That's a smart and rational decision of google to support a competing browser so that they don't have a monopoly (that may be natural) and don't get suit for abusing this monopoly.

    The only thing keeping the lights on at Mozilla 
    right now is their default search engine deal 
    with Google.

I'm perhaps splitting hairs and I apologize accordingly, but you're saying "right now" as if it was a new situation. While decidedly non-ideal, their default search engine deals are the only things that have ever kept the lights on there, right?

You call it ironic. Others might call it principled.

Principled? Maybe, but at the same time, consider that if you anger Google, that's literally 90% of your funding gone overnight and the platform by which you publish your principles won't exist anymore because it went bankrupt. It doesn't make sense to promote principles that bite the hand that feeds you, if that hand is the difference between you even existing or not.

In which case, if you make your "principled" stance and bite Google's hand enough that Google drops the funding... great, you made headlines for a day, but it didn't really accomplish anything and have made the situation worse for everyone by making WebKit the only rendering engine left standing. Great job for principles.

@tasty_freeze But in that situation, I'm just one guy who lost a job. The stakes are not like that for this. We have two browser engines left standing, WebKit and Quantum, and the organization building Quantum has been angering their sole source of income. If they fail, they make headlines for a day, and then the web is a WebKit monoculture.

In this case, I get it that they have Principles. It's just that those Principles will kill them and what they hope to accomplish by those Principles in the first place. In this situation, I would still have principles, but I wouldn't be so vocal about it until I could stand on my own two feet and withstand the loss of funding.

Your logic is not lost on the people at Firefox, I'm sure. The fact that they are willing to risk pissing off Google when it contradicts Mozilla's stance about the open web is precisely why it is principled.

Imagine working for a boss and you find out that he is cheating customers for millions of dollars. Say you objected to your boss, or reported him/her to the police. Would that be ironic because you might lose your job?