You are fundamentally misunderstanding something very important: a browser is nothing without content to view in it. In order to achieve Google independence, M

You are fundamentally misunderstanding something very important: a browser is nothing without content to view in it. In order to achieve Google independence, Mozilla can't just focus on Firefox. They need an ecosystem of web apps that are Firefox-first, or at least not Firefox-second the way Google's YouTube and Search are. They can build it themselves, or they can get other people to do it, just as long as it gets done. Nobody seems interested in doing it for them. Most web pages either work better in Chrome, or they work about equally well in both browsers. The obvious allies that I can think of who might want to help elevate Firefox are Google's competitors, like NetFlix, Vimeo, various third-party ad companies, and, back when Google+ was still a thing, Facebook, but there are ideological reasons why being too overtly friendly with most of these companies can't happen. Ideologically, Firefox would want to ally with hobbyist groups, but they're small and fragmented: if there was a widespread movement to push Firefox at the exclusion of Chrome, many hobbyists would be happy to participate, because fuck Google, but nobody wants to go on this stag hunt[1] alone, and nobody has enough influence to organize such a thing except maybe Mozilla themselves (if enough websites start blocking Chrome at Mozilla's request, YouTube will retaliate by blocking Firefox, and I'm pretty sure Google's war chest is big enough that they'd be the ones who live through this metaphorical nuclear war). So most hobbyist websites work about equally well in both browsers, which overall means that the set of websites that work well in Chrome is a superset of the ones that work well in Firefox. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt Thus, Mozilla is stuck in a position where Google is vertically monopolizing them into irrelevance. Their repeated failure to launch their own products has proven that they don't have the power to go their own way, and working on their browser engine just means you have an excellent web browser engine, but that Chrome has them beat in the category of "stuff to actually do with it," which is much more important. This is, of course, the reason why Google desperately needs to be broken up.