> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.

We all know how that was paid for. Google. But instead of taking that money stream and investing it 100% into making it the best browser ever, they pursued a myriad of fancy distractions. Yes, making a sustainable browser project is hard. Making a sustainable browser project while being constantly distracted by side project and political activism [1] is even harder. I am not saying if Mozilla stayed focused the win would be guaranteed. But I am pretty sure doing it like they are doing it guarantees failure.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need...