Fair question. First move for Mozilla: Fire the whole fucking leadership team and use the millions saved for some more developers working on Firefox. That should finance the next 2 years, afterwards we can think about next steps. :-P

In general I agree: Open source projects are super hard to monetize and too much work does not get donations, flowers or even thanks.

For Firefox specifically I am not so sure, especially when Thunderbird seems to be doing good with their donation based model.

As long as Firefox is run by Mozilla throwing millions at their incompetent leadership, I will not donate a cent to Firefox.

If Firefox would get forked by some developers I’ll happily donate money to them and given Firefox high visibility/importance, this might work out, like Thunderbird did.

… as already mentioned above:

1. This will be just an additional data point about you sold out - no advertiser will dial back on all the other ways to collect data about you.
2. Mozilla shows that it willingly and silently will sell your data out and they will increase this over time to make money/try to be the man in the middle.
3. It does not matter at all if it affects ad blocking solutions, this is about tracking and profiling. Learn about browser fingerprinting and other techniques.
4. This is built in to your browser, which is crossing a very important line.

… first of all, providing a new API to give out information about me is not a good thing in my mind.

Second, this would be the first time in human history, the advertisers would not simply add that APIs information to everything else they aggregate including fingerprinting of your browser.

So, serious question: How is this good for me?

Edit: typo