That's silly. Chrome has become so dominant that it'd be a good move on MS's part to help segment the browser market by supporting Firefox
If this goes wrong, what is google going to think of open-source development. If the second biggest (I think) open source application turns out to have been a failure for the company backing it, what is that going to do to commercial open-source development?
I find this a scary prospect.
The point of the chromium name is to provide a name that's not the general product name. I haven't looked at the license, but I don't think Google can take that name back; but if they do, Microsoft would just change it to something else, no big deal.
Google has already turned their back on open-source development; so much of Android isn't in AOSP, and I don't think it's coming back. Chrome so far has stayed open-source, but whenever it becomes inconvenient for that to stay, I expect it will. Such is corporate life.
I mean their money comes from the bank account that others pay in to, but that's a stupid and irrelevant distinction ...
One way or another Mozilla relies on Google remaining its customer for vast majority of money, while Google being their biggest competitor who eats out ever more of Mozilla's market share every year, further reducing any reason for Google to remain their customer going forward.
If they want anyone believe their pro-privacy branding, yes. Ethics and making the most money possible are often in conflict.
That said, I work for Mozilla and in practice we're very independent. Our user base, small as it may be compared to the past, is still a valuable bargaining chip. We are still very much fighting for an open and accessible Web in the standards arena (where technical and philosophical arguments work well with the actual Google people doing the work, even if the outcome is not optimal for google the advertising juggernaut.)
Opinions my own, can't speak for Moz,etc.
Your userbase is not just small, it is shrinking. While initial attrition may have been do to anti-competitive practices by other browser makers (who you could have taken actions against, if you were actually independent of them), your continued loss of even the hard-core userbase that has stuck around this long can only be explained by your own disregard for the wishes of those users.
But I'm also doubtful of your and my armchair quarterbacking, especially when it's hard not to bring in a self-serving angle (as in, it would obviously be better to prioritize X, where X is something I really want). Mozilla does a lot of surveying of current and potential users, and evaluates things in terms of maintenance costs that might not immediately be obvious. I'll bet that neither of us would be able to accurately predict all of those findings.
Stories like "...but power users are who are going to drive adoption, so investing in them is clearly the right strategy even if they're a small component of current users!" are intuitively persuasive. But again, someone who has studied the situation extensively is going to know things that we won't. Off the top of my head: "power users" is an amorphous group (and "self-reported power users" only weakly overlaps with "users who depend on advanced features"); the range of things that cater to power users is vast and all over the place; security, privacy, and maintenance concerns are far larger than the "why can't you just..." crowd ever seems to realize. None of which mean power users are unimportant, just that the tradeoffs are not at all clear.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. (Well, except maybe about the anti-competitive bit. The time frames of any legal or governmental action on those grounds is far too long, and often far too sidesteppable. Those things are good for dead companies to eventually receive justice, and for the playing field to be leveled out for future companies. The ROI of $1 spent on chasing down the legal or regulatory rathole pales in comparison to $1 spent on development or marketing.)
As the other poster mentioned, there's a meaningful distinction between customer and contributor. If Google stopped buying the contract for the default search, someone else would buy it. Like Yahoo did in around ~2014. Or like various other search engines already do in other countries/languages.