Yeah, absolutely, which is why I think it's always going to be tricky for Firefox as long as there are corporate entities like Google and MS that have identified "having our own browser" as a competitive advantage.

When Chrome came on the scene it was a huge improvement, and Google seemed mostly-benevolent then, and the core of it was open source. And I worked in that codebase and met some of the people involved, and they were all good very smart(er-than-me) people that I met. The core engineering project itself has good foundations.

The problem is those folks gotta get paid. And so ultimately in the long run, Chrome has become the problem we always dreaded it would become.

Which is why, yeah, "we" (for some definition of we) need to come up with a way that these kinds of projects can get paid for outside of places like Google etc.

Mozilla almost feels like that, but from talking to the people I know who worked there... it's not.