Get your facts right.
Mozilla Corporate receives 400mil a year from Google, for google search to be the default search engine. The engineering costs of Mozilla in 2020 were about 300mil. [0]
So in actual fact you could maintain the not-for-profit status, fire all the corporate staff and still sit on a trove of cash every year.
The google money will not dry out because it is the only CYA situation that Google has against an anti-trust case on Chrome.
There is absolutely no reason Mozilla could not maintain the not-for-profit status and tick along, like other foundations such as Linux, Gnome, Apache, etc.
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3600206/mozilla-report...
Is the claim that it is economically impossible to create a browser without turning it in to surveillance malware?
To the extent that's true, it is the best argument yet for shutting down the web.
Except if you go full-on Neo-Amish/Luddite and use
[->] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
or the remaining stuff which stays accessible via simple
browsers like [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetSurf ,
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo ,
or textmode stuff like Lynx, (E)Links(2), W3M, and similar.
In case it is, really, shut down the web? What would that look like? Why would we do it? How? How can “browsers are expensive” possibly be worth doing something that extreme?
Fancy UIs are made to slow people down in their tasks and draw attention to things that don't matter to what they want to do.
Web developers and creative people like to think the web is their playground but really the most important role of the web should be delivering informations and services efficiently, and get the hell out the way.
(honest question) Why is this necessary then: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
>Searches: Firefox sends Mozilla what you type into the search bar and Mozilla may share that data with its partners.
>Sites you visit: For the Suggestions you click, Firefox sends Mozilla the website URL, and Mozilla may share that data with its partners.
Interesting that turning off "suggestions" is not located in the "privacy" section.
And those “home calls” are nothing more than calls like whether you are on the public internet, whether a new update is available and other mundane things.
As a categorical statement, this is false. "Not all telemetry is surveillance" is true.
Telemetry is exfiltrated data the user did not ask to send. The line between telemetry and surveillance depends on the use and intent of the data recipient, not (necessarily) the data itself, and that use is opaque to the person whose actions generated the data.
It is interesting to note that telemetry can become surveillance after it is collected. Perhaps a new manager has a different plan, perhaps the cops show up with a subpoena.
When Firefox is first launched, it opens the Privacy Notice page https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/, which is totally up-front about data being collected. Nothing surreptitious about it. Data is not "exfiltrated", it's simply "sent". But that doesn't sound nearly as evil, does it?
No sane company pours money into unprofitable anything. They pour money into those moats precisely because it pays dividends.
Mozilla doesn't have an ecosystem like Google, Microsoft and Apple do. If they want to stay afloat they have to be profitable with the browser alone. So trying to directly compare that to the "free candy" approach which the others can get away with is unrealistic.
It's like asking why Target and Best Buy can't match the prices of Amazon retail, which has a money fountain named AWS in their backyard that can subsidize their other activities for "ecosystem growth". If Amazon retail had been a separate standalone business which had to succeed on its own for the past decade, it probably would have been run differently.
Though that may be regional, as I speak from Germany.