Ask Paul: March 7 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This has been a surprisingly busy week, with lots going on, and I feel like I have as many questions as you do. I'll do my best...

? Protozilla?
oasis21 asks;
We know Mozilla is trying to improve it's revenue streams. What do you think is stopping them from trying to become Proton? I know they had a VPN. It seems like a perfect business for them. Like basically copy Google, Microsoft, Apple products and "don't be evil". Wouldn't it be interesting if Proton buys Mozilla to bail them out if they start having money trouble.
I have this mostly unwritten editorial called "I Want to Use the DuckDuckGo Web Browser But I Can't." It currently starts out with:

I love the idea of DuckDuckGo, the company and its products. But I still can't use the DuckDuckGo web browser, and neither can you. That needs to change.

I mention this because I feel like Mozilla and DuckDuckGo are two companies that we should trust but neither seems to elevate to that level of outright trust, as Proton has (for me, at least).
Trust is a tough thing, it's difficult to earn and very easy to lose. And Mozilla has made so many mistakes, strategically or technically, that make fans worried that it will never live up to its lofty ideals. DuckDuckGo is less problematic in a sense--I 'trust' the company for the most part and feel they've done a reasonable job with search and AI--but they never closed the deal on their browser by completing it from a functional standpoint. How do you even release a browser without extensions? This seems crazy. (DuckDuckGo did have that one Mozilla-style controversy back in 2022 when it was found to be passing through Microsoft trackers, but it course-corrected pretty quickly.)
Mozilla's plan to expand beyond the browser, which was triggered by its rapidly declining usage share, was certainly understandable. And like many defeats, it wasn't any one thing that sunk things for them. Some of it was just them doing the wrong things. Some of it was them not paying enough attention to the product its fans really cared about, and making bad technology decisions. Some of it is just tied to the difficulty of converting free users to paid users. Etc. It's not all their fault. But Mozilla made mistakes too.
We can debate web rendering engines until we're blue in the face--the people who feel strongly about this will never give it up--but Mozilla's too small and too fragile to be one of three web rendering engines. My stance on this has never changed: This is the wrong place to innovate, it's where we need one standard, and that standard is Chromium. This raises all kinds of alarms about giving control of the web to one company, etc. I get it. But I don't care and don't see the issues. Apple can afford to fight on this point, but they're not innovating there either. I'm sure all the work they do is just to ensure that Safari renders the web correctly. Which means, like Chromium. That battle is over.
But it's not, right? As long as...