I do wonder why billion dollar companies (or in the case of NASA, an organization that AFAIK is still funded directly by the government) can afford to do this.

I’d also argue that extremely rigorous testing is a bit more important in terms of life-or-death scenarios for the companies that you mentioned, rather than Mozilla - but hey, that could just be me.

I mean come on, your comparison might work for a company that can hold a candle to the ones you mentioned (ie, Google or Apple) but how large do you think Mozilla (who still has to take handouts from Google essentially) is? Even then, I’d still say it’s probably a bad comparison given my second point.

Yeah, embedded systems for military applications is exactly the same as consumer software. You’re right.