Mozilla: Proposed contractual remedies in United States v. Google threaten vital role of independent browsers

There are plenty of plans B. They simply want to both have Google-like politics and money literally from Google, while calling themselves independent. In Russia that's called "to both eat a fish and sit on a d*ck", same as "eat your cake and have it too".

They can break with mainstream standards represented basically by Chromium only, simplify and improve and don't track Chromium bug-to-bug anymore. That'll both reduce pressure and attract people.

They can rely on donations more, which will also have the clearly positive effect of users' opinions mattering on their further development.

They can have useful paid services, working best with their browser. Say, those "free speech" extensions adding comments to every webpage didn't fly well, because there were many of those extensions, and those comments were nuts. If you pay with some Foxcoin for every comment, then this won't have the spam problem.

So many ideas.

You mean Mozilla? Developing a browser doesn't cost 300 million a year.

Which doesn't mean that browser engines are not inefficient and overcomplex monsters.

Mozilla could solicit donations for the development of Firefox while also still being able to rely on commercial funding sources if they restructured the Firefox project so that the core technologies underlying it (stuff like Gecko and SpiderMonkey) were actually developed by the Foundation instead of the Corporation, while the Corporation could package all of those pieces together into a complete software product with branding. The way things are now, though the entire browser is developed by the Mozilla Corporation and so its development can only be financially supported by Mozilla Corporation selling products or engaging in business deals.

Speaking as an engineer doing a lot of web dev, I think people underestimate how much work Mozilla does in standards and low-level shared API's via w3c and others, and how important it is that google isn't the only one in there making decisions. Most w3c standards decisions are made with google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple representatives in committees, and as we know, two of those are much more aligned in their own best interests these days, while one kinda wishes mobile web browsing didn't exist.

Would we have a better browser with less Mozilla baggage? Possibly.

Would the web standards that make everything work be better off without Mozilla? No, absolutely not.

Safari's team does what they can within Apple's bullshit intentional deprioritization of anything that could compete with the App Store, Edge's team has brought some sanity to the chromium side and toned back some of Google's wilder standards proposals and intentions. The fact that there are now 0 legitimate reasons for a website to "only work in chrome" (aside from some mobile safari things still) nowadays is all the stuff behind the scenes that matters. Even google is doing less FAFO shipping features and not caring about what other browsers need.

That said, maybe a disruptions is needed to a new paradigm could step in. Maybe a Mozilla Foundation placed under other ownership with a narrowed focus.

In the Linux space, the massive investments that GNOME, KDE, and others have been able to garner the last few years from governments and interested organizations is promising. There could be a similar interest in a web-focused org that could champion things without the Mozilla baggage and intent to avoid the same fate.