[Berniek]

Sort of... But Firefox is open source, so anyone can contribute. Mozilla accepted money from google to "just make google the default search engine". But they also accept contributions in programming (its open source after all) from google, Microsoft & others employees.

The google/Microsoft contributors whether working after hours or as part of their employment have some influence in the direction of Firefox.

That may be deliberate or benign (a really good direction by google, in a workers mind, will bias their thinking in other projects and visa versa)

That is one disadvantage of open source. A foundation can't avoid that unless you setup like Greenpeace and don't give the riff raff any real say.

Firefox users are "captured" by any adds on google search even though they may advertise chrome.

People that comment here are interested, most users of browsers ARE NOT. It is so much easier to use the default. Google knows this, Twitter knows this.

One of the more brilliant ideas in Firefox was containers, chrome could not implement them because of architectural constraints but rather than build on that beautiful idea, Firefox went in a slightly different direction that Chrome & Edge could follow and still protect their advertising revenue.

[bawolff]

Just because anyone "can" contribute doesn't mean every patch is accepted or that product decisions are delegated to corporations with competing products. Firefox still bears responsibility for its own product decisions, not to mention how firefox is marketed.

[Berniek]

absolutely correct, but Firefox takes notice of ideas. They can be influenced by what is proposed as fixes or contributions. "Everyone knows" that Firefox may break some websites, just ask google. Has anyone ever come across that pretty regularly? Firefox has become a follower rather than a leader and I think the influence of contributors has done that. It is no good for Firefox going in a direction that a good deal of their contributors wont go. The users be damned!