If Firefox and Thunderbird development were financed from money collected from the VPN profits and / or donations, I'd happily pay. But I'd like it to be directed exactly there, or into other clearly stated initiatives I can understand and approve of, like Rust back in the day.
I have the exact opposite opinion. They should get out of the rendering engine business and start using Blink like just about everybody else. Take Blink and make a better browser from it using those 20 side projects. Pour resources into them and move them from mediocre to great. Take what Google gives away and spend resources on what Google ignores. Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me.
If Apple allows third party browsers and Chrome is adopted by enough iOS / iPadOS users, everything other than Blink will be non-standard in a de facto sense.
This is a fairly new opinion for me. On Windows I've started using Edge alongside Firefox and I find myself using Firefox less and less often. On my machine doing the things I need to do, Edge is significantly faster.
Having an independent rendering engine has a lot of value, in both diversity and control aspects. Having another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh. I mean not that a good chrome can't improve things - it very well may - but the importance of having it is less.
> Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me.
And that's exactly why we need a strong independent org to do this. Because it is hard and it doesn't make sense for most people. Anyone can get an idea of a chrome improvement, get a VC to sign up and start yet another "same browser as 50 others but with this little twist" thing. This is not a huge breakthrough that has any fundamental importance. Having the whole web rendering infrastructure not owned by a single entity sounds kinda important though. Yes, it's hard to pull off - that's exactly why it is valuable, as opposed to make another quick buck by doing a quick tweak over somebody else's work. Quick buck things are valuable too - but they are not fundamental. It's like developing a new theme for Windows as opposed to developing Linux. I think having Linux is much more important than having one more Windows theme.
> Having another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh
Yep. Browsers in general are meh at this point. Mozilla is looking for things like Fakespot because all of the big browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. There really isn't anything they can do with the core of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
> There really isn't anything they can do with the core of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
That comment placed in a thread filled to the brim with "Firefox is slow" and (at least on macOS) "Firefox eats my battery"
That's not even getting into the horrors of their dev-tools impl, or the missing CSS items cited in this same discussion, both of which I grant not _every_ user cares about but there are for sure users who care about all 4 of those things
Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20 mediocre side projects.