Their user share is almost irrelevant now. They have no significant user base anymore but they will continue to exist for a long time because they are funded by google purely to make them not a monopoly.
I do not think that Mozilla will prevent Google from being legally perceived a monopoly, rather Yandex and Alibaba will prevent the US administration from braking up Google. Imagine Google be broken up to be effectively less influential compared to what they are right now. Do you really think Yandex or Alibaba will give a shit and give up their quasi-monopoly in their realms as well? It's effectively Googles size which prevents these two from taking over.
They have no significant user base anymore but they will continue to exist for a long time because they are funded by google purely to make them not a monopoly.
This is exactly where Microsoft was with Apple in the 1990s, before Jobs returned. Is there some way to break this cycle?
Mozilla was great when it focused on making a browser that people loved. Tabbed browsing, addon extensibility leveraging the power of thousands of user-developers, lightweight on resources and application size to download... Those where the days. In the early 2000s the only thing that would steal the focus of the company from their killer app was Thunderbird, and it was ok. Nobody cared about it but it did not imapct the quality of their amaaaaazing browser, Firefox. Then starting around the time that Brendan Eich was ousted, I don't even know what is the real focus of Mozilla anymore. What was the name of that company that they bought, and bloated Firefox with, that button were you could save tabs for later? I mean, I can't even remember the name of the damn thing. Now it's VPN and God knows what else. I just want a lightweight, extensible browser. Is that too much to ask?
The way things are going, Google will probably have to also hire some programmers and designers for Mozilla. And then see that they are working on things that appeal to users—so that the users don't all abandon FF.
