Firefox is the only even vaguely independent browser engine that keeps up at all with google.
I use it these days and I am considering to start chipping in too (I am at my limits currently so I will have to stop something else though).
But I really really want something like my old Firefox back...!
Well yeah, that's how all the forks are when they start out. It's less than a year old (started in Nov 2021) so I'd be worried if it didn't keep up with upstream security patches.
AFAIK Librefox re-forks from the newest FF everytime there is a release and apply their fixes as patches.
Did something change? Last I checked almost all funding for Firefox was from Google.
> More than 90 per cent of Mozilla's funding comes from web search providers that pay for the right to be the default search engine in Firefox in their regions. According to the organization's latest financial figures [PDF], $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those internet giants – primarily Google, we understand. These deals were due to be renewed or renegotiated by November this year.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
I believe it's listed under royalties and also receivables in the annual report, though that does not specify Google specifically, but you can look at the numbers and figure they are a large portion if the news was accurate.
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...
But Firefox is mostly independent eh? Did they stop taking google money yet?