Let me pay for Firefox

Someone should fork Firefox, strip all copyrighted stuff, and severe all ties to Mozilla. Worked great for Rust, Servo, Thunderbird and several other projects dumped by Mozilla.

But honestly Firefox has way too much technical debt. Starting new browser (Ladybird, webkit) seems like much better way to go! There are several independent browsers!

There is also Servo which shares some code with Firefox (Stylo, Webrender) while rewriting significant parts.

Thunderbird is de jure still a Mozilla project (through a subsidiary, MZLA).

And no, severing all ties wouldn’t work – not unless you find a viable financial model. Selling access for builds (Ardour-style) might work, but I’m not too sure.

My understanding is Thunderbird is self funded from donations.

> not unless you find a viable financial model

First reduce expenses by several magnitudes. There is no reason browser should need more than a github project, build QA servers, and 10 paid core developers. But you would need much better codebase for that!!!

As for income, donations come to mind. You can still sell default search, just not to google.

20 years ago browser companies had income from selling their rendering engine for embedded use. They also did consulting...

I mean I do agree – donations plus endowment should work pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549144