I hate ads. I love Mozilla. I understand Mozilla needs the money. I don't mind supporting them with cash. Why not have a freemium option for folks to subscribe to Firefox and hide the ads?
They could charge for services such as sync but again that is going to be difficult Chrome does it for free.
I think Mozilla need to seriously look at how they are spending their money as it seems to be pretty insane some of their outgoings.
I know they are trying to diverge from just being a browser with things like Firefox OS but we all know that isn't going to ever be a real competitor to iOS and Android. Even in developing nations I think people are more likely to go with a dirt cheap Windows Phone when Windows 10 is out over a Firefox phone. One thing Windows Phone does really well is run great on very low powered devices. I can't ever see Firefox OS getting above 0.x market share.
Perhaps Mozilla is just too big now? Do they need to scale back to save money? Can they survive on a donations alone?
But how is "Firefox with ads" going to work then? Firefox is still open source after all. Someone will remove the bit of code enabling ads, gives it a fancy new name and eventually a critical mass will switch to this browser.
"Firefox with ads" lets one turn off the ads. The control offered is the same when you're allowed to download a fork. I don't see why a fork would hurt Fx so much if it just turns a feature off by default -- a feature that Firefox lets you turn off anyway.
Why? Anyone who would go to the bother of downloading a separate build (and worrying about whether it'll update itself properly) can surely click on the gear in the top right corner of the new tab page and uncheck a checkbox? (Or be like me and keep the new tab page blissfully blank. Far less distracting.)
I highly doubt the revenue from the ads will be significant compared to what Mozilla gets from Yahoo, at least not for a long time. This isn't about revenue; it's more like the old Firefox sync thing where it avoided sending unencrypted data anywhere. You could only decrypt client-side. Similarly, this is about trying out an ad model where the privacy-sensitive data stays client-side.
Perhaps it'll do better than old Sync did?
(full disclosure: I work for Mozilla on the JS engine. Sadly, though, I'm not one of those world-class JIT geniuses mentioned elsewhere in this thread. In fact, I'm a complete idiot. Please don't tell them.)
(And no, we can't survive on donations alone.)