The mass won’t even consider being part of a paid membership of a cooperative that’s only purpose is a web browser. That would be the way to drive them even more into Chrome or Safari.
If there was legal ownership that would be different. But it's open source so cooperative ownership doesn't add much. It's already there for everyone to use and modify as they like
Yeah, I remember how the "community" reacted when they made that homophobic asshole quit. They still won't shut the fuck up about it, about how mozilla cares more about wokeness than the browser whenever there's a girls' coding initiative or the like. I don't want those assholes having a say in anything.
I don't see much benefit of a fork being a member coop, since the product is already free. I could potentially see a worker coop - if this fork was intended to make a profit, and the people working on it are then incentivized to improve the product because they'll personally benefit, then maybe we'd see more movement and innovation.
The fork is to preserve the core browser experience and provide security updates. If you hate AI jank bloating software, your best options for a browser is Chrome suffering. Certainly, you can refuse updates on Firefox going forward if they commit to this path, but you’re a single missing patch away from being an easier target for bad actors to exploit your security vulnerabilities