Safari is nowadays getting ~$15,000,000,000 per year with a Google search deal. Meanwhile Mozilla has been ignoring their core user base going as far as laying off development teams working on Firefox components in the name of cost saving while they try to diversify income to support the rest of Mozilla (which makes basically nothing) yet they've retain their own Google search deal with lower user share for <$500,000,000 per year anyways.
At this point a better risk avoidance strategy would have been focus on Firefox development and retaining user share (particularly on Mobile where they basically faded to nothing while holding onto the old browser engine on Android for far too long) to have decades worth of current income on hand from the same deal they've kept anyways.
I was amazed/saddened that they laid off the Servo team. That seemed like the one really worthwhile improvement Mozilla had bet on in a decade. I use and appreciate Firefox, maybe it's partly nostalgia for when FF pushed the web experience forward.
Maintaining even one browser engine is an ungodly amount of work (see how even microsoft dropped the ball on that), let alone 2. Discontinuing Servo was the correct decision however sad it is.
On the other hand, Firefox does incorporate more and more Rust into the browser, but reimplementing such a core part is simply infeasible.
Servo was a research project to write those various Rust components that did made it into Firefox not an alternative reimplementation to one day replace it wholesale.
I hear what you're saying, but at the same time what's the way forward for Mozilla and Firefox? Firefox either needs to be way more performant than other browsers, or needs to have some significant UI benefits over other major browsers (like it used to have with tabs and extensions). With great respect to Mozilla, I don't see either happening or even a path to either anymore.
I still find Firefox plenty extensible, as well as it is the most privacy oriented browser, hands down.
With containers, and tree style tabs/sideberry it gives a unique user experience. To me it is performant enough and has great adblocking through ublock origin (that is not in danger of removal by API changes, looking at you every single chromium fork).
At this point a better risk avoidance strategy would have been focus on Firefox development and retaining user share (particularly on Mobile where they basically faded to nothing while holding onto the old browser engine on Android for far too long) to have decades worth of current income on hand from the same deal they've kept anyways.