Mozilla could have gone to OEMs like Dell and said "We'll pay you to pre-install Firefox" but they didn't, Google did. I wonder if that would have cost more or less than the yearly bonuses the CEO takes?
Has any non-ad driven piece of software ever used this inorganic growth hack? Admittedly, it has been a long long time since I've suffered using an OS burdened with this kind of malady, but it was definitely where I learned about how apps are not as "free" as one might be led to believe. It was these types of apps and the damn browser toolbar installs that were dark-UI/hidden installed when installing a completely different app.
I don't know who has or has not used that approach, but if you're going to say "Chrome is popular because it did these things" I'm going to wonder why Mozilla didn't do those things. I remember the first time I downloaded Chrome was because I got some item in Runescape for doing that. Why didn't Mozilla do that?
Mozilla has hundreds of millions of dollars at minimum, very likely billions. It's absurd that they're failing so miserably, and it's obscene that their CEO has taken increasingly large 8 figure bonuses while the company has floundered under her leadership.