The current spend on Firefox development is only about $290 million per year, not the $1.5bn you're talking about...

But at the end of the day, it's not the amount of money that matters, it's the goals of the people running it.

If you sell it on Steam or the Mac App Store we’re talking about a minimum of 30% gone off top.

Marketing costs money. Taxes, etc. Not everyone is going to pay the full 150$. Various discount programs would probably exist.

Anyway, even if my numbers are off not enough people will pay for a browser for this to be a viable business.

If you disagree you can start today and I’ll gladly subscribe. Not a fork, no build a new browser from scratch with feature parity to chrome

> Not a fork,

I guess you know you're wrong because why else would you need this bizarre requirement?

Because otherwise you can git clone Firefox , change it's name and call it a new browser.

I guess if we really get technical we could say you can fork, but need to independently implement updates going forward.

> you can fork

Progress!

> but need to independently implement updates going forward.

That's not needed either? But since you've provided no rationale, it's hard to point out where the mistake lies. What's wrong with using known code updates as long as you remove the anti-user parts?

Because you have no control over the future of the project. If Firefox or Chrome starts going down a route where they deprecate features you need you probably won't have the expertise to keep them going.

Anyway modern browsers are too hard to build profitably I guess without anti-consumer weirdness. Might have to switch to a cli RSS reader...

> it's not the amount of money that matters

I think that matters quite a bit. Otherwise, if you've got a spare $1,000, build us a browser. Maybe vibe code it?