I just saw a post complaining about the Mozilla layoffs.
I wanted to point out that the vast majority of their income (over 85% in 2022) is from having Google as the default search engine - Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
Expect things to get worse.
Please don’t assume it was just a cruel choice.
That’s how Chromium works.
Anyone can see the source, but it doesn’t mean that anyone’s code makes it into Chromium, because Google picks and chooses. Chromium has a “reviewer pool” of Google developers doing all the picking and choosing. Getting into the reviewer pool takes months to years of building up a contribution history and being vetted by the Google team.
They’re completely at the mercy of how Google integrates things like DRM, or web standards that Google wants to push, like a deeply integrated into the browser and actively maintained with little to no alternative. The engineering overhead of sustaining and increasingly complex fork of Chromium is unsustainable and unless you have the development capability to compete, Google controls the destiny of any chromium browser.