Just for the record, what is it that Google is paying them $500M/yr to do? I haven't installed Firefox for while, is Google the default search engine or something?
edit: Upon more searching, I find passages like this:
>in 2020, Mozilla Corporation’s revenue was $466 million from its search partnerships (largely driven by its search deal with Google), subscriptions and advertising revenue. [0]
Google pays Mozilla to exist. I wouldn't be surprised if other browsers get either checks or favors for existing. All of this is to make Google not seem like the monopoly it is.
You're considering "contender" when the word you should be using is "competitor".
It's not Google's fault people prefer chrome over safari. The fact that people _can_ choose Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Chromium, Brave, etc. is what matters. As long as Google isn't doing anything anti-competitive, it's absolutely okay to dominate the market with a superior product.
Well, yes. It’s almost all of their annual revenue and Mozilla already had huge layoffs[0], so presumably they’re not exactly on amazing footing financially. Duckduckgo could not provide anything near that much - ddg has 100m in annual revenue and Google is giving 500m to Mozilla. 5x their entire company’s annual revenue.
If an organisation can be in financial trouble with an annual income of half a billion then it's poorly run. That's ample resources even for something as complex as a browser.
Who wants to let go of free money?
Mozilla is way overpaid, they probably lost focus other than paying $100m for browser development and MDN and probably the rest wasted.
