Mozilla's main source of revenue has always been the money Google gives them to have Google as the default search engine. They could stop this at any time to effectively kill Mozilla. So, why haven't they? Because there's this case called United States v. Microsoft Corporation that deals with this very issue of browser monopolies. Now usually a lawsuit wouldn't mean dick to Google because they already have a litany of lawsuits against them that their star legal team is hired to handle. But in this one narrow instance a precedent case is massive, and were Google to kill Mozilla, there would be a league of lawyers jumping over themselves to sue Google on this. Why? Because it's a slam dunk, and would at best force Google to say "hey, you can download Chrome, or you can use these alternative browsers" everywhere there's a Chrome download prompt, or at worst force them to split up. They don't want that.
Regarding Mozilla's direction, we already have years of evidence. It all starts with Brendan Eich's resigning. Whether you agree the reasoning is immaterial; that decision lead him to start a direct competitor that is now fighting them for the ever-shrinking demographic of people that don't use Chrome. And then there's stuff like acquiring Pocket, something completely antithetical to Firefox's core values. Money-wasters like FoxOS (or whatever that mobile OS was called) that distracted from Firefox. And then lots of tick-tacky stuff like FF devtools being inferior to Chrome for years (people say it's better now, but I don't care to check it out, I've been using Chrome's for years), over-focusing on frivolous things like social justice issues. It will be death by 1000 cuts that kills Mozilla from the inside.
"Money-wasters" like FirefoxOS were a gamble to get onto the mobile phone bandwagon, to reduce Google's Android/Chrome moat. If they had worked, it'd have been a huge gain both for Firefox and for users.
> And then there's stuff like acquiring Pocket, something completely antithetical to Firefox's core values.
Pocket itself isn't antithetical to Firefox's values. It not being open source is, but from what I understand they're still working on making the server open source, though at disappointingly low priority.
pocket is mainly an article reader and not really a bookmark service. the whole point is you don't have to send tab of some js heavy news website, you can just have the clean reader view from pocket.
If you bookmark articles, they'll likely eventually go offline or your links will break because websites change and die. This is known as link rot.
There are services, of which Pocket is not the only one, that save you personal hard copies of content so you can have it available offline and keep things even if they're gone. Like a personal Wayback Machine. It's a very sensible thing to integrate into a browser in my opinion, although a lot of the Firefox fanbase, being idiots in love with the idea of FOSS donationware, are hostile to. I used to be one of those idiots.
Simply put it combines "article view" with pinterest style saving. Find an article online, save it to pocket, revisit it later and read it in an "article view".
There's a possibility that they're going to Bing, in which case they'd truly be a non-Google player. Not a non-Big Tech one, but a real anti-Google system.
