There desperately needs to be a fork of Firefox that sheds the terrible organisation that is Mozilla. They have destroyed a great product and paid themselves handsomely to do so. Technically incompetent, but full of cunning.
Do we need a large corporation building our roads, pumping our water, etc?
Sure, the work on these is sometimes done by corporations, but the they are (ideally) publicly owned and and any for-profit entity is (ideally) accountable to the public.
I think we need the same for our core internet infrastructure, including browsers. The Mozilla foundation could have been that but they don't seem to be interested in funding and developing the browser in a publicly-accountable way.
On the other hand, browser are only so complex because other giant corporations (or one in particular) push for them to be so complex. This should also be fixed via anti-trust enforcement.
Then finally, I think you also overstate what it takes to maintain a browser. Especially when you keep the scope reasonable (focus on web pages, don't chase the never ending torrent of features added for web apps) then even creating one from scratch is doable for a relatively small team: https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
> These are enormously complex pieces of software.
Then the "internet" should be rewritten. If the browser is now on such a complexity level that making a new browser is "impossible" than it's safe to declare the internet as dead.
