion (and it's not something I necessarily want), but the elephant in the room is _selling_ Firefox: I would be happy to pay for their browser provided it was more polished than the competition. I would even pay a yearly fee. (Again, not ideal, but I'm just brainstorming.)
Or maybe find a way to sell an "enterprise" Firefox to nontechnical companies who are privacy-oriented? I'm not sure how realistic this is.
The only other way they're going to be able to do this is to find something as creative as reCAPTCHA's business model [0]. With so many users, maybe there's an idea there.
[0] https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/recaptcha-...