They have a lot of income.
I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects.
But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was before Chrome came along.
Can we please stop fueling this myth?
Maybe for some of you Firefox lacks something you actually need.
For others, like me and a bunch of others it is completely the other way, -if I was forced to use any other browser it would annoy me to no end (not tree tabs, etc etc).
So while I think it is totally fine to point out where other does better, telling everyone that Chrome is better isn't even true except for very specific cases.
Edit: clarify need
One of the things I love about Chromium though is the responsive and device modes of the web inspector. Top quality.
Remember FF extensions can be quite a bit more powerful than other extensions.
FF was my main browser, and would be to this date if it provided the best experience.
Chrome is faster, snappier, more fluid. Faster time to render, fastes JS engine.
There's a reason most of the geeks switched to Chrome on their own, before Google began it's aggressive approach of converting everyone to it with ads and bundling.
For any of the reasons you mention we can pull another reason why FF is better.
But unlike others I hope that I don't tell everyone that my taste is better.
I also believe that Firefox should look to exploit Google/Chrome's weaknesses more: Google relies fully on ad income. Firefox relies on sending users to someone's search engine/default page. Why not offer a version that shows the web as most of us see it: ad-free and with less tracking.
Linux and Apache and the others succeeded because they spawned a lot of other businesses that were just cheaper than the offerings from Microsoft or Oracle.
That's a unfair caricature of what really happened. There were competing systems with business-friendlier licenses. Obviously, Linux wouldn't be what it is without corporate contributions. But it also wouldn't be what it is without Linus' management and extreme pragmatism. That combined with the momentum introduced by the distribution ecosystem and advocacy that sprung up in the nineties.
Don't forget that by the time that IBM started pouring money into Linux (Peace, Love, Linux was in 2001 IIRC), Linux already had a large following among the tech crowd, which was stealthily replacing commercial UNIX installations with Linux.