I don't want an aggressive split, but I'd like to be able to support the project. I've donated to Mozilla in the past but it apparently was not going to Firefox directly.
All the donations go to MoFo, where they barely covered Mitchell’s salary and what was left went to her pet political projects. People are pretty unaware/misled about how Mozilla is structured/funded.
The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and use Google as the default search engine.
> The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and use Google as the default search engine.
Which is a much greater cost than I'm willing to pay.
I donate monthly to KDE and I would to firefox.
And no I absolutely won't keep Google
You could contribute with code I guess, or if you just want to throw money at the project hire a developer to fix a couple bugs. As a bonus you get to pick the bugs.
Yes, I have one for Waterfox. I have had one since 2012, first as Waterfox Limited and now as BrowserWorks Ltd (registered in the UK).
When people ask for comparison between forks, as often happens in the community, I’ve actually found it interesting that none of them actually have anyone to hold accountable in a legal sense, and I’ve started to lean into that as a benefit of Waterfox.
A browser is an incredibly privileged piece of software; it’s used to access very sensitive information, but it doesn’t seem to be a consideration a lot of the time about “who” is behind these forks.
I’ve got a few product launches that I hope will get me out under the thumb of middlemen and the murky world of search engine partnerships, and with that, hopefully build up a small team to have sustainable growth and a viable mainstream alternative.
Waterfox will be 13 in March, and one pie in the sky dream was to eventually be able to have a completely detached front end with frequent improvements submitted upstream to the browser engine. So somewhat similar to what you seem to be asking for.
"Thunderbird is a project of MZLA Technologies Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation." and
"Gifts to Thunderbird are not tax-deductible as charitable gifts, but are greatly appreciated."
... so I guess Thunderbird is part of a for-profit corporation owned by a non-profit? Why would Mozilla pick this kind of corporate structure?
Donating to the Tor Browser project could be an idea. The Tor Browser is a Firefox fork, and they are a legitimate org that is on friendly terms with Mozilla. Even to the extent that some Tor features are actually in the Firefox source code, and just disabled by default.