They could stop paying their CEO so much and hire a few more devs, refocus their identity on privacy and performance (their offline ai translation is actually really useful), and actually give people the sense that their donations will be well spent.

I could not disagree more.

Mozilla has used the most powerful cheat code in history: infinite money for free.

Google cannot let Mozilla go under or they would become an actual monopolist, triggering a lot of laws that would force them to diversifying/selling the browser.

They don't want any of that headache so they're pumping Mozilla full of money, making sure that they can always operate as "the other browser engine".

The issue is that Mozilla's management seems to be completely incapable of doing anything interesting. Instead of ensuring that Firefox is the lightest, most optimised browser on the market while also being packed full of features (or at least full-fledged add-ons, not this crap they have), they do... mostly nothing.

Their last major update was "vertical tabs", something that Chromium-based browsers had for around a decade.

Their previous major update was integrating Pocket...

Meanwhile, PWAs still barely work, add-ons are still dependent on the website being loaded instead of working on the browser level, the whole thing still feels bulky.

Mozilla management needs to be replaced and then we might see some movement on the market.

How does adding AI help their funding?

People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.

People are complaining about unnecessary bloat. That has nothing to do with them being the underdog.

Basically, Firefox only crushes a handful of elderly cats while everyone else crushes kittens by the shipload.

They could try asking for donations, while getting rid of the massive drains on their budget.

I have no solution for their funding issue, what are they supposed to do?

Stop updating their browser every 5 minutes. Software that already works fine does not need continuious updates that will sooner or later subtract value.