How does The Browser Company make money? They're giving their product away for free.
Browsers are complicated. It doesn't inspire confidence that the folks in charge of that complexity can't get their heads around a business model.
(Aside: none of their stated company values have anything to do with the product or engineering [1]. They're all about how people feel.)
The biggest opportunity has to be driving search traffic to the major search providers all these browsers partner with.
Could also get acquired by a major browser vendor if you have a better product and people are downloading it more than the major ones, especially if both are based on the same underlying engine. Even Firefox still sucks to this day. I'm using it right now (Waterfox) the product still sucks! I know of some browser vendors acquiring others, especially as mobile took off and it was hard to get it right.
Seems like the opportunity is similar to that of social media but slightly more modern because nobody uses new social media anymore but people are trying out new browsers (and you get richer user/usage data).
Unfortunately you are also describing Mozilla here.
If you're trying to bring value to market, focus on your core differentiator and use existing tooling for your boilerplate stuff.
It’s not only not a smart engineering decision, it’s also a terrible product, reputation and marketing decision.
But I still disagree that the use of Firebase, in and of itself, is a bad engineering decision. It's just a tool, and it's up to you how you use it.
Firebase gives you all features needed to secure your backend. But if you configure it incorrectly, then _that's_ where the poor engineering comes into play. It should have been tested more comprehensively.
Sure. You could build your own backend rather than using a Backend-as-a-Service platform. But for what gain? If you don't test it properly, you'll still be at risk of security holes.
Needs a name. Meowr? Hissr?
My cats would use Yowlr.