It surely isn't generally "inferior" but let's say it has character.
I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development.
Let's not forget the ridiculous pay for the executives which has been shown to not correlate with revenue (or anything else):
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
I give to the Thunderbird fund every year but have not given to Mozilla for a long time!
If it followed the product's success, products that are going through a bad patch, or are going downwards, would not be able to attract good executives, when arguably they are the ones who need the best executives, relative to products that are doing well, which on many occasions can sustain themselves purely on momentum.
This is further complicated for non profits which cannot use ownership stakes as an incentive either.
I may be a naive person who generally detests the organization chart gymnasts, but I honestly believe Mozilla would be better off if they just got rid of all C-suites and handed that cash to their developers to do whatever they want. So many open source projects are hugely successful without a CEO. Why would Mozilla be different? Keep the cash for the devs, and it's already miles ahead of any other big open source project financially!
For countless years they've been handed some 400-500 million(!) for "free", just by keeping Google the default search engine. For a conventional company, this kind of money requires a massive operation, customer base, etc.
Mozilla just gets a check. Half a billion for free. And then pisses away this money on projects where most are questionable, have no impact, etc. All the while the user base shrinking further and further, for over a decade now.
If that is the situation, it seems pretty reasonable to me to just get rid of leadership altogether. Let the tech people figure it out, it's not like they can do worse.
I'd love to see them pour more resources into it, but it's a huge project, so I think moving the needle likely is never as simple as "a bit" more attention.
It would be neat if Mozilla added a "where do you want your money to go to" option in donations. The bulk of their funding would likely continue be from partnerships, but it would make it so much more tangible that the users really care about browser development. We're not just noisy people in the HN comments--we'll put money into it given the option.
+1 A whole back I wanted to give to Firefox but I wanted to specify which projects it goes to. Many other orgs do this but last I checked Mozilla does not
In fact if they cannot avoid answering their answer is that donations are not even allowed to go to the browser. Something about Mozilla being a non-profit and Firefox being a fully owned commercial company.
To which I have to say that this is weird: 1. non-profits are allowed to do maintenance of their buildings and machinery, why not something that keeps generating income 2. even if the above doesn't work because of tax reasons they could just stop bleeding it dry. Firefox alone without Mozilla is very cash positive.
Summary: Donating to Firefox goes to Mozilla, the organization that keeps taking away all the money that Firefox generates.
Update: Firefox VPN and maybe Pocket too goes through Mozilla Corporation I think, but verify this before buying 1000 subscriptions :-)