You bring up a great example. Mozilla poured tons of resources and had very smart people working on Rust, Servo, and related tech projects to improve Firefox. Where was the surge of market share?

We’re at a point where the core functionality of browsers is very mature. It’s unlikely that any amount of investment will produce a browser that is significantly faster at things like JS execution or rendering compared to Chrome.

So alternative browsers add things like better ad blockers, more privacy protections, or maybe LLM summaries to enhance the core browser experience instead.

The least cynical view, in my opinion, is that Google is an ad company, which ultimately means they are a data company. They don't need Mozilla to build a better browser, they need Mozilla to increase the amount of user data Google can collect and ad spots Google can sell.

The more cynical view is that Google doesn't care at all about Mozilla because the investment is nothing more than a hedge against regulatory pressure.

Most non-tech "normies", which is to say 95% of the population, barely know what a browser is. They couldn't describe the function of one, or discriminate what makes one better than another. They certainly won't give a crap about Servo, or extremely marginal improvements in page load time (at best).

Browsers are a means to an end for other major providers excluding for Opera. They can be loss leaders even, as long as they do their job of steering users towards proprietary ecosystems

That would give Mozilla $20B of debt and an even bigger dependence on Google for payments, at least initially.

Though in the long term, maybe they could use the market share to make money in other ways.

But if they can’t manage to make money in other ways with Firefox, I’m not sure that they’d be able to do it with Chrome either.