Sure, Mozilla seems to have quite severe organizational issues, but to me, the deep integration of a crypto wallet into Brave is what's keeping me away from it.
A Crypto pivot didn't end well for Opera, it ruined one of my favorite OSM apps for iOS (maps.me; fortunately there's an open source spin-off available now, i.e. Organic Maps), it left a bad taste in my mouth when Signal did it...
I use Firefox as my main browser, and more or less consider my relationship with Mozilla to be not different from any other corporation – as long as the product itself works for me and doesn't seem to be heading into a predatory direction (e.g. heavily pushing a subscription model, needlessly collecting data server-side etc.), I'm fine with its creators spending their money however they see fit.
That said, I'll also definitely not donate to Mozilla in its current state.
It’s possible to be completely bearish on the crypto ponzi, and use Brave with all the crypto features completely disabled.
Their crypto play is a novel revenue generation scheme which doubles as a “web3” marketing campaign to acquire a niche userbase. Good for them, but it’s not for me so I opt out all of it, and it’s trivial to do so.
Brave is more aggressive on protecting user privacy than all the other browsers also, including Mozilla who is completely dependent on Google to pay their bills.
Opera was ruined by many other things. The new owners (since 2016) have been running it into the ground basically.
The ads, tracking, dark UX patterns, performance regression, and social media integrations are things that together made it for me, even before I heard how even OG ex-Opera employees won't touch it out of mistrust anymore...
The crypto wallet you can take or leave, it's not like they shove it in your face.
A Crypto pivot didn't end well for Opera, it ruined one of my favorite OSM apps for iOS (maps.me; fortunately there's an open source spin-off available now, i.e. Organic Maps), it left a bad taste in my mouth when Signal did it...
I use Firefox as my main browser, and more or less consider my relationship with Mozilla to be not different from any other corporation – as long as the product itself works for me and doesn't seem to be heading into a predatory direction (e.g. heavily pushing a subscription model, needlessly collecting data server-side etc.), I'm fine with its creators spending their money however they see fit.
That said, I'll also definitely not donate to Mozilla in its current state.