Well, the browser status quo. I guess they want their own Chrome.

Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization, so there cant be a company who comes, donates 20million and then tries to gain control of them through money

Yes, it is still independent. Cloudflare is just one of the three Platinum sponsors. Other two are Shopify and FUTO. Proton is also a sponsor, but in Gold tier, iirc.

I think It's on their charter that no matter how much corporate money they'll get they'll never accept any outside influence just the same. The donators are amply warned to not expect anything other than development as usual or faster.

they stated on their website this project will remain independet and that donators don´t have a say in how this is being developed

You do know the difference of "built by" and "partly funded by", right?

What exactly is your problem by Mozilla/Firefox being partly funded by Google?

Ironically, we already had that - Microsoft's first version of Edge was using their own engine. On release, it had the highest W3C compatibility score.

Google started shitting on it (including things like serving clear HTML version of Gmail because "the browser is outdated" if it detected the Edge user agent) and massive self-delusion campaigns of "Edge is just Internet Explorer" eventually killed the thing and forced MS to switch to Chromium.

I have Ladybird installed and I check it out every now and then, but I honestly doubt that a bunch of random developers will succeed where Microsoft failed. Unless Cloudflare somehow chips in and forces Google's hand into compatibility, but I don't know if even they are big enough to do that.

Firefox relies on Google for its funding, so any browser based on Gecko relies on Google

Google introduced Extension manifest v3 to effectively to kill/handicap AdBlock extensions.

Mozilla, though getting funding from Google to make google its default search engine, officially decided to keep supporting Manifest v2.

Adblockers are direct challenge to Alphabet’s ad revenue which is still their biggest cash cow.

That speaks a valume about how much control google has on Mozilla decision making process.

I just wanna say that we have Webkit. After Google moved over to Blink Webkit has not stopped development.. and it even has multiple big names behind it (like Apple, but also Valve partnered with WebkitGtk maintainers, and many devices like Amazon's Kindle are heavily invested on it) so it's not gonna go away anytime soon. Specially with Safari being the second most used browser on the web, right after chrome and several times more users than Firefox.

On Linux we have some browsers making use of Webkit (like Epiphany, Gnome's default browser) that are thus independent from Google or even Mozilla. I'm not sure if there's any browser like that for Windows though.

There's also Netsurf, they also have their own rendering libraries, but development for it is super slow, I've been following them for a couple decades and they still haven't got a stable javascript engine, so it only works for the most basic of websites. The plus side is that it's very light on resources, though.

Here's one theory: https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html