I don’t care about Occam’s Razor.

Google has massive control over the web thanks to its money but also its social clout. There were points where if you went to https://google.com, it would recommend installing Google Chrome. Google already had a name for itself, so people would take that kind of recommendation seriously. This only went a step further with Android. With the Google sync, anyone could have their tabs and bookmarks across devices using the Google account they already have. Firefox has a feature that’s just as competent, but why would anyone want to make a Firefox account? So now there’s the incentive to just use Chrome everywhere.

With that huge market on lock, Chrome can introduce changes willy-nilly and influence the web spec, and other browsers have to tag along if they want to stay relevant, including Firefox. Opera went bust. Internet Explorer went bust. Firefox is barely stringing along, thanks in part to Google funding, but it’ll never be enough to keep up with Google. Especially with their incompetent leadership and their tendency to remove features sometimes. Those two things are ultimately not the main problem, though.

Mozilla is in a no win financial situation right now. The Google donations keep them running yes, but every time they try to diversify their revenue with things like sponsored content (that is still open source on the user side and deliberately has minimal analytics data and can be outright disabled), or their VPN, or whatever, their users raise hell even though it will help them get off Google dependency. Huge companiss use their other more significant-in-their-class products like Rust and they don’t get a dime from those companies, even ones that have large portions of their tech stack running it. They have a direct donation page, but if their public financial info is to be believed, almost no one donates.

Stopping Google’s monopoly over browsers? Which in turn benefits everyone in the community?