There is a meme that Google financially supports Firefox development as some soft of strategy whereby having an "alternative" to Chrome gives Google some sort of "protection"

This does not make any sense and there is zero evidence to support it

Firefox's value to Google could be as a source for browser development. As part of the agreement between Google and Mozilla, perhaps Google gets more than just search traffic from Firefox, perhaps it also gets collaboration with Mozilla on software development. There is a history of such collaboration. Google CEO did not want competition from Mozilla on a browser. Chrome was originally written by ex-Mozilla developers using components of Firefox^1

1.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121018180015/https://www.compu...

https://web.archive.org/web/20200805000248/https://blogs.wsj...