Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
> Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.
No they wouldn't. Everyone recommended Chrome, and it came long before Edge (given Edge is based on Chromium). People have got used to Chrome. That's why it does well. People don't even interact with those sites so much any more, as they've all moved to phone apps, but they all still use Chrome.
> Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
Just paying far fewer executives and putting money aside for lean years is a good start. Put aside $150m/year and spend $100m on servers and engineers and that'll get you a long way. But because it's free money it gets spent on nonsense.
At my grocery store, they are using image recognition for self checkout. Bananas show up as bananas automatically, and if you select otherwise, I imagine it flags the item or purchaser. Shouldn't be long before the store figures out who is regularly overriding the image recognition for the purposes of theft.
Either way, pretty stupid to incriminate yourself without plausible deniability on high definition cameras for stealing low price items.
Good thing I always shop with my andy worhol banana tote bag.
Anyway, i am not a professional checkout machine operator. Any errors i may have made are caused by the fact that you’ve forced an untrained uninvested party to do work i don’t want to do so you can save on labour costs.
Please explain to me which part they are automating.
A person scans the goods. A person handles keying in codes when necessary. A person tells the system the scanning is done and to accept payment. A person bags the groceries.
I guess if you’re paying cash it automates taking the money slightly more than the standard cash register does.
Mine have lower wait times because people with lots of stuff can’t fit that shit on the tiny scale-tables, and likely don’t feel like doing all that work themselves, so they go to the regular checkout line (there is usually only one, maybe two if it’s busy), plus the five or six stations share a line so it feels faster.
The difference is that where I live stores that used to have, say, 10 counters out of which maybe 6 were open on average now have 4 human counters and 20 self-checkout counters.
So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to do just that.
By the way there are also RFID counters where you just dump your goods in a bin and it scans everything automatically. Wouldn't solve the problem with items priced by weight, but makes the rest significantly easier.
Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages. More staff can only mean higher prices. I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
> Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages.
And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
> More staff can only mean higher prices.
When you’re talking about massive chains that are prioritizing profits, usually on behalf of shareholders, that is true. For smaller businesses, coops, or even gov run grocery stores - things that aren’t as focussed on rates of return for investors - it can just mean less profits for the owners.
> I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down. Maybe the “quicker” bit… except only if I have just a handful of items.
> And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
Why would they not be high? The purchasing power of the currency goes down day after day. If nominal profits are not hitting highs day after day, then you are losing purchasing power.
> It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down.
Profit margin is the relevant metric to look at for this context. It is possible prices would have gone up 10% instead of 5% if not for the automation. It is also possible the automation fails to reduce costs.
There are no guarantees in life, just bets that may or may not pan out. Long term trends will the story, but for now, the profit margins make me happy that I don’t invest in grocery stores.
You're blaming the store, which I agree with. My question was whether you could blame the GP, or the consumer in general. They have little control over how much the staff of their grocery store is being paid.
People have different preferences. What's to be confused about that?
I share their preference. The cashier saves me no real amount of work. The difference between putting my groceries on a conveyor belt and having a cashier scan them, and me myself dragging my groceries past a scanner, is somewhere between minimal and non-existent. The amount of work I perform is functionally the same. The biggest difference is in the amount of time I spend, where the win clearly goes to the self-checkout, since then I can bag my groceries at the same time as I scan them, and there's more self-checkouts available than normal ones, meaning I spend less time queuing if I use those.
Some places have more automated steps - Uniqlo has bins where you just toss in all your clothes and it detects it via RFID tags in the price tags and rings up a total.
I scan as I walk around the shop and only pay at the self-checkout, I'll happily volunteer that 'labour' of scanning a bar code as I drop items into my bag instead of a basket in exchange for not having to hang around at checkout while someone else takes care of all that hard work for me.
I'd rather scan stuff myself than awkwardly hover while someone else does it. What's the point of paying (directly or indirectly) for another human's labour if it doesn't save me time?
