> That is a very cynical view. You assume Mozilla will give up their one huge advantage over Chrome (ie a browser where actual privacy is somewhat possible), you assume they will go about it in a round-about way.

Yes? It would be the... third or fourth, I can't remember anymore, mass extinction event for extensions, and be consistent with previous instances of sidelining functionality before killing it (say, tab groups, which were native functionality, then moved to an extension, and then completely killed off in one of the aforementioned extinction waves). Previous behavior is an excellent reason to be cynical.

> And you assume that nobody will fork it to keep webRequest. This seems strange as Firefox is itself a fork of Netscape create because the dominant browser was horrible to use.

I guess someone will, but they'll always lag, and accrue security flaws and bugs and missing features (ex. pale moon) since modern web standards helpfully move too fast to keep up with unless you're huge and/or making only the most minor of changes (and even then, really; icecat failing to keep up is a reasonable argument that it's impractical).

>And you assume that nobody will fork it to keep webRequest.

No, I'm not sure how you got that idea. There are plenty of instances in the past where Mozilla/Firefox has been forked.