I would've been okay with paying taxes to fund the only real competitor to Google in the browser space, I would be okay with giving them even more than 3.55 million if it meant having a truly free and safe browser. Then you see that 80% of the money that Firefox has comes from their competitor and we are already cooked.

edit: Also the amount of work that Mozilla does cannot be funded not even with 10x of the denied money, they went super big and established themselves as backbone of the free Internet ignoring the fact that they've been able to do this because of Google's money: they don't really have their own money to sustain this