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Mozilla CEO quits, org pivots, but what about Firefox?
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
KHTML was the basis of WebKit and then Blink/Chromium, so the community did make something. It was just overtaken by the corporate projects, for those same reasons you mention.
those days the web was way simpler than it is now. complexity has doomed every web engine not maintained by a mega corp (and some that were, Microsoft killed their own).