There are plenty ways to fund digital commons, including people volunteering their time.

A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.

Right. Firefox stands alone as the most successful self financed full stack browser that's ever been made without being subsidized by outside revenue streams. I like to use the example of Opera. If "make a better browser" won market share and business creativity won stable revenue, we'd all be using Opera right now because (sorry Mozilla), no browser company was ever better than Opera in my opinion.

In 2026 the rules to making a good browser are (1) already be a trillion dollar company, (2) use Chromium, (3) have some form of distribution lock-in over billions of devices. Otherwise you're cooked. Mozilla swims against the stream better than anyone.

I don’t know, but there are other ways of funding besides -completely- volunteer run.

Take look at Ladybird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser)?wprov=s...

You can't seriously compare ladybird, a mostly broken browser nowhere ready or even remotely close to it, to Firefox.

Ladybird will be dead in a few years.

There's a strong desire to keep the web an open platform, if the alternative to WebKit isn't going to be Firefox, it'll simply have to be something else. I'd gladly contribute to the cause, beit ladybird or something else. For now it would be monetarily until my impending retirement when I can contribute hours without impacting my family.

I wouldn't discount ladybird or others simply because they haven't shipped their mvp just yet. They're closing in on a usable product. Maybe they never make it, but servo and others may. Saying they'll be dead in a few years isn't contributing much besides pessimism for anything but the status quo.

The EU says it cares about privacy. although it's actions have normalized enshittification; the EU could fully fund Firefox or a Firefox fork or another browser in a second and stop all the trackers right in their tracks.

It's American company... unlikely.

Then fork it.

Besides, the one thing Mozilla could do to be relevant to 99.9% of web users is to move somewhere other San Francisco and turn their office their into a homeless shelter. They should go to Dublin or Frankfurt or Barcelona, anywhere.

Monetary contributions via government grants have happened in the past. Iirc that's how VLC got their start.

But several entire operating systems can an do operate entirely by the volunteer model? I don't follow...

I don't think volunteering is going to cut it. Big orgs have big money and public commons are just targets to be controlled exploited.

mozilla employs 750 people and has a 1/2Bn dollar deal with Google and still their browser is absolute hot garbage. i think volunteering won't cut it.

I'd argue these are not _contradictory_, just incentivized financially to continue since that's how they've operated. What i'm suggesting is a change. There's plenty of counter examples where diverse funding models for community projects can work without taking vast sums from a single, direct competitor. Linux is one. Imagine if MSFT was the sole contributor to Linux and how that would have shaped its development. In recent years MSFT may infact directly contribute developers and funding to linux, but they have a vested interest in doing so, as they run more Linux VMs in Azure than Windows VMs these days...

Because Windows doesn't go open-source and others can't build their OS from windows like chromium. With OS, there are no open source kernels that are actively maintained and security-fix bump every month by full time staff of giant corporation. With browsers, devs already have an open source engine with most of the work and build are from full-time staff of a giant corporation, and then they just lazily build "their own" browsers upon that and brag on social media.

Build your own browser engine and see how you can pay the devs to make them work on it.

I'm not sure the counter argument you're making tbh.

The license or patch cycles of either project is irrelevant in this example. The money changing hands between the original product and it's competitor is the issue at stake here.

I'll spell it out in Mozilla's case:

If money is provided by a direct competitor, and that same money is _critical to the continued existence of the original project_ as it is in Mozilla's case, that project and it's staff now have a vested interest in avoiding _anything_ that could endanger that flow, as it now poses a very real existential risk. This is the game they play and the conflict of interest I'm merely pointing out.

Google gets to keep slowly eating the entire browser pie. Should regulators come calling, they can even point at Firefox and say "see, we're not monopolizing this space! there's Firefox over there" To me it appears as a sick form of puppetry.

The argument is you are using OS as a counter example when it's not the counter example.

What is the chromium of OS world but Linux doesn't depend on them?

The Linux Foundation has many, diverse corporate donors, and Linux enables software like ChromeOS, yes. These are all true, but doesn't change the argument that it's a bad call to take the vast majority of your income from a single, direct competitor.

I truly don't grok the point you're trying to make, but that's likely a me problem. Your points appear to all be asides to the core issue at hand.