They could use the donations to improve Firefox, to pay the salaries of the engineers, instead of all the political nonsense they do with the foundation. Yes, your donations go towards that.
And they could cut the salaries of management instead of giving themselves raises.
I don't think you get what I said. I said: if they stopped throwing money down the drain with the politised foundation and the executives stopped raising their salaries they wouldn't have to run ads and maybe they could even pay their engineers more money.
Can you elaborate on the ways in which you feel the Mozilla Foundation is politicized? Their advocacy page[1] feels incredibly vanilla: it emphasizes private communication, online safety, and collaboration with generally well-regarded groups like the EFF.
First that's her. Then I am going to entirely ignore yoir pointless jab at developers. The discussion was strictly about Baker 150% raise.
The 2017 deal was a 8% increase in revenue. That's a significant slow down of the increase trajectory of these deals. Meanwhile every other metrics were going down, most notably market share.
2017 also saw the rebranding and the Pocket deal go through. I still don't think it was worth a 150% increase.
And they could cut the salaries of management instead of giving themselves raises.
Instead we got ads in the home page.