In 2011 Mozilla income was 85% derrived from Google, through the primary search engine deal. Around a billion was paid over three years as part of this deal at some point. Appearantly there was bidding by Microsoft for making Bing the default, which pushed up the pricing.
So every time Mozilla speaks out against Google, it is a bit awkward, since they are biting the hand that feeds them. I suppose they could take a deal from Microsoft, Yahoo or even DDG (or Baidu!), but without interest from Google I presume the funding would be lower. Quite an interesting situation. Thank God both Firefox and Chrome are open source. That is at least some small degree of insurance against potential freedom-limiting shenanigans by tech giants.
For example, the per-device configuration (GPU acceleration enabled or not, etc) is not there, the statistics collection infrastructure, the WebAPK minting code is not there, etc.
Chromium being open source is a red herring. The web is a protocol between clients and servers, and having the ability to fork the client doesn't matter if all the servers ignore your fork and continue speaking the protocol dictated by the dominant client. You need to fork the entire protocol, which is to say, you need to fork the entire web.
Mozilla's opposition to such initiatives matters only because of their users. And there are no other significant fighters in this ring on _our_ side, unfortunately.
I can't think of a single candidate other than Mozilla that has the technical expertise, experience, trust, reputation, resources (not to mention non-profit structure) built over 20 years defending the open web. I don't understand why Mozilla is dragging their feet on this. They should have owned the entire VPN market by now. VPNs aren't cryogenic rockets.
Of the remaining 1%, most don't need a VPN for anything personal. It's literally just a handful of geeks who need VPN (mainly for secure piracy, or accessing different regional Netflix catalogs), and maybe a few dozen journalists living in dictatorships.
Mozilla needs to gut spending. Get rid of all the diversity /hr/evangelism people bloating their employee headcount and funneling people's donations to divisive causes like that org that doesn't hire white men (forgot the name but it made me cancel my monthly donation to Mozilla). They shouldn't need more than 25% non-technical staff, and the purpose of those 25% should be exclusively to support the technical staff. Instead they became another bloated Big NGO that's basically welfare for liberal arts majors in California.
Not at all. Controlled opposition has to pretend being an opposition.
I would love to have a Mozilla hosted email and calendar service from them, for example. I don't understand why they aren't branching out into more common web citizen needed services.
I think that if they cut back on some of the other projects in the short-term, they could ensure the foundation was funded for the long-term - to support Firefox and anything else they deem valuable.