It really stinks that 250 people lost their jobs, I don't want to downplay that. But I think overall this is a good move for Mozilla. For them to be product-oriented will allow them to uphold their own privacy advocacy ideals. Most notably, they may eventually be able to remove Google as Firefox's default search engine.
Well after all these years they were soley sitting on Google's contract money and are yet to create a very competitive and revenue-generating product that users will pay for. Firefox VPN is essentially Mullvad with Firefox branding so there is no comparison with either of them.
Most of all of the products Mozilla has is either free (mostly) or not competitive enough to the point of redundancy. For the typical end-user (who really doesn't see open-source as an advantage) Pocket can be replaced with Chrome Bookmarks and ultimately, Firefox can be replaced with Chrome.
Add to that that for the freedom-concerned user Pocket has to be replaced (Wallabag is good), as do most of their other "privacy respecting" services. There's no advantage with them over any of the propriatary alternatives other than a fallen-out-of-favor-dwindling-financially foundation-corporation hybrid healf heartedly developing an important browser saying they won't sell your data.
Possibly. But Google gets the bad PR and stays in the dominant position anyway, while Firefox more or less disappears. I don't say Google necessarily wants to be evil towards Firefox, but in their position it is enough to not care.
Also, even if the contract is renewed, the number could be smaller.
Google isn't afraid of bad PR of larger caliber. No normal user cares whether Mozilla is getting money from Google and people who care find it questionable that Google is the default search engine instead of something like DuckDuckGo (that would fit the Firefox brand so much better).
Whenever the day comes it'll be a small notice on the normie-tech websites ("An era has come to an end") and a short discussion in freedom-concerned tech circles.
Who doesn't deep down already consider Mozilla dead at this point? I'm just hoping for a good rebirth.
