Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways, and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would not describe that as "money wasting".
To be fair, most of Chrome’s budget is spent on developing ever more complex web standards to stay ahead of the competition, and to make sure no one will ever catch up to them.
Just two personal experiences of why the quality of Firefox is far from Chromium's: downloads, and creating an extension.
A few years ago, they changed their interface for downloading. This introduced more than a dozen of bugs. Some were cosmetic, e.g. hover was the same color as foreground. Some were rare but caused a file loss. Some were performance related, e.g. deleting the history of downloads could take a minute with no visible change until the end. Most of these regressions are now fixed, but that made me lose confidence in the quality of Firefox.
This year, I had to develop a cross-platform extension for Chrome and Firefox. I started using Mozilla Documentation Network, but many pages seemed unmaintained. The relationship with extensionworkshop.com is unclear. The status of manifest v3 is poorly documented (most pages are for v2 only). The page about the compatibility with Chrome is incomplete. After a few struggles, I switched to Google's documentation. Then I lost time and energy on a severe bug with the Firefox tool that publishes web-extensions: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webexterror-unsupported-file...
So just think how much greater the browser could be if Mozilla put more of the money they get into improving Firefox instead of into pointless UI redesigns that only slow things down, or breaking existing functionality - not to mention all the other frivolous nonsense they seem preoccupied with instead of being a credible competitor to Google.
With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if they're trying to be inept competition, as if they're being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but established by now.
One man's "useless UI redesigns" is another man's feature.
Every person I talk to has a completely different idea of what Mozilla should be doing. Keep pocket, or pocket is stupid, or pocket is the second coming of Christ, or the VPN is stupid, or the VPN is a revenue stream not dependent on Google, or whatever fucking bullshit.
Firefox does not "suck" - this is a legitimate psyop. It has all the features of Chrome minus the horrendous privacy violations. It has all the performance of Chrome, too.
I mean, what are we missing? Web USB? Give me a fucking break.
If you really, really need Web USB then fine - use Google Chrome. You win. 99.99% of people I've ever talked to don't even know what Web USB is, let alone do they rely on it.
.. and about a thousand less privacy violations. Plus significantly less ties to Google.
Even chromium-based web browsers are tightly coupled to Google. They rely on them for 99.99% of their source code. Mozilla just uses Google as the default search engine.
If I had to estimate, the developer time required for Mozilla to change the default search engine is ~.5 hours. In order for, say, Brave to not be dependent on Google, they'd have to spend ~100,000 dev hours. Because, you know, they'd have to completely develop a new web browser.
