Mozilla needs to hear this more often.
There is only one browser, because browsers need to be embeddable, and Firefox isn't.
There is only one browser, because browsers need to be embeddable, and Firefox isn't.
On its face, it's a tough sustainability position for an org of Mozilla's size b/c browser revenue - today - is from controlling the search bar (and maybe now payments APIs?). By making Firefox embeddable, Mozilla gives that revenue to whoever is doing the embedding. Ex: Brave <> Chrome engine.
Building for embedding developers can be super distracting if no sustainability, which isn't a problem for Google: They still make money from embedding by owning the embedding environments like Android. AFAICT, Mozilla failed to land in sizeable markets there. They tried to own & partner in the embedding envs -- e.g., FirefoxOS -- so maybe the trick is to get a more generous rev share for phone vendors wanting to break free of Google? Historically didn't seem to really work out, but maybe genAI w/ consumer/prosumer-grade UIs is reopening that door.
Evolutions like that in turn may take quite an engineering & culture rethink as well, not easy to turn such a big & decentralized ship. I'll keep rooting for them!
If that’s true, then Mozilla wouldn’t have been making money from Gecko’s ability to embed with FirefoxOS unless the project took a sharp corner and changed UI toolkits.
It's less likely the handset manufacturer would be able to change search bar defaults in those scenarios, at least without a stronger profit sharing negotiation, as they'd probably be already negotiating a more careful licensing & teaming agreement
But then… looot of things happened, other priorities, competition, bad decisions, etc etc.