> Thunderbird, on the other hand, takes user donations.

And it depends on Firefox, sadly.

Do you mean it depends on Firefox for money and staff from Mozilla inc/fdn? Or that it uses a Firefox-based browser engine for HTML emails?

If the latter, I don’t imagine this will have too terribly much impact. Email clients often lag behind browsers in what they can display.

It's not just the "rendering engine" it's the entire software stack from down at the bottom with the IO and networking libraries to mid-layers of JS and core rendering, to very top with the UI toolkit. There's not much in Thunderbird that isn't Firefox and it's almost all custom Mozilla code, about 20 million lines of it, and not heavily reliant on major OS libs like so many other large-scale apps.

Yeah but Thunderbird doesn't really depend on rapid development of that stack. The requirements for MUAs have been basically frozen for decades.

Fair enough. In any case, now would probably be a good moment for Mozilla to reconsider user donations on Firefox.

Just my €50 of course isn't going to change the future by itself. But I'd happily give it to them if they'd let me.

(And I don't even mind manually removing Google and replacing it with DDG.)

Just so you know, the money users donate goes towards political causes not towards Firefox.

When you are donating, you are donating to the Mozilla Foundation (which is a non-profit). All Firefox development is done through Mozilla Corporation (which is a for profit entity). There is no way to donate to Firefox.

I've long been baffled at the inability to contribute to Firefox development. It seems crazy to me that this isn't possible.