* Eat the costs because you're so wealthy you don't care (Apple, Google)
* Use the work of those who ate the costs (Waterfox, Icecat, Edge, Firefox-Fork-Of-The-Month-Whose-Only-Purpose-Is-To-Shit-On-Firefox-Lol-Palemoon)
* Find a way to actually make money (Firefox, Brave)
Needless to say, you entire lifeline being depending on Google when you're Firefox is horribly bad.
Maybe web technologies have gotten too complicated. Maybe they need to be replaced with something that does not cost hundreds of millions to support?
Why can we have the whole galaxy of free software with the various distributions and desktop environments and entire kernel ecosystems and device drivers free of this kind of monetization yet somehow this is impossible with browsers?
I don't think twice about using Debian, Freebsd, Openbsd, or Openwrt.
What the hell is going on with Mozilla and Firefox?
A lot of the remaining OSS ecosystem benefits corporate software development and is already supported by corporate backers.
Many of these ‘forks’ emerged because of the Firefox trademark policy which prevented distributions from packaging Firefox under that name.