this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Firefox will live on regardless of Mozilla's support. Since it's FOSS the community will keep it alive
Will it though? Seems like the kind of task that requires a huge amount of effort, way beyond the kind of capacity you get from casual contributions in peoples' spare time...might be difficult to maintain feature parity and implement new standards without a full time team on it.
couldnt you say the same about linux?
Linux is currently mostly made by big corpo, but they are held by community and Linus'es checks.
Unfortunetly for browsers most of the giants focused on Chromium, which Google has final say over. Also Linux is OS, where browser should be simple and websites should work even if some one API is not supported. In Chromium's world web"apps" are won't be compatible with anything non-Chromium. Any browser would be required to support 99+% of Chromium features or not work.
Linux is cheating by having every major tech company help develop the kernel
Sounds like we just gotta add Firefox to the kernel while Linus is on vacation.
firefox doesnt have any corporate friends besides mozilla?
Not many and none that I can think of with deep pockets (besides google). I think the corporate world has almost completely piled on Chrome.
True, but web designers already treat Firefox and its offshoots as an afterthought. Do you think without Mozilla it would get even worse?
the corporate world seems desperate to kill it. its chrome/edge or GTFO
In swear this mainly has to do with it's about:config being so much more robust and vast than chromium's //flags settings. The fact so many privacy related forks (Librewolf, Mullvad, Mull, Tor) are based off of firefox and not chromium (Ungoogled Chromium) should point to why these corporations are seething at it.
Google was/is keeping Firefox afloat via funding as the article points out. This is mainly due to the fact that Google didn't have a real competitor in the browser space for some time until Microsoft got Edge off the ground and finally killed Internet Explorer.
Personally I see Firefox as being the superior browser for privacy and customization. I also don't think it's going anywhere, but it's funding relying so heavily on one entity is an issue. If Google decides to pull it's funding of Firefox and no other major corporation steps in to provide the needed cash flow... well who knows, guess it'll be a chromium world after all.
Good corpos should made suffer ,the more they cope and seethe the better
They all want to FULLY control the end user.
The end result will be something like the DVD menus from the 90s and 00s. The difference is that it will have full access to all the data on your computer or device.
A huge portion of Firefox code is ancient. Never mind that the codebase is gigantic. Small FOSS projects fail to organize properly, I can't imagine maintaining Firefox without Mozilla would be a small feat.
People like this scare me.
I scare me too
I often can't tell if they are just saying stuff like that to cope or they are really that optimistic/naive. It's a similar mentality to people constantly giving benefit of the doubt to kickstarter / early access projects that have like a 1% chance of actually living up to the made promises.
Well if by some feat it dies, the only competitor to chromium would be WebKit and Goanna(A fork of Gecko)