Comment by allenrb
I have an idea:
Take that $1B, invest it sensibly, and use the income to fund the development of an open, free browser in perpetuity.
Nah, that’ll never happen.
I have an idea:
Take that $1B, invest it sensibly, and use the income to fund the development of an open, free browser in perpetuity.
Nah, that’ll never happen.
They already do that. They invest the endowment, and right now it exists as a firewall to cover operations in the event that their search licensing revenue becomes unstable. The annual growth of the endowment is not nothing, but it's also nowhere near enough to fund their browser development on a yearly basis.
And while I don't love the dabbling in ad tech, and I do think there's been confusion around the user interface, I think by far the most unfair smear Mozilla has suffered is to claim they haven't been focusing on the core browser. Every year they're producing major internal engine overhauls that deliver important gains to everything from WebGPU to spidermonkey, to their full overhaul of the mobile browser, to Fission/Site Isolation work.
Since their Quantum project, which overhauled the browser practically from top to bottom in 2017 and delivered the stability and performance gains that everyone was asking for, they've done the equivalent of one "quantum unit" of work on other areas in the browser on pretty much an unbroken chain from then until now. It just doesn't get doesn't mentioned in headlines.