I think it's the other way around. They determined that to become less reliant on Google for revenue they should explore other directions, and that hasn't been very succesful.

Though I don't fully understand why pulling funding for new browser technology was part of their strategy going forward. Servo was one of the projects that made me excited about using Firefox. I bet that big announcements about moving Firefox to Rust would have consistently bumped usage numbers. As much as people voice their opinions about the RiiR movement in the comments here, it's clear people love those kinds of projects just for the technical novelty. I know I do.

We will never charge our users, or attempt to monetize them in any way. Our nonprofit will run on unrestricted donations only.

With a simple two-part strategy:

1. We keep the team small enough that there's always at least 1.5 years of runway in the bank.

2. We continue fundraising actively.

Would you accept "issue" sponsorship to prioritize work you were going to do anyways - for instance, improving performance for a specific usecase etc?

I believe that's also what the Zig Project is doing. I hope that this sort of thing becomes more common, as browsers and programming languages (and many more things) really are things that we should have as "common goods" that don't have the interest of a corporation before the interest of users.

Rust wasn't a Mozilla project per se, it was something a person who happened to be working for Mozilla was messing around with and it got internal traction.

But I'm actually ok with a lot of the non-firefox projects that they have like the VPN.

What I do have an issue with is the foundation, throwing money away at various projects that have very little to do with making firefox better. From "trusworthy AI" research grants to giving 387k to the Mckensie Mack group or 375k to the New Venture Fund (I get Mozilla are lefties but what does this have to do with Firefox?) plus some other organizations that I can't even tell if they aren't just money laundering fronts as they don't appear to actually do anything.

That and the C-Suite being complete parasites. The CEO of Mozilla corp makes almost as much in a year as the Mozilla foundation makes from donations.

Remove the parasites and the senseless spending of the foundation and you could develop Firefox with the ~20% of revenue that doesn't come from Google.

Also the Mozilla originated Fluent project for localization is another example of a stand out approach. It would be interesting to see how localization fits with the Ladybird browser project as a whole. Making use of a custom implementation of Fluent might actually be a good way of moving forward.

If I recall correctly, Rust was born with building a browser engine in mind, or at least it was one of its earliest motivations. So Rust would have been a thing even if Mozilla had focused on their core product.

Instead of rebuild 'everything' in Rust, we just can use AI to optimize C/C++.

We don't need another programming language.

Don't know about oversized, it felt partly more that eg. Baker was mostly interested in Mozilla as a platform for activism, not in making a good tool for users. The new interim CEO seems to have breathed life into actual browser development.