So say we all

I get the saying. But in this case, Mozilla gets most of its money from search royalties, primarily from Google. We are Google's product, not Firefox's.

It's both. Firefox sell you to Google, Google sell you to advertisers.

It seems Firefox executives take a large chunk of money from Google; presumably to make sure Firefox doesn't do anything too wild that would reduce Googles income.

Instead of viewing the situation as Firefox selling me down the river to Google, I like to view it as an opportunity for collective bargaining.

Firefox is my union representative. They are better able to fight for my interests against Google than should I go it alone and use Chrome.

What motivation does Firefox have to fight for your interests?

People use it purely for that reason. If they don't, their usage will drop, which will reduce their revenue. The fact that this revenue comes from Google is largely a byproduct.

Its not a perfect system, but it should somewhat work.

I'm not sure - I guess the same motivation that supports the open source movement. I am satisfied that the actions Firefox has taken so far does tend to support my interests.

Kind of.

Many of us who used it from the start think it was a much better browser before.

For me it was more or less rock solid at >800 tabs and with a lot less memory and more exciting extensions than I have now.

I admit this wasn't everyones experience, but as a superuser tool it has degraded a lot over the years.

It is still the best browser for me: I don't think anyone else except Orion (which is Mac only) has actual tree style tabs (not to be confused with vertical, non indented tabs as seen in Opera derivatives).

continued existence

> presumably to make sure Firefox doesn't do anything too wild

I wonder how much of what the Tor Browser version of Firefox does, would be upstreamed to Firefox proper, if not for that deal?

(I wonder how much the Firefox team considers Tor Browser to be "the real Firefox" / "Firefox the way we intended", with Firefox itself just being "the sell-out version of Firefox"?)

curl, sqlite, awk, etc. They're all free. Am I the product?