Both developers have been actively hostile to DEI initiatives, and at least on the case of DHH, also coddling with ultranationalism viewpoints.

On Kling: hyperborea.org/reviews/softwar…

On DHH: tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-c…

The standard point is most around how big that 'partly' is, and how attached a project can become to that part. If a project has, for easy math, a $10M bankroll and $5M comes from, say, Goog or MS, the project can face a moment where the corporation comes and says, 'we don't like that you've implemented this feature that interferes with our control of users. We're pulling our funding unless you remove it.' (more realistically, 'we see you have allocated some dev time to this feature request we don't like. Cancel it before the public can demand it.') If that happens, you have to have a project lead with some real rectitude to say, 'okay,' and just cut their budget in half. The more diversely sourced a FOSS project's funding is, the harder it is to control, and vice versa.

"Partly funded by"?

Google contributed roughly 83% of Mozilla's income from 2020-2023, and 89% of overall income since 2005.

https://windscribe.com/blog/windscribe-expose-mozilla/

Personally, I think if the engine was closed source, then we didn't in fact "had that". Maybe Microsoft had it, not us.

What makes things like chromium, firefox and webkit actual ecosystems is that they at least have an open source basis. Edge isn't an ecosystem, it's a black box. We don't even know whether it's true or not that it was its own thing or just they sneakily used bits and pieces of chromium from the start anyway.

User Agent checks is the easiest thing to overcome. Had edge's engine been open source we would have had spins of it resolving the issue within hours. There are many examples of "random developers" succeeding where big companies tied by business strategies (I bet they had business reasons to keep a distinctive user agent) didn't, to the point that the web runs on servers using FOSS software.

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

For now. Google probably isn't too concerned since they have a more than 70% market share, and nearly 90% if you count all Chromium-based browsers. Firefox has managed to do what Google wants, which is "exist" and "not meaningfully compete with Chrome". If that changes, Google might lean on them harder.

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

It doesn't say anything about that at all. Just because you're paying for something doesn't mean they have to do it your way. It is at most something to keep an eye on.

Google pays them for two reasons. To be the default search engine giving them substantial marketing and ad space, and to keep them floating and independent to lessen their probable status as a monopoly.

In fact, in the recent antitrust ruling, Google is precluded from even making exclusive deals with them.

Its sponsorship only of an open source browser, with no telemetry, advertising, crypto, etc, etc built in.

Sponsors get listed as sponsors, thats it.

It is being rewritten using swift

You go to the website and the images promoting the browser are using apple. The project is being developed only for macOS and linux. They decided to change the programming language to swift.

To many signs that the devs are appleheads and I get the feeling that the main target is apple, linux second and windows completely out of the box (states by devs themselves). Myself personally, not a fan on apple, I don't have that kind of money to buy hardware and I don't see any advantages on doing so.