Comment by jeroenhd

Mozilla needs to pay their developers. Donations alone don't cover the wages. The way money is divided is rather suboptimal at the moment in my opinion, but most of that money comes from Google, which may be ruled illegal in the coming months if the antitrust case against Google pans out well, leaving a hole where 86% of Mozilla's funding used to be. They _need_ to make money.

Developing browsers is very expensive. Currently, the only people doing that are Google+Microsoft (Blink), the megacorps in it for the ad money, Apple, in it for their own independence, and Mozilla, trying to be a third party. Forks are made constantly by individuals or small teams, and are often lagging behind in quality, maintenance, and security; Palemoon simply cannot keep up with Firefox, KHTML is effectively broken, and even the maintained Gnome fork of WebKit has tons of issues that make it hard to use it as a daily driver.

Everyone wants a super duper privacy friendly browser that only does browser things and preferably only works on their personal requirements, but nobody wants to actually spend time and money to develop one. I hope Ladybird turns out well, or maybe Servo will get revived into a functional browser, but how those browsers will be developed and distributed is entirely up to those browser vendors.

You can use whatever browser you like, but unless you're paying a significant sum for it or are part of the dev team, you'll have to succumb to the terms under which the browser is made available. I'd rather have parties like Mozilla funded by donations or independent government funds than by big tech, but nobody is willing to spend the millions necessary to catch up to Chrome just yet.