"Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the free and open-source Chromium project. Blink is by far the most-used browser engine, due to the market share dominance of Google Chrome and the fact that many other browsers are based on the Chromium code."
Ladybird seems to be the only hope, once available.
And how does that control look like in practice? Has Google ever decided how things should be done "or else"? What Google does is pay a protection tax. Without Firefox around and independent, the EU is almost sure to break Chrome away from Google, especially with the warm EU-US relations now. So Google pays and is going to pay as much as it takes to keep Firefox alive, kicking, and doing whatever it wants.
Google Chrome needs Firefox to be moderately successful more than Firefox needs that money. Or else it might become someone else's Chrome.
> Follow the money
Everyone has this revelation once. If it was that easy then customers would practically own the company providing them the services. Do you and your fellow paying customers feel like you own any company, especially big-tech? Do you all control Netflix? Amazon? Apple?
A million individual voices are just noise which is what your "fellow paying customers" line equates. A single monetary contributor is not that. It is the sugar daddy of Firefox. Conflating the two seems to be a bad faith comparison.
Talking about bad faith, with Google's single, enormously powerful voice surely you can hear what it says. So why not answer to literally the first thing I asked in my comment instead of skipping straight to the end to claim bad faith? You should have laundry list of examples to show how Google flashes the cash and the orders, and Firefox executes. That's a sugar daddy.
You understand that if Firefox ever just becomes a puppet on Google hand the whole setup crumbles? It's barely at the edge of plausible deniability even today. Why kill the golden goose when Firefox is anyway in no position to become a real threat on the browser market any time soon.
Plenty of companies lived and died by their customers' "noise", or at least got a bloody nose, so that's a shallow dismissal.
Expecting FF to listen to a million individual users is not a good expectation. Expecting FF to be prone to listening to a single powerful voice would be a better expectation. However, FF has not assimilated into yet another Chrome, so there's some evidence they are not giving in to the whims of that powerful voice.
That doesn't really seem relevant these days though. Although I guess duopolies are totally fine.
If Firefox and Apple can't rein in Google with their competing engines, what exactly does Ladybird change?
Same reason some of us choose Linux over Windows.
In fact your example betrays you, because it would be like rewriting Linux from scratch while still attempting to maintain perfect compatibly with Linux. And then arguing that you've somehow weakened Linux in the process. Why not just fork it and maintain your own fork?
Straight from the source:
I like Servo, but it's also very early in its development. There's no choice but to hold on for now.
Both projects (Chromium and Firefox) are open, so it's like Linux vs FreeBSD, but at least FreeBSD has a clear licensing advantage.
No defeatism though please, some of us will advocate till the end (pen & paper)