Its seriously absurd. I hate ads, but there's realistically not a better option to profit when providing free software and services like Mozilla is doing. Investing into ads that don't violate your privacy is a great decision. I don't know what the hell people want from them.
In a healthy market new browsers need to be able to enter.. but browsers are so complex from the reckless, endless feature creep that creating a new browser securely (or at all) is unreasonable. (Luckily they are open source and can be forked but the changes are minor compared to the base. A Chromium fork is still Chromium at the end of the day).
Supporting the ad-driven internet is contrary to what is wanted by many users of Firefox/flavors and there is no alternative. It was said that they would destroy the Sith, not join them.
The thing is that there's not really a good alternative. There's real costs in running a service - servers, bandwidth, staff, etc. Either you pay for content directly (subscription services), someone else pays for you (which is the case with many Lemmy servers where admins are paying out of their own pockets), or ads cover the cost for you. People want to use the web for free, so ad-supported content is going to be around for a long time.
I disliked adverts so much as a time waster of limited human life. There may not be a good alternative to dumping toxic waste into a river, for example, but I still think we shouldn't do it.
Can't speak for others but I do donate (not as much as I'd like) to Wikipedia and buy merch from some creators (if I like it for what it is).
Fuck the entire industry. The last competing browser trying to be gentle about it does not solve that the problem is any involvement between ad companies and your browser.
Mozilla is better than Google. Mozilla has never been evil. But god damn, are they stupid. They had half the market right before Chrome launched, and they've been fumbling it away piece by piece.