Charging money for the browser will quickly push them down to single-digit marketshare, and will make "works on Chrome, ship it" the only correct way to develop for the web.
If you want to pay for using their browser, you could always donate to them.
the donations never went to firefox. it was dispersed to many of their other misguided and failed revenue gen efforts. they redirected a ton of servo engineers to focus on VR/Magic leap, ffs.
Yes. The money should gone towards dev, but also testing.
According to the author, the problem contributing to this misprioritization was that “Firefox exists just to give Mozilla a seat at the table when the web is defined,” such that they didn’t care if it was the best. I doubt that’s true. Few want second, third, or fourth place. So let’s assume they wanted it to be the best. Where did it go wrong?
As much as Rust is great and FF was a great project to try it out on, I’m not convinced that FF needed a full rewrite, and in my experience there were significant problems with performance as Rust wasn’t fully there and the developers didn’t test adequately on all platforms, which they should’ve pushed more for if the funds were there.
If you want to pay for using their browser, you could always donate to them.