Sure, but I deliberately choose my grocery store to increase the probability of having an actually skilled cashier. And I’ve never had a skilled bagger, including excellent cashiers. Doing it right is worth some of my time.
That's peanuts. I dedicate far more time to locating goods on the shelf then toting them to the cashier than I do ringing in the purchase. You don't see very many people complaining about the lack of full-service in grocery stores. Besides, I usually grab a few items on my bike ride home after work. Self-checkouts tend to be a lot faster. Even in the days of express lanes, odds were that you ended up behind someone counting out change or outright ignoring the item limit.
Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.
I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.
Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve explicitly said “don’t mix the raw meats with other products in the bags” only for the cashier to completely ignore me. This happened at a high end organic grocer the other day (after I had specifically and nicely asked) and I talked to the manager. He ran and got me replacements for my produce that was tucked into the grocery bag right next to my ground beef and raw chicken breast.
Isn’t this just basic food hygiene? Surely they teach this to the cashiers.
Do you mean the “we’ll take anyone with a pulse”, “pay them as little as possible”, “they’re a cost center” cashiers? Yes I’m sure the company invests extensive time and money into training.
The "too bad" is most people lacking the understanding that you don't steal from a store, you steal from honest shoppers who keep the store open for you to steal from.
Stores just pass on the losses from theft into the price of everything else. You're not robbing a rounding error amount from a faceless billionaire, you're robbing a rounding error amount from the "sucker" paying full price next to you.
None of the other automating technologies like this in the past ended up causing job loss. We used to employ hundreds of people 24/7 to connect phone calls...
if a store does not want to hire capable staff to perform an essential function, they should not expect laypeople to perform that action for free (or at higher cost, as we've seen with grocery prices in the US as human cashiers are reduced) at the same level as a trained staff member.
we do not have to accept this decision to reduce staff and raise prices as a matter of course. plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't.
If GuinasEyebrows does not want to drive an appropriately security-hardened armored vehicle, then they should not expect that I will not jimmy the lock and hotwire it. If you see me drive it away, no you didn't.
People are responsible for their own actions. If you think shoplifting is morally acceptable, don't try to tell me that I didn't see it.
With about a month of practice you could learn to pick 95% of residential locks.
So free everything because homeowners didn't bother to secure their stuff!/s
Growing up our house physically did not have a lock. Keys never left vehicle ignitions. A frequent experience was buying a farm machinery part and picking it up after hours out of the back of somebody's truck.
Living in low trust societies sucks.
I've had friends bring people over to my house who just randomly stole things. I've dated women who stole money out of my wallet or if it'd leave $10 on the table they'd just take it.
Casual theft is just gross as is the need to constantly feel like you need to defend yourself from everyone you meet, but moreso the casual attitude people have towards it.
It does, but that trust is established top down. If businesses in this country act lawlessly with impunity, why would you expect people, especially if they are suffering because of some company's greed, to be the chump who acts nobly while seeing a society that rewards theft?
That is not a normative moral defense of this behavior, just a descriptive one. Why would anyone expect a normal person to see a company receiving a tariff refund for a tariff that person paid and then view stealing from them as a continuation of the theft that the company itself engaged in by not paying them back?
There's a disconnect because all of the accused corruption are big picture things people barely understand happening with shady political influence, corporate structure to avoid taxes, defrauding investors and those kinds of things.
When do these people that glorify their stealing interact with actual low-trust-society events from corporates? Almost never. They just hear about it on the news and social media influencers sharing stories.
These are people who have no idea what being shaken down for a bribe is like, have always benefitted from strong consumer protection laws, generous refund policies, and all around honesty in most every corporate interaction and the complaints they have are minor compared to their proud theft.
How often are you short changed at the store? Lied to about the weight of something you were sold? Received an adulterated or diluted product?
> plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't
Don't tell me, in your view the cost of shoplifting is begrudgingly covered by those evil rich people who own everything, right? It's not passed down to customers, and therefore affects those who obey rules, and especially those who are in a precarious financial situation to begin with, right?
