Not really conductive as long as most funds are siphoned by the C-suite ranks. Get rid of the C-fat first, maybe even turn Mozilla into a co-op, then have the People fund it.

Their support isn’t required though, it’s desired.

Mozilla have millions of $, they are actively investing in various money making schemes (sorry, financial investment vehicles) well outwith the original scope of Mozilla.

They take the money because they want the money, they could refuse it any time they want. But they won’t, because they don’t want to. They’re not a poor FOSS project with an independent developer that needs donations to survive, stop treating them like they are.

Mozilla has created some brilliant software, but they’re leaving their original mission behind, burning goodwill with many people around the world, and setting themselves up to be shunned by the open source community the second a viable alternative pops up.

start putting up the money to make their support no longer required

There’s no way individual donations from ordinary people could match Google’s. They’re also likely to be less reliable.

Mozilla doesn’t even ask for donations from users a whole lot, and the money they receive mostly doesn’t go into development of the browser:

These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer’s guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-asked-questions

Voting with your wallet doesn’t work when you are the product. They don’t care about your money when google’s will dwarf any amount individuals could hope to raise, even collectively. Nothing prevents them from just taking both your money and google’s and changing absolutely nothing.

I thought Mozilla lost the google funding in the monopoly ruling?

What’s the amount they get donated or funded? So we know how much to raise yearly.