The IRS rules governing nonprofits still required the Mozilla Foundation to beg big to go big: the parent had to go find big grants from Soros, Ford, Knight, MacArthur, and give smaller grants to many. This put it in the lefties-only-no-righty-Irish-need-apply revolving-door personnel sector of NGOs and nonprofits (too many glowies there for me, too). Which meant I had a hostile MoFo over my head the minute I got CEO appointment from the MoCo board…
Of course I can’t comment on anything about my exit, for reasons that only the most loopy HN h8ers still can’t figure out.
None of that affects the average user. I’m talking about the experience as a browser. No ads, popups, cookie walls, newsletter signup, none of that. Much better than I’ve seen with Firefox plugins. I don’t use their VPN or crypto, it doesn’t affect me at all. Crypto is always shady but it’s a choice to engage with that, and they do make it easy to avoid completely
Of course it affects the average user, if nothing else then by showing that the browser can’t be trusted.
If the people making the browser is willing to alter the Web pages people visit to steal money once, what makes you think they aren’t willing to do so again for any number of reasons?