Most of Mozilla's money of course comes from Google to make them the default search engine on Firefox. And of course its a way for Google to ensure there's at least one alternative browser engine. Reading about how Texeira was recently fired and how executives have been pushing for AI features for a long time, Mozilla certainly loves chasing trends and then forgetting them, like how Google kills lots of products. It seems like the company can't stand on its own two feet without Google's funding and is poorly run.
What happened to Mozilla over the years? How much effort did they put in to trying to be a successful tech company? because it hasn't been until the past few that I really started following Firefox and Mozilla news.
I wonder if Mozilla could've been Proton, years before Proton AG existed, making their own comprehensive suite of privacy-friendly tools, since Mozilla makes privacy their brand. And they were late to the smartphone game with Firefox OS. If they were smart, they would've ensured their long term survival with an actual business, to continue funding development of their privacy and FOSS software like Firefox, without large funding sources like Google.
Well, Chromium is fully open source and I think largely devoid of Google tracking, and there is prior art with ungoogled Chromium for the rest of it. So a Proton "fork" would basically just be a rebranding of that project.
That said, if they do make a browser, I hope it's a Firefox variant instead of a Chromium one (or even better, Servo).
Chromium does have some Google things in it. Like what happened with the built-in extension giving Google websites special permission to read the hardware info of your computer.
https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018
I’m in no way affiliated with zen browser, but if you’re looking for a privacy / Firefox (Gecko) based browser with a nice aesthetic check it out.
https://zen-browser.app/
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop