I've been using Firefox since the Phoenix/Firebird days, and I fear the day that Google ends their search funding to the project.
They are absolutely on the right track with Mozilla improving the actual -browser- with all of these new privacy features and core improvements. This could put them in a position to create a revenue stream independent of Google, where people would actually be willing to pay to have a browser wholly decoupled from these ad companies.
There's some risk there indeed, but there would be also big anti-monopoly scrutiny risk from Google's side doing that if they indirectly kill alternative browsers.
Right now there's some kind of equilibrium by having alternative browsers/engines, on Windows especially, plus Google still gets traffic from millions of Firefox users by being default search engine, which makes them $$$.
They are absolutely on the right track with Mozilla improving the actual -browser- with all of these new privacy features and core improvements. This could put them in a position to create a revenue stream independent of Google, where people would actually be willing to pay to have a browser wholly decoupled from these ad companies.