What's the next step after Mozilla shuts down and Google loses its cover?
Anti-trust cases take at least 10 years. This is plenty of time for Google to make the internet theirs and the then defunct Gecko engine to be too old to use. Blink and WebKit will be the only engines left.
Even if you then pry Blink and Chrome away from Google, there will never be another browser engine and it's naïve to think that just because Blink isn't legally part of Alphabet anymore that they will be instantly independent.
Exactly. Chromium is open source; Google can simply make open-source modifications to it the same way others can. Splitting Chrome from Google isn't going to do anything, and won't stop Google from making proposals to the IETF that work in their benefit.
What they did was rewrite half the browser, and release it before every single extension API was re-implemented (because the new version is vastly better in almost every other respect).
It's not really fair to pretend that they deliberately broke your addons out of malfeasance or something.
It seems that most of the APIs are now implemented but are buggy, so they added a flag to the nightly version that allows you to install any addon from AMO at risk of it maybe not working. Once it stabilizes you'll be able to use your addons again.
As a user, the new version has a worse UI and no notable speed improvements for the sites that I visit.
When I go to open a tab, by default, the ability to close the bottom tab is obscured. And collections? Useless when I already had bookmarks in folders.
But hey, they managed to break important privacy-protecting addons in the process.
I didn't notice much/any speed improvement either. Losing the tab queue sucked and certain links now force open the youtube app rather than in Firefox. The url bar at the bottom is nice, but they released it without the ability to also reverse the order of results.
I think if the new version had just one killer feature it would have been received much more kindly but for many it's a straight downgrade in terms of experience. Personally I think it's crazy that they still don't have working chromecast support.
I use it because the alternative is Chrome. But I'm also very annoyed about the update (forced, like every one is on mobile) and I'm avoiding to use a browser at all on my phone because the experience is so bad.
Before the update, mobile Firefox was so slow for me that using Chrome with no adblocker was a better experience. Now their speeds are about the same. The update was a massive improvement.
In this way, Mozilla is actually helping Google dominate the internet by providing very useful regulatory cover.
Google has free reign to do all of what you listed. They tread lightly only due to fears of regulation.