That sounds like Firefox made a bad decision to fund their operations by selling the default search engine space to an advertising company, then.
I can donate to Mozilla, but then they'll take my money and pursue whatever their current distraction of the month is. I can pay for Pocket, but then I'm paying for Pocket, which I don't need or want. I can't just give them money and say "I really, really want this money to go directly to Firefox, not to another side project".
Until they offer that as an option, they cannot claim to have tried everything.