I believe an open source ranking algorithm is antithetical to good search, sadly. It hands spammers a recipe for how to push past legitimate sites to dominate the search results.

This is a strange concept to me.

When companies add additional features to a product I use, I generally want to be notified about them so that I can make an informed decision about whether I want them enabled or disabled.

What do you mean by "locked to Mozilla's AI"? Mozilla doesn't host an AI chat bot to my knowledge.

Torbrowser is a fork of Firefox, not a user. I'm not going to bother looking this up because pigs aren't flying yet, so I'll just state it as fact: the torbrowser fork does not include any of Firefox's AI code or functionality.

Firefox development is funded almost entirely out of Google's massive donations to Mozilla. For Google, it's no more than a regulatory hedge - something they can point at and say that Chromium and Webkit are not a duopoly. But the flip side is that if Firefox were to ever become a real threat, Google pulls funding and Firefox is toast.

So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is bikeshedding.