(Cue complaints about it not being the right way to fund Firefox, because it’s not a pure donation. Before you go down that road, tell me: what evidence do you have that pure donations would get enough transactions to be worth the overhead? Have they ever worked at scale for any other software?)
I pay for lots of software I use, and do so happily if it delivers value — it would be extremely easy for me to justify paying for what's probably one of the apps I use the most. Why can't we pay for good browsers, that put the focus squarely on being the best tool to access the www? Why can't that money be used to hire back some of the talent Mozilla has been letting go? I say it elsewhere in this thread — Mozilla should let us pay for the bloody thing.
Make it open source, but have the official download for builds (and source code?[0]) be payed. Bonus points if the download bundle includes source code and a simplified build process.
[0] obviously it'll be mirrored in 2 seconds, but still.
Might as well just ask for donations.
I’m not sure what in my brain says “Telemetry? Absolutely not”, but that’s how it is for me (and why I don’t use the Developer Edition).
However, I respect the “Telemetry? Absolutely not” stance and can only hope and pray that Firefox PMs use telemetry as only ONE among a whole host of other signals to support decision-making.
The rest, outside of core, seem to write code as you mention. Product additions which most always give zero real value, no income, and even detract from the brand.
No, you can't maintain an entire modern browser (25 million lines of code) with 6 people.
You probably can't even maintain a complete multi-architecture, JIT-enabled Javascript engine with 6 people. Or GPU-accelerated rendering that works across thousands of hardware / software combinations. Much less that plus all the other things a browser has to do.