Technology

Well it was 1200 people at Mozilla, not necessarily directly working on Firefox. They have multiple products and they still need HR and lawyers and all the other support roles any other company needs.

Because money.

A non-profit that begs for donations has become a money making machine netting their ceos over $10m in 3 years.

There are plenty of browsers. Dillo, NetSurf, surf, w3m, Lynx, Links, Via, Midori, Pale Moon although it's based on a fork of Gecko, Tunnel, qutebrowser. And there are even options for a search engine, although the only one worth considering that isn't just a layer on top of other search engines is Kagi which costs $10 a month, and I wouldn't exactly call it minimalist.

The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades and are almost unchangeable, without sacrificing basic web functionality and just making it a worse experience than it needs to be at least. The fact is that practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, on top of HTML and CSS which take a lot more resources to utilize/display than it looks, meaning 3 interpreters constantly running that must be sandboxed to each tab you have open with a lot of overhead to manage security.

In an ideal world we'd all just be using provably-safe high-performance compiled WASM-but-stronger (from functional languages or more likely Rust or something less boiler-platey but similar), without having such a complex and fucked dependency situation*, where we wouldn't need to sandbox interpreted languages and slaughter performance. Of course, in an ideal world, we also wouldn't have to be concerned about aggressive tracking, ads, clickbait, SEO abuse, scams, or even malware, so there's not much use in imagining a reality where we actually have quality web browsing.

The actual answer to using the web without the fucked-ness of browsers is to not use a web browser at all for sites you use frequently. Use stuff like this instead.

*seriously, you can write the most basic website with JavaScript and it'll probably rely on tens of thousands of expressions of code which realistically should just be expressable in like a small page or two, you do webdev and you'll probably accidentally be implicitly committing a sacrifice to some Aztec God in order to check if a number is even or odd

Also just imagine if all of web dev was just ML/Scala/Rust/Swift/Erlang without compiling to JavaScript 🤤 That is the definition of a perfect universe

Unfortunately none. Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks, and not something a hobby programmer can whack out in a few weeks. Thats the reason why even Microsoft abandoned their own rendering engine, because things did always look and work different in IE.