as a developer of a firefox fork: currently, no, i do not think this could happen, because there’s still simply not enough of a justification to imo.
in spite of mozilla’s incompetent management and poor decisions, the people working there and working on gecko/firefox are still good, and they do a great job of working with forks/other projects. personally, i’ve had overwhelmingly positive experiences with mozilla folks, and i feel like they’ve gone above and beyond to support and work with us. it’s not just us too, they also maintain a very good relationship with the tor project, as well as others.
i think for the path you describe to unfold, there would need to be some kind of *major* event; mozilla would need to violate their values on a scale that is unjustifiable and impossible to ignore, and/or they would need to stop having positive relationships with forks and other projects like they currently do. without that, i struggle to see there being enough of a motivation/push for organizations/forks to come together to hard-fork and continue development of firefox/gecko independently of mozilla.
assuming we did all come together and decide to fork firefox, there’s of course the question of where we would get the time/resources to maintain it - i’m sure you’re already aware of the significant amount of time/resources/energy/work that would be needed to maintain a browser engine. so this is another reason why there would need to be something *significant* to trigger this, as it’d need to be large enough to justify the cost of the resources that would need to be invested in continuing gecko development independently.
so yeah, i think your path could eventually be viable, and if things really get worse than it may eventually be necessary - but i think a *lot* would need to happen for it, and i struggle to see it happening any time in the near future.
