Skewed priorities like trying to make sure that Firefox continues to exist even with the massive amount of competition in the browser space and everything being taken over by chromium. Yeah. Definitely skewed priorities.
They really just can't get a break. When they take money from Google they get attacked. When they try to create other revenue streams (pocket, vpn, etc.) they get attacked. I don't think you want the browser to be a paid for subscription product and the donations aren't enough to reliably cover browser development.
Maintaining and keeping secure a large standards compliant browser is decidedly expensive. And most of the expenses are not one off they are ongoing.
Listen, I love what Mozilla stands for, or at least what they claim to stand for. But every time they've been asked to choose between their principles and money, they've chosen money. On the one hand, I kind of don't blame them -- after all, if I was a scrappy broke nonprofit singlehandedly maintaining one of the most complex and fast-moving pieces of software mankind has ever devised, I'd probably take money wherever I could get it too -- but on the other, paying lip service to caring about your users' privacy isn't a good look
You can easily remove them. Mozilla isn't a for profit company, but they need to have money to run somehow. Dunno if you've seen Chrome lately but it's 1000x worse.
It's not like it used to be. Even thunderbird has had tons of great work put into it. If you're ever sick of using weird stuff like palemoon you should see for yourself. All the extensions I liked are back.