Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.
Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves.
So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time.
I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining.
It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it.
In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.
