random thoughts
funding: a mix i suppose. volonteer work, i mean we do tons of volonteer work daily in terms of writing open source code, providing documentation and stuff like that. fundraising from persons (like wikimedia) and small and big companies that care about these things. funding should cover operations.
ads: the browser should come with a ad-blocking tech by default. this can happen because the browser does not come from a company/community that relies on ad revenue to pay salaries. the internet, especially the desktop internet, is horrible to use without ad-blocking tech and ads and lack of privacy goes hand-in-hand like nothing else.
privacy: i'm not a cookie expert but my gut-feeling tells me there's more to do in terms of creating a browser that tries to make the end-user as anonymous as possible and prevent the mega-tracking cookie networks that build up massive profiles about people, while still allowing web sites to function. also see search below. also https-only within a reasonable time-frame, just like everyone else is doing (because it doesn't stop ad revenue so this aspect of privacy they can afford).
search: provide a search solution that is good enough but does not a) shove ads in your face and b) build a massive profile of you based on your keystrokes. it would be interesting to see some back-of-the-envelope calculations of yearly running costs per user for a ~decent search engine. providing decent enough results at maximum privacy is the goal, not becoming the number one search engine and selling tons of ads.
mail: should perhaps be decoupled from everything else, i don't know. no ads, don't build huge profiles on people based on their mail conversations.