Baker and friends pulling out the money and Mozilla employees turning the NGO into just another bargaining chip in the US culture war seems more like a symptom of the rot that set in years earlier. Since the late 2010s there seems to be a distinctive lack of vision at Mozilla.

Building a browser engine from scratch is akin to building an operating system. Maybe the new Firefox will be 95% effective vs. an only 92% effective Chrome but I don't see how this effort advances the state of the web in terms of freedom and user choice meaningfully. Like others here I switched to Brave a few years ago. I think their strategy of building interesting things on top of Chrome is smarter. Imagine if Brave where the prevalent browser and I could send anybody an .onion or ipfs:// link at it would Just Work (TM). Same with their BAT token. Instead of restlessly shitting on the idea, let's imagine it does work and we have an alternative to ads for monetising content. I find this way more exciting than parallel rendering and Rust.

For a Phoenix and later Firebird user like me it's sad to see what happened to Mozilla, but the only constant is change.

Edit: grammar