Maybe in terms of market share as a proxy for success that is true.
As a browser though Firefox has come on leaps and bounds (and has momentum to keep improving), I never switched away from it but used Chrome for dev for the last few years so I have a fair amount of time with both (dozens of hours a week) and Firefox is as fast and reliable as Chrome.
Ironically the one property that gives me issues with Firefox is youtube, they don't fix bugs against Firefox (the white bar header on fullscreen has been in firefox for over a month now and has been reported).
I ended up having to implement a ublock origin rule to remove the header.
EDIT: Mozilla are (to me) so much more than just a browser vendor, MDN documentation is probably my 2nd most visited documentation/help site (behind only stack overflow) because the quality is superb, concise and they quickly mention at the bottom can do this on foo, bar but not fizz which is useful to someone approach 40 because keeping that stuff in my head is well beyond me these days.
Firefox is my daily driver, and it's great.
Then I got tired with certain sites not working properly and went back to Firefox - and it's plain to see they've done great things to the browser engine, it's fast, pretty lightweight on CPU and power usage and all of the problematic sites in Safari work fine.
So while this is not as compelling as a community controlled fork, it at least shows the alternative vendors are not willing to blindly swallow Google's changes.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-...
We need to get a version of Chromium that's not owned by Google -- but, I don't see any motivation for Google to give up control of Chromium or move Chrome over to use a different, community controlled fork.
So if you want a version of Chromium that really is community controlled, you'll need to have a community fork of Chromium that we all agree to work on and use as a browser base. Otherwise, we'll just be giving free labor to Google, and they'll still filter contributions so that primarily their interests are served.
Unfortunately, now that we've forked Chromium for all of our browsers, one of two things is going to happen:
- either the fork will need to be tightly constrained by Chromium, in which case Google will still effectively control it, or
- the fork will diverge from Chromium, in which case we'll be back to the exact same position we are now. You'll have multiple competing browser engines, one of which is used by the most dominant browser on the market.
The TLDR is if you're worried about Google controlling the browser engine, it still seems to me that the only solution is to get a non-google controlled browser engine used by a browser with market share comparative to Chrome.
The relative lack of user adoption for Vivaldi, Opera and Brave suggest to me that standardizing on Chromium won't significantly help with that. Edge is now moving over to Chromium -- if it sees a massive influx of new users, maybe it'll be worth taking that strategy more seriously.
In the meantime, since it appears we are going to need a browser engine to compete with Chromium anyway, what's the harm in having one company (Mozilla) try to compete by building their own browser engine the way they want? Sure, Firefox isn't doing great right now, but is it doing any worse than Brave?