@jeffcliff @hfaust From a financial perspective, the search deal is what allowed Mozilla to deem itself "guardian of the Web" instead of remaining a smallish team working on a browser and mail client. This means the past two decades of Moz history (and the internal myths they believe about their work), and their various corporate entities are all sourced from that deal providing incredible amounts of money from Google.

I even read on some Mozilla site that when people donate, it goes to a completely different entity than the for-profit entity that develops the browser. I don't know what sort of options they have (and not just them: LibreWolf / PaleMoon / Waterfox / and the various other downstream forks are probably not strong enough to survive without Mozilla actively producing code upstream).