By everyone who uses any tool invented in human history. You are drawing an arbitrary line at self checkouts for some reason, but I am sure you have no problem with the millions of other ways automation has benefited you, obviously including using a computer to express your ideas on a forum hosted by a business that invests in other businesses that use automation as their springboard to success.
But let's see if I can explain it in a capitalism friendly way, I guess.
I have a preference for cashiers checking my stuff out for me, so that's how I select. Partly because I like the convenience, partly because I like knowing more people are having jobs.
And here's the important part; I personally actually have significant control over this, which makes it different from your silly argument.
GuinansEyebrows's opinion was that businesses are wrong for implementing self checkouts. Presumably, ryandrake agreed with GuinansEyebrows.
I do not think that a business's decision to use self checkouts is wrong, and in fact the business is consistent with all of us, as we all choose to use automation/technology how we see fit.
Maybe it is suboptimal for some people, but why would a business be wrong for trying something that reduces their costs? I try to reduce my costs all the time. For example, I like restaurants where you order at the counter or on a device and self bus. I don't like waiting for a waiter. Is that business wrong?
I've heard this argument, and I just don't get it. I've never heard anyone complain about having to push their own shopping carts. No one pays you to push the cart. Should they? If you want the cart pushed, you push the cart. If you want to check out, you check out. If either one of those is a hardship for you, go elsewhere.
This was an actual thing (complaining about this) when super-markets started to take over from general stores and butcher shops et c. Having to go get your bag of sugar off the warehouse shelf yourself rather than a clerk fetching it for you is unpaid labor on the part of the shopper (and is also not automation).
Oregon recently eliminated their mandatory gas station pump attendants. It seems most people considered that a good thing. For those that prefer the premium experience of having a human cashier, it seems that for now, they're still easy to find. For establishments that regularly expect to have large orders with dozens of items, they'll probably continue. It seems there's less to gain for large complicated orders.
Or perhaps it will go the way of smoking in restaurants. Some people definitely preferred it, but in the US anyway, it's pretty hard to find, if it's even legal anywhere.
I've always felt this is an absurd statement. Yes customers are paying the wages of the people working at the store, that's literally how basic exchange of goods and services has worked forever.
Like what is the alternative? Businesses sell things they sell those things for more than they make and then they use that money to pay people to work for them. People agree to work for them expecting they will be paid primarily from the money made by the business saling things to customers.
Like what is the alternative businesses pay their employees from some magic pool of money that you get the key too when you file articles of incorporation?
At the end of the day the customer is always paying the wages of the employees, that's literally how it worked since ever. Which is honestly an improvement where the local lord would take 30% of whatever you grew and in exchange would give you diddly and squat.
Two thousand years ago, most authors didn't know how to read or write. The erudite author would dictate their words verbally to a scribe, who had learned these specialized skills. Then other scribes and copyists could copy out the manuscript. When Gutenberg made the printing press, more specialized skills emerged: that of typesetting and publishing and printing and all that.
These separations endured well into the 1960s, as secretaries were trained women who could type and take dictation, and their bosses would generally shout into their ears and/or a tape recording device to get their work done. "Diane, take a letter!" was a common trope in the office of yesterday.
When home computing, personal word-processing, and desktop publishing came on the scene, suddenly we had to learn how to type. Suddenly every high school student who needed to write a paper, we all needed to know how to type in order to produce research papers. This was unprecedented. Then with word processing and WYSIWYG, we needed to know fonts, and bold/underline/italic conventions, and this was also unprecdented, because previously this was done for us, behind the scenes, by professionals.
Ultimately all that page layout, and design and visual aesthetics, even finding clipart and adding it appropriately and tastefully, all of that skilled knowledge and labor fell upon the shoulders of the one who was writing a newsletter for a non-profit, or writing technical documentation, or designing an album/CD cover or something.
