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