US hardly makes anything. Ukraine desperately needs air defense missiles, perhaps they may get some next year. The same with munition, armored vehicles, jets...
Opera corporation had most of income from embedded devices. Presto engine (and something they had before) could run on low end CPU without MMU and floating point math, with a few megabytes of memory! Browser wss just a side gig for them.
My understanding is Thunderbird is self funded from donations.
> not unless you find a viable financial model
First reduce expenses by several magnitudes. There is no reason browser should need more than a github project, build QA servers, and 10 paid core developers. But you would need much better codebase for that!!!
As for income, donations come to mind. You can still sell default search, just not to google.
20 years ago browser companies had income from selling their rendering engine for embedded use. They also did consulting...
Someone should fork Firefox, strip all copyrighted stuff, and severe all ties to Mozilla. Worked great for Rust, Servo, Thunderbird and several other projects dumped by Mozilla.
But honestly Firefox has way too much technical debt. Starting new browser (Ladybird, webkit) seems like much better way to go! There are several independent browsers!