They just spent 30M dollars on this AI thing lol it wouldn't cost 20% of that to do what I'm saying

First, speaking from experience of someone who worked in a (failed) project that wanted to build a "Enterprise version of ChromeOS", based on Firefox and Linux: I love this naive confidence to predict how much it would cost to bring a whole new lot of features to a product (Firefox/Gecko) that is known for being extremely difficult to refactor.

Second, You really don't get it, do you? They will not spend money on anything that might actually threaten Google's dominance. They get 30M to play with AI is because they don't get to spend anything on making Firefox a strong alternative for Chrome. If they did, Google will take all their money away and then it's game over for them.

That’s categorically false, their revenue is tied to their userbase, if they were more popular Google would cut them a larger check like they do for Safari.

According to a contract, which can be renegotiated or simply not renewed.

Google does not pay Apple for "access to the user base". Google pays Apple so that Apple does not try to get into the search engine space and compete with Google.

They also pay Mozilla as a way to keep controlled opposition and a (relatively) inexpensive way of avoid threats of lawsuits like the one that MS had in the past. But they don't need to. If Mozilla for any reason decided to stop conforming to this game and went on to actually fight against Google, Google would drop them in a heartbeat. And who would Mozilla go for, Bing? DDG?

If you think it costs 30 million dollars to write a blessed extension that implements the Endpoint Verification logic... lol

> If they did, Google will take all their money away and then it's game over for them.

Because of the position they put themselves in. Also you underestimate how much cash they have.

In terms of ROI: How much do you think they would get in market share if they implemented it?