Firefox the browser is still a great piece of software, literally unique, and also open-source.
Do you think any other company / organization would be able to take over it / fork it and develop it adequately? If so, where would they get the money? Many high-profile open-source projects (e.g. Python, Blender, well, Linux itself) managed to secure corporate sponsorships or donations in a much less toxic way than the Mozilla-Google deal.
Yes. The browser, though, is very easy to build, requires few dependencies, a few minutes to build and runs fine on Linux. The result is quite impressive. And experimental.
I haven't actually looked at it, but I have the feeling that the Firefox code base is godawful and nobody who isn't being paid for a 40 hour weekday actually wants to get involved in it.
> I haven't actually looked at it, but I have the feeling that the Firefox code base is godawful...
Damn, didn't know that one can develop skills to evaluate the quality of a code-base by just "feeling" it and not looking at it at all - quite impressive!
Spend money on everything except browser development (>$5 billions!).
Market share down the drain.
Use the market share as an argument for a lost cause and spend money on everything except Browser development.
Ladybird - a browser spearheaded by one person - will expose Mozilla of what it is.