Completely removing AI, chopping AI to pieces, burning the pieces, and pissing on the ashes counts as direction... right?

keep the browser configurable

Link?

Anyway, my answer is, it already happened and it failed. The phone. They made a Mozilla phone. It ran Linux. It didn't go anywhere. (I think it ran some flavour of Ubuntu?)

Insults get the point across, too, though.

To give up on AI and focus on making a good browser that just does what it's supposed to.

It's a bit niche, and I'm probably one of the few people who daily drove them when they were a thing, but bring back Firefox OS phones - they were a bit ahead of their time, but now that every app is a browser window anyway it'd probably be fine, and people are craving a mobile OS alternative to Android and iOS.

Sure, I'd personally prefer something a bit more powerful, so maybe a joint project between Mozilla, and a linux phone distro like PostmarketOS would be cool. Or (since I'm already in fantasy land) depending on hardware, considering Valve's work on ARM for the Steam Frame, maybe a partnership with them.

Granted, it's been close to a decade since I daily drove FirefoxOS, there's always a chance I'm remembering things as better than they were. I should dig my old FirefoxOS Phones out and do a bit of a retrospective look at them.