Eventually those specializations and skills became so democratized that everyone knew them but we all knew them badly. We could do a half-assed job of desktop publishing, whereas a Gutenberg publication in the 18th century could have been a true work of art that was replicated many times.
Now even the em-dash is vilified as a signifier of low-skill slop, when some of us actually took the time to read manuals of style and understand when/how to properly use hyphens, en-dash, and em-dash. But never mind that; elegant grammar and perfect spelling are now the hallmarks of a shitty LLM prompt and HN commenters can just tear down any article by falsely claiming it was AI-written, and you can sic your fake "AI-writing detectors" on anything and 99% tear it down because of your stupid faulty em-dash hueristics.
I’m not sure whether this is a bit of a joke about the broader thrust of my post, but I actually do think tons of the “automation” computers have given us is fake, for many of the reasons you suggest. I think it’s part of why the benefits of all this alleged automation have been more muted than one might expect (though not trivial, to be clear) and that it’s imposed costs in a bunch of ways that aren’t tracked on a P&L sheet but do make life less pleasant.
If people are needing to steal food to survive we need to radically work on changing society so that doesn't happen, not just then a blind eye and ignore it.
But no, most people in the US aren't stealing from grocery stores to feed their kids, they're stealing from stores to resell on black markets.
I had a look at what it actually does in the Firefox settings and all it seems to do is to disable one AI feature flag, change the default search engine, and then set a few other flags that are changes that you may or may not want to make, unrelated to AI. Not sure you want to run a 3rd party shell script just to do that…
The second sentence in the Getting Started section invites you to follow the manual guides instead of running the 3rd party shell scripts. I think this is a good way to do it -- have both options and tell people about them right at the start of the process. Is there some other way you wish they'd share this info?
Are all options available to the group policy? Since this is not directly modifying your app and merely creating a group policy for the browser to use, there might be some things not able to be set there. I have not experience with these group policies. Just thinking of why something might be missing as you stated. It could also be considered out of scope for the dev making this project.
Seems like this is for the people that need to execute random powershell scripts they don't understand in order to turn of telemetry and copilot on Windows because reading about the registry and group policy is too much for them.
The Getting Started section invites you to follow the manual guides instead of running the scripts. That's what I did, and I really appreciate the site/guides.
Stupid to run random scripts you find online, but browser makers push users into it.
My son wants to eat "Chinese" food with chopsticks, but he can only really use a fork, so we adapt the chopsticks. He'll be able to use them eventually, but not everyone has a) the desire, nor b) the dexterity.
Making it easier to do what users want with a computer without telling them 'just learn to program' (or script in this case) is actually a good thing imo.
Some people want computers, some people just want to use them like appliances. The bigger problem is those companies who want to control other people's computers no matter which type of person they are.
A mobile phone is meant to be used to make and receive telephone calls. That is its raison d'être from the very beginning and why it is called like that.
It... doesn’t? PDAs won, there are nearly no mobile phones being made anymore. The thing you call a mobile phone is a PDA with an incidental value-add of placing phone calls. (I had been wondering for some time why the UX of talking into a headset had been on the decline for the last 20 years until I encountered this idea; sadly, I don’t remember where.)
Seems like you're using your computer wrong by posting here then. In fact, 99% of people are using their computing devices wrong all the time. The computer must be the most misused tool in the world.
With all due respect, I hope you never touch the development of any piece of software any of my relatives or friends ever has to use.
Good UX is one of the most important-yet-underserved areas in the tech industry (the topic of this site), and this sort of attitude goes beyond being smug and naive to being actively harmful. Your goal should always be to make things easier and with as little friction as necessary.
It's not hard to search for a few keys in the about:config menu or to set a group policy. If you can't be bother to do this you have zero business running random scripts that update your system configuration that you have no idea how it works.
Normie users would be better off reading some detailed step-by-step instructions on how to do it by hand using built-in methods than to run random code from the internet that can be malicious.
