@thomasfuchs That sounds like they're literally making most of their money by having search engine companies arm-wrestle each other to get Firefox to default to their engine.

Firefox has an install base of something around 4%. What happens if Google just decides that 4% isn't worth ~$400 million / year? As of 2023 that's like half their budget.

I mean that nobody makes money by selling a web browser. Mozilla is pursuing those other projects for the same reason Google has itself in mobile, Chrome OS, and Cloud... They know their revenue is basically mono-sourced (ads for Google, getting paid by search engine vendors for Mozilla) and they're trying to develop another tent-pole so that if the weather changes they don't just go out of business.