I think it's the other way around. They determined that to become less reliant on Google for revenue they should explore other directions, and that hasn't been very succesful.

Though I don't fully understand why pulling funding for new browser technology was part of their strategy going forward. Servo was one of the projects that made me excited about using Firefox. I bet that big announcements about moving Firefox to Rust would have consistently bumped usage numbers. As much as people voice their opinions about the RiiR movement in the comments here, it's clear people love those kinds of projects just for the technical novelty. I know I do.

We will never charge our users, or attempt to monetize them in any way. Our nonprofit will run on unrestricted donations only.

With a simple two-part strategy:

1. We keep the team small enough that there's always at least 1.5 years of runway in the bank.

2. We continue fundraising actively.

Would you accept "issue" sponsorship to prioritize work you were going to do anyways - for instance, improving performance for a specific usecase etc?

I believe that's also what the Zig Project is doing. I hope that this sort of thing becomes more common, as browsers and programming languages (and many more things) really are things that we should have as "common goods" that don't have the interest of a corporation before the interest of users.

Don't know about oversized, it felt partly more that eg. Baker was mostly interested in Mozilla as a platform for activism, not in making a good tool for users. The new interim CEO seems to have breathed life into actual browser development.