Let’s be honest: neither Apple needs $18 billion a year, nor does Mozilla need $450 million annually to develop a web browser. Microsoft or Apple could afford 100 lives of browser development without a Google penny. And Mozilla corp was already making millions in “Royalties” 20 years straight.

Yes, Mozilla would probably lose those royalties, but at this point browsers are good. Not a single browser needs a billion $ development budget each year to keep working – it is stable, fast, feature-complete. No one’s asking for major changes anymore. Keeping them running doesn’t require billion-dollar budgets, and we can probably use latest Chromium build for free forever even if random asteroid destroyed the whole Google HQ tomorrow.

But of course — we are devastated. A few corporate bozos lost billions, others now need to figure out where to burn them next. Very sad. Not a dry eye in the house.