My mom is 75 years old and barely knows how to use a web browser to begin with. There is zero chance I encourage her to run random pwsh scripts from the internet.
God forbid we're going to start giving them AI agents to do this kind of stuff for them. God help us.
When Mozilla updated Firefox with the AI chatbot feature the first thing I did was look in settings in how to remove it. When that failed I just googled it, which pointed me to about:config and which keys to look for.
Much easier to figure out with your intuition what `browser.ml.chat.enabled` could possibly mean than running pwsh script.
If you're this paranoid then you can't really trust any piece of software. Many "random" shell scripts that update your system config are more well vetted than 90% of the software you run on your computer daily.
You should trust software that you can verify yourself as safe, or software written by people who you trust not to abuse the power you're giving them over your device by allowing them to modify it.
Personally, I don't trust most popular software either, but its easy to see why people would be fooled into thinking that software written by a major corporation used by millions of people might be more trustworthy than a script uploaded by a random anonymous person who couldn't be held accountable if their software infested your system with malware.
I agree. But I'm just surprised that you'd be extremely wary of running a sub 100 line open source script as a one time operation that you can easily audit yourself but on the other hand are likely using a browser that no one in the world (not even the developers) has fully audited.
There are "detailed step-by-step instructions" linked in the second sentence of the Getting Started section. I'm not sure what more you could want, besides perhaps making it more foolproof against people who can't be bothered to read.
Presumably you grow all your own food, cook from scratch; manufacture your own tools; refine your own fuel; mine your own lithium for batteries; produce your own fibres to weave at home, make cloth, which you tailor your own clothes from; grow trees, fell them, cut them to boards, and make your flooring and furniture; and so on?
Otherwise, you're the sort of normie carpenter who doesn't even do their own land clearance ready for seeding. For whom you must express your utmost contempt! /s
They also demonstrated how this could be used to silently find out someone’s phone number and then hijack a TFA validation call from an app like WhatsApp to take over their account with no user interaction.
Right, but isn't it noisy ... at the headphone level? (i.e. not heard when not wearing them?).
What I'm getting at is that I think the risk varies depending on how often you leave the headset paired; for example, if the headphones are over-ear, those are more prone to not be turned off --- and remain connected; thus, a greater chance of success for establishing a BlueTooth classic connection without getting noticed and performing the WhatsApp account take-over until they listen to "I'm gonna take a shower, honey!" in the distance.
How are you expecting to run an entity with developers, support, and operations without any leadership?
I don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy, but in my experience that is almost always a disaster.
I'm worked on many larger teams and leadership is independent of compensation.
The fact that "high performance leaders" need to make tens of millions of dollars is one of the greatest lies being told in the modern age.
Right now my chief in the fire company where I volunteer makes the same amount of money I do: $0.00. He is the greatest leader I have ever personally met, and I've been around for a while.
When I was in the Army, my company commander (a Captain) made ~4x what the newest private did. The highest-paid officer makes ~9x.
There are government senior executives and university professors running labs with budgets and teams that make Mozilla look like a lemonade stand for practically nothing.
Mozilla should ask the Linux Foundation what their budget is, what their leadership structure is, and do that.
Mozilla, no matter what they say or think or try, is and will always be a web browser developer. A web browser. Anything else is a side project, a hobby. A distraction. Every single molecule of fuel used by their brains while at work and every single microwatt of power used by their infrastructure should be wholly and aggressively dedicated to building the tools and organization needed to create the best web browser possible.
Bloated payrolls are tolerable if the decisions made are wise, responsibility is taken, and strategies exist and make sense.
Three examples off the top of my head — PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, and Debian — are doing just fine without someone "taking responsibility" (when have Mozilla's CEO ever done that?).
Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.
There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.
I think all of these projects have contributors who are getting paid at other companies for the work, notably Linux. Not quite so for Firefox. I mean, tell me where does Linus get his income? You think that can be fully replicated for Firefox?
> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.
If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.
> If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable
That's a big if. AFAIK most open source project developers don't get remotely enough donations to support them working on it full-time. The ones that do are the exception, not the norm.
I’m fine with twice the amount of a developer. Taking into account responsibility, public involvement and special clothing. Travel costs and so on are separate. The developers are doing the hard work.
There is not “team” if a MBA or lawyer gets 38 times the wage of an actual person doing the work.
Worth thinking of it also "the other way". As long as some people (developers) accept an MBA above them getting 38x, without adding much value, this will happen.
I don't personally like it (so generally did not allow to happen to me), but if some people feel "safer" getting lower pay (less chance of getting fired, easier to get re-hired as there are more low paid positions than high paid positions), the natural result is that it will happen.
My experience is that both high and low paid positions are not as "safe" as people think they are (seen multiple changing in various organizations types), so people should care more about finding a reasonable organization.
I think you need a CEO, you just don't need a CEO that is paid $7m/year. That's ludicrous. What amazing decisions have they been making that were worth that amount? Have they really contributed more than a team of 70 developers could?
There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.
It doesn't even have to be that. Take that and bump it 5 times like a million dollars. Throw in more cash if they can increase Firefox's market share. Have clauses to penalize anything about opt-out telemetry or anti-privacy features. I'm happy to add more carrots as well as more sticks.
All said and done, that will still be way more reasonable than that ludicrous salary.
I would be fine with $6 million if it was making at least that much more in revenue because of the CEO, but I highly suspect that it is not. I think $600K would be PLENTY and would pull in talented execs and managers.
> don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy
I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.
I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.
If the CEO changes his salary to 200k then fine I have no problem with that. CEOs are overpaid relative to skill and that does not sit well with my sense of generosity.
It's bizarre. In Japan, the custom is to revere your elders, in the US its apparently whoever is titled "leader". All of HN shivers in exaltation at the mention of the word.
The reality is that Firefox would have done much better had Mozilla fired their CEO 15 years ago and never hired another one. All of them executed significantly worse than mere government bonds did.
Leaving aside the (valid) sibling commenters here pointing out that it can be done well, but you're making a strawman argument - the gp never said anything about eliminating managers or organisational structure.
They specifically targetted two things:
1. directing funding towards Firefox development. Mozilla have been criticised for spending large portions of their income on non-Firefox endeavours while not publishing breakdowns of Firefox-specific spending in their annual reports
2. The CEO's salary: the commenter said nothing about not wanting the CEO position to exist, merely a desire for the funding to the Foundation to not be excessively funnelled into salary increases while the company's resources contract. Which seems reasonable.
CEO is typically needed for-profit purposes on a scale. Donating for devs to build browser without that purpose does not need CEO. Just a lead engineer and accountants.
If dev work is paid for by the community, the CEO payments can increase since the budget of Mozilla will stay the same but now have less cost to carry elsewhere?
Aren't they just piggybacking on Mozilla's work though? The point is to make the work that Mozilla is doing sustainable, not to pay someone else to ship a slightly modified version of it.
Yes, forks do indeed piggyback off of their code; that's the point of free and open source software anyway. And Mozilla, in its current state and current leadership, is not sustainable and still won't be with people paying for Firefox. Its marketshare is dwindling, and people are moving to forks such as Zen or to other browsers like Vivaldi. Adding a paid version will just make that trend go faster. And you don't even need to make a fork, because user.js tweaks such as Arkenfox or Betterfox exist anyway.
The point is that people want to fund the development of the actual browser engine which is more important than the customization scripts that those forks maintain. The engine is what people are worried about.
Or in slightly less fatalistic words: In any entity with more than 1-2 employees you need someone to make decisions and be accountable for them. The normal solution is to have a director/CEO for this. You may be able to get away with paying them slightly less than market rates if they are doing it for a good cause, but if you want someone competent you will need to pay them a relatively high salary to compete with other employers.
Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.