The trouble is that Mozilla has admitted they can't survive without Google's revenue. You are basically using Google by proxy unless you use a truly independent browser engine of they get blocked by Cloudflare for not having enough fingerprinting tech.

Mozilla is paid when people search on Google through Firefox. If you're not searching with Google, you're not using Google by proxy.

(Work at Mozilla, but not related to this - this is just public info.)

(Ungoogled) Chromium and Firefox are both projects that are open source and readily available. The code is sitting there ready for you to compile. More users = more donations. You can be the change you wanna see.

What browser can genuinely claim independence from Google? Chromium browsers are all arguably in the same camp. If FF is implicated, then so are forks like Zen.

Safari is probably the only one?

> You are basically using Google by proxy unless you use a truly independent browser engine

This conclusion doesn't follow your premise. Google has to pay because if Mozilla dies, so does the claim of any real competition on the browser engine market. So everyone agrees Firefox's engine is truly independent. Google pays so Firefox users don't use anything that has to do with Google.

If you think about it, the only real way to not hurt Google is for Firefox to stop existing. Chrome would end up being spun off from Google.

I don't agree that you are using Google by proxy when Firefox has more technical independence from Google than Chrome and can be quickly decoupled from the few Google defaults it has, search and safe browsing.