This is a good idea. I don’t think I should change the petition now that it’s signed by a significant number of people, but I agree targeted donations could help somewhat (although mainly I think we need to urge Mozilla to direct its other income into Firefox development, too).
This is a good idea on paper. But it turns out that having a for-profit corporation (as Mozilla Corporation is) accept donations, especially donations earmarked for certain purposes, is understandably tricky from a regulatory and tax standpoint. You can do it, but it comes with lots of rules and restrictions, and constrains the company in weird ways that kind of make sense, since it's kind of similar to money laundering. (And I'm not talking about tax deductible donations, which are a no go for obvious reasons. "Don't pay us $50 for our product, donate $50 and we'll give you the product for free, and you'll lower your taxes!")
The Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, and you can do it because it's a non-profit. But it doesn't make Firefox. It owns Mozilla Corporation, which does. And it can't just dump donated money into Mozilla Corp either; regulators are not naive.
There’s nothing to prevent them from allowing people to donate without a tax deduction AFAIK, but they don’t allow it. In the US, most donations no longer actually get deducted from taxes anyway due to the greatly increased standard deduction since 2017. I think something like 85-90% of people now just use that and don’t itemize.
No idea about earmarked donations, but I don’t think Corp would have any problem with donations in general. Designate it as “sponsorship fee” if you must.
But yeah, part of the problem is probably the fact that the Mozilla Foundation isn’t the one employing Firefox devs.
