No, I think it was "yes but I want to be pedantic about it". If you had just said "Mozilla" the answer is an easy yes. But you made the mistake of specifying MoFo (as opposed to MoCo).
That said, I work for Mozilla and in practice we're very independent. Our user base, small as it may be compared to the past, is still a valuable bargaining chip. We are still very much fighting for an open and accessible Web in the standards arena (where technical and philosophical arguments work well with the actual Google people doing the work, even if the outcome is not optimal for google the advertising juggernaut.)
> Our user base, small as it may be compared to the past, is still a valuable bargaining chip.
Your userbase is not just small, it is shrinking. While initial attrition may have been do to anti-competitive practices by other browser makers (who you could have taken actions against, if you were actually independent of them), your continued loss of even the hard-core userbase that has stuck around this long can only be explained by your own disregard for the wishes of those users.
You might be right. I would probably even agree with respect to certain decisions.
But I'm also doubtful of your and my armchair quarterbacking, especially when it's hard not to bring in a self-serving angle (as in, it would obviously be better to prioritize X, where X is something I really want). Mozilla does a lot of surveying of current and potential users, and evaluates things in terms of maintenance costs that might not immediately be obvious. I'll bet that neither of us would be able to accurately predict all of those findings.
Stories like "...but power users are who are going to drive adoption, so investing in them is clearly the right strategy even if they're a small component of current users!" are intuitively persuasive. But again, someone who has studied the situation extensively is going to know things that we won't. Off the top of my head: "power users" is an amorphous group (and "self-reported power users" only weakly overlaps with "users who depend on advanced features"); the range of things that cater to power users is vast and all over the place; security, privacy, and maintenance concerns are far larger than the "why can't you just..." crowd ever seems to realize. None of which mean power users are unimportant, just that the tradeoffs are not at all clear.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. (Well, except maybe about the anti-competitive bit. The time frames of any legal or governmental action on those grounds is far too long, and often far too sidesteppable. Those things are good for dead companies to eventually receive justice, and for the playing field to be leveled out for future companies. The ROI of $1 spent on chasing down the legal or regulatory rathole pales in comparison to $1 spent on development or marketing.)
Which in this case is equivalent to 'if you owe 10k to Bank its your problem, but if you owe 10M its the bank's problem'.
One way or another Mozilla relies on Google remaining its customer for vast majority of money, while Google being their biggest competitor who eats out ever more of Mozilla's market share every year, further reducing any reason for Google to remain their customer going forward.
They've had other customers in the past and present, and could have others in the future. Should they take less money to not take the money from Google?
This idealism is nice but if you remove privacy unfriendly customers you rule out basically every customer and don't have the money to make a browser at all. Behind Google are Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and Baidu before you reach duckduckgo who somewhat respects privacy.
If I didn't like to admit it, I wouldn't have clarified that most of the Mozilla Corporation's money comes from Google.
As the other poster mentioned, there's a meaningful distinction between customer and contributor. If Google stopped buying the contract for the default search, someone else would buy it. Like Yahoo did in around ~2014. Or like various other search engines already do in other countries/languages.
I mean their money comes from the bank account that others pay in to, but that's a stupid and irrelevant distinction ...