Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.

A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are - if firefox drops to 1%, then it becomes irrelevant and the project has failed at its goals as the "web standards" become equivalent to whatever chromium does.

Browsers get influence to keep the web as we want it to be mostly based on the quantity of browser users which websites want to attract and keep; without that all the best code in the world is useless and doesn't even give you a seat at the table, much less a strong say for how the de-facto standard web practices will change.

> Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.

As a browser maker your "concerns" should really be web/internet standards. If websites and webapp builders aren't complying with standards and are building their stuff to only work in non-standard compliant browsers that's a separate problem that no web browser can solve.

That's not how web standards work - or how they ought to work, for that matter.

Perhaps that's not how they ought to work, but that's definitely how they work - web standards are effectively determined (e.g. in WHATWG) by a consensus (or in some cases unilateral action) of makers of browsers with nontrivial market share; and that's how this has been happening for quite some time now. If you've got 20% market share, then your opinion (and your implementation choices) matters much more than that of the multiple <1% browsers.