Comment by hakfoo

The right answer is to nationalize it. Set up some sort of independent non-profit steering committee, and maybe redirect some of the massive savings Elon has pulled out of his ass to fund the actual core development. That solves the "who spends $1b per year on development if not an adtech" problem. If the US was a functioning state right now, I might suggest making it an international organization to encourage buy in from developers and backers outside our borders.

Browsers are one of the most critical pieces of modern software infrastructure, both from a security-footprint perspective and as a vehicle for (mis-)information delivery, so maybe they're too important for ANY commercial entity to use them as a bludgeon to for their agenda.

If they no longer control the core project, then Google (or Microsoft) have a much harder job doing self-serving stuff. They could nuke Manifest v2 in THEIR Chromium derivative, but core Chromium isn't going to give it up-- the Operas and Vivaldis of the world don't have to spend their limited resources trying to unwind the change to keep a desired feature.