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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

As it becomes more of a niche, also-ran browser, you can expect its quality (and so, its security) to fall as well.

The "use an inferior tool for philosophical reasons" mindset is already pretty unconvincing for me. A chromium fork maintained by a pro-user, pro-privacy team is the best of both worlds and doesn't expose you to Mozilla's fad-chasing.

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Firefox is not an “inferior tool.” Its cookie segregation and CSS styling feature are not found in Chrome. I don’t use Firefox for moral reasons, I use it because it’s better.

Plus much as I'm very much and definitively unhappy about a lot of directions and decisions taken by the Firefox developers, Chrome's (and Edge's, too) address bar search alone is a no-go – it's positively amnesiac and frequently (with no discernible rhyme or reason) doesn't return even pages I've recently visited and that are definitively still in my browser history (and it's not for lack of space to display the results, because often it returns no local results at all!).

This is exactly the kind of problem that is a fork can solve when the upstream project can't or won't. I haven't used Chrome in years, but I do not notice the problem you describe in Brave.

This is assuming that their funding is dependent on their share of browser use, or that Mozilla would get bored of Firefox if it stays at a lower share, and move on to other projects.

These assumptions would be true of a for-profit entity like Google, Apple, Microsoft, but it's not as directly applicable to Mozilla.

I think the first assumption holds. There is a (conspiracy?) theory that Google's funding of Mozilla is based on a desire to avoid antitrust scrutiny. If Firefox usage continues to tumble, it ceases to be a meaningful competitor and the funding might be safely discontinued without legal consequences.

Mozilla exists as it does today entirely due to Google's largess.

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