They've paid their CEO.

500 million would pay for almost 5000 full time developers.

Fiy, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the highest rates charities on Charity Navigator.

They don't always make the best choices as far as product direction, but as a charity, they are quite respectable.

You say that as if we're lying. Mozilla's entire revenue is from the search deal. If it goes away, you can kiss the entire company goodbye. Not saying that OSS is inherently unable to survive or anything like that.

Wtf you on about?

The grand majority of all costs for Firefox are in engineering salaries. And there is no million dollar CEO relating to the nonprofit's expenses, that CEO is paid for from funds from the for profit organization.

Browsers are CRAZY expensive to build and maintain. And teams of engineers are crazy expensive.

I know your question is rhetorical... But as of 2024-02...

CEO is paid for from the for profit. The majority of costs are engineering salaries for Firefox.

Yeah, but their job is like reeeally hard!! They deserve it. /s

Maybe, but what are the odds of a fork taking off? It was started under the codename "Phoenix" and went by "Firebird" for some time before becoming "Firefox".

Maybe it's time for a fork to rise from the ashes and take off...

Because a browser is several orders of magnitudee more complex than a website.

https://www.mozilla.org/products/vpn/

And soon: https://thundermail.com/

In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most "alternative browsers" do - tweaking or repackaging.

These days, a browser is like it's own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.

I'd say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.

So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop "apps".

If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren’t supported?

Likely yes, as Google will keep enshittifying the web unless stopped by antitrust or whatever. Which isn't looking so likely.

A ton. Mozilla is already behind on all kinds of miscellaneous less used standards implementations compared to Chrome AFAIK. On top of that there are security fixes needed monthly and realistically you need to be able to push emergency patches within 48 hours or less (really 1/4 or 1/2 that) or people are going to flee because they got cryptolockered because of you.

How quickly would sites be unsupported? Hard to say. Most likely large chunks of the internet would start blocking Mozilla user agents as an out of date security threat for their userbase before it actually ran into actual implementation problems. The problem would be that, websites and services no longer even bothering to try to support Mozilla and making changes that break things, and of course security holes and exploits which would likely eventually lead to no-click complete computer compromises and other very bad things. Once it falls far enough behind on standards a lot of sites will block it for that reason because they don't want bug reports or to spend money chasing down an issue potentially caused by an out of date piece of software.

Google or whoever owns Chrome would keep pushing new web standards at a fast pace to kill and bury any attempts to keep Firefox running. At that point there's nothing really stopping them closed sourcing large parts of Chrome to kill privacy forks and lock down control of the web which most big websites would be fine with as Google's interest is in getting through ads and preventing the end user from control over their own computer in favor of the interests of the website owner.

It would be apocalyptic potentially for what remains of the open web and user freedom.

Not even remotely true, this is a myth. Most of what they spend is on development, operations, and legal. They publish their 990 online which gives the breakdown. IIRC the foundation gets like 2%.