Idk, I think people underestimate what it takes to support a browser. It's a lot of money and Mozilla doesn't have an ad empire to leverage, operating system sales to subsidize from, or phone/computer sales.
All they have is the revenue they make from Google, a little bit from their attempts at revenue diversification, and a little bit from their partnerships (like Pocket). If the Google revenue disappears, they won't even be able to maintain the current level of quality.
This to me is entirely fantasy. We are instead overestimating what it takes to support a browser because of how much money Mozilla gets and still can't produce anything. We're talking amounts in the billions of dollars here, and more than a billion in current cash reserves.
This Google-controlled narrative is pushed out onto a lot of things (i.e search) which people are slowly starting to realise isn't that complex or expensive to build after all (see Brave Search for example). It's not surprising that Mozilla would echo similar sentiments considering the entire company is controlled opposition.
What other similarly sized or smaller company has successfully built a browser which is not Chromium-based fit for the average consumer? If you're just piggybacking on Google's work, then sure, it's probably not bad, but Mozilla has their own browser engine and is trying to keep feature parity with browsers which have effectively unlimited funding.
Well yes it’s clearly expensive to support a browser and that’s why they’re trying to make money, but they’re failing miserably to deliver on those other revenue streams and they aren’t keeping up in the browser space. That’s all, if they were developing some business model that worked that would be different. That’s why breaking off googles monopoly would kill them, they are dependent on it
All they have is the revenue they make from Google, a little bit from their attempts at revenue diversification, and a little bit from their partnerships (like Pocket). If the Google revenue disappears, they won't even be able to maintain the current level of quality.