The $500M per year they get from Google isn't enough to pay the bills?

Having other sources of revenue outside of a benefactor whose interesting in you relies on having a relevance in the browser market with them also actively engaged in implicitly or explicitly undermining that with a product of their own doesn't seem like too bad of an idea.

How does this relate to the original claim I was responding to which was "they have to pay their bills somehow"?

It's dangerous to depend on a single company (that also happens to have a competing product).

What happens if the money stops coming?

> that also happens to have a competing product

Firefox is a "feature" for Google Chrome.

The day Google stops paying mozilla and mozilla close shop, they will get the same treatment Google itself set up in courts against Microsoft for IE6. It's pretty much protection money for their past selfs.

Google doesn't actually need Mozilla to increase their search market share. When Mozilla switched to Yahoo in the U.S., many users switched back to Google [1], and those who care about privacy switch to things such as DuckDuckGo anyways.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/report-yahoo-search-losing-fire...

That's my theory as well.

It's cheaper to keep mozilla barely alive than to pay lawyers and governments for anti-trust lawsuits around the globe.

And they get to harvest search data from firefox users as a bonus.

Developing more than one revenue stream is likely to be a more resilient strategy than hoping that Google is happy to keep paying a competitor browser to stay in business

Ads this way is not a sustainable revenue strategy, it's pocket money at best.

Pocket money is better than no money.

Maybe, but that does not mean that they should put all their eggs into one basket.

Not when you're up against billion-dollar budgets.