Sure, but would the users have sided with FF? I'm not convinced. The users use whatever BigTech tells them to use, that's how I see it.
> Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF
Brave is Chromium. I don't see how this would even begin correcting the mistakes of FF. The one thing FF does right is that it is not Chromium.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Google controls Chromium, everybody uses Chromium, so Google controls the web.
The web is more than tracking and ads. Chromium is not an ad engine.
but they certainly care about the search engine. I remember several years ago when Firefox changed their default search from Google to Yahoo, so many clients that we supported complained that IT's response was just to switch everyone over to chrome.
To be fair the biggest issue was that yahoo was worse with dangerous ads in their results then Google was the time.
One cannot compete with those who hold the choke points. Google owned the Web when they launched Chrome. Microsoft and Apple own desktop and mobile defaults. With three major competitors setting defaults, nagging users, and aggressively developing their browsers, Firefox was doomed.
Only unskippable browser ballots, with random order, and outlawing promotion of owns own browser from a dominant business would help.
My argument is that short of ballots and anti-trust enforcement, nothing could have stood against three chokepoint-holding and well resourced competitors.
Yes, I run my own independent search engine[0].
> successful
Now that's the challenging part, especially since Mozilla needs to fund browser development. The initial differentiation for a Mozilla search would have been difficult, but at their peak they had 30%+ market share, and if the default search on Firefox was Mozilla Search then they might have been able to make it all work financially. DuckDuckGo makes over $100 million in revenue per year[1], if a Mozilla Search made as much money annually, then even though it's below their current $500 million search contract with Google, with some fiscal responsibility they probably would have had enough to support a search engine and browser development concurrently.
[0] https://ichi.do/
[1] https://techreport.com/statistics/software-web/duckduckgo-st...
But Mozilla leadership did not have an interest in this, in light of endless google money. Google essentially captured Mozilla back in the day.
Now people have got used to ads because they only could chose between browsers that don't protect them.
Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF and is attracting a small userbase, but not large enough to make a big difference, because the times have changed a lot.
Now with the new management at Mozilla and the dim outlook for the next 5 years, the realization is kicking in that listening to users is actually important. But the elephant in the room is the contracts with large ad-based search engines.