Google's search deal with Mozilla is such a sizeable portion of its overall income that without it, Firefox would struggle to compete - or even survive,
Maybe, but what are the odds of a fork taking off? It was started under the codename “Phoenix” and went by “Firebird” for some time before becoming “Firefox”.
Maybe it’s time for a fork to rise from the ashes and take off…
I’m not that pessimistic, development for Ladybird seems to be going well and those crazy people are building it from scratch rather than basing it on Chromium or Firefox. There’s also Servo. When Mozilla dies the forks will hang on for a while then we’ll have alternatives.
This is going to probably sound like a stupid idea, but I mean this earnestly:
Can we just make Internet 2? Just a new underlying protocol with less restrictive browser requirements, sure you might need to use Chrome to log in to your bank, but we could just host everything else on the fedinet. Just like back in the old days, webrings hosted on closet servers and rented racks.
Google didn’t build the internet so why do they have so much clout about how it’s run? We can just start over again with self hosting. This time we even have all the knowledge we gained from already doing it the first time. I’m picturing an entire second layer of internet unlinked with the first one. Kind of like onion sites I guess, the more I think about this the more I’m realizing that the tor network is probably exactly what I’m talking about. Just that, but instead of hosting pirated content or weird porn or bitcoin assassins it’s just a low stakes noncorporate internet protocol. You probably won’t want to do a lot of transactions on it, but social media or personal websites or video hosting would probably be fine.
The fork that takes off will be the one where the Firefox devs move to. Which isn’t predictable. We could make our own foundation, without the blackjack and hookers (cause based on how mozilla was doing things it sure seems like all they did), and make it more as a means for the devs to get paid for their work.
What does it matter? They all rely on Mozilla to do the hard work - maintenance and keeping up with web standards, and then just slap a couple of features and customizations on top of it. If Mozilla dies the current forks are dead in the water.
The problem isn’t the existence of forks, it’s rather how many developers are behind them. Mozilla has around 750 employees, so I’d guess maybe around 500 full-time devs work on Firefox. Tor Browser and such have significantly fewer contributors, who only do this stuff in their free time.
Maybe, but what are the odds of a fork taking off? It was started under the codename “Phoenix” and went by “Firebird” for some time before becoming “Firefox”.
Maybe it’s time for a fork to rise from the ashes and take off…
Any fork will die a slow and painful death of it can’t get the necessary funding for project management and maintainer salaries.
It will also dwindle, hard, towards irrelevancy.
In world where the only viable browser is one owned and operated by Google.
Even worse - it looks like Google might be forced to sell Chrome to some AI company.
I’m not that pessimistic, development for Ladybird seems to be going well and those crazy people are building it from scratch rather than basing it on Chromium or Firefox. There’s also Servo. When Mozilla dies the forks will hang on for a while then we’ll have alternatives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2YGzaaDXgQ
This is going to probably sound like a stupid idea, but I mean this earnestly:
Can we just make Internet 2? Just a new underlying protocol with less restrictive browser requirements, sure you might need to use Chrome to log in to your bank, but we could just host everything else on the fedinet. Just like back in the old days, webrings hosted on closet servers and rented racks.
Google didn’t build the internet so why do they have so much clout about how it’s run? We can just start over again with self hosting. This time we even have all the knowledge we gained from already doing it the first time. I’m picturing an entire second layer of internet unlinked with the first one. Kind of like onion sites I guess, the more I think about this the more I’m realizing that the tor network is probably exactly what I’m talking about. Just that, but instead of hosting pirated content or weird porn or bitcoin assassins it’s just a low stakes noncorporate internet protocol. You probably won’t want to do a lot of transactions on it, but social media or personal websites or video hosting would probably be fine.
The thing you describe is probably I2P and epsites.
The fork that takes off will be the one where the Firefox devs move to. Which isn’t predictable. We could make our own foundation, without the blackjack and hookers (cause based on how mozilla was doing things it sure seems like all they did), and make it more as a means for the devs to get paid for their work.
and before that it was Netscape
I thought Netscape turned into Mozilla, which was different from Firebird
Correct. Firefox was a rewrite separate from the old Netscape/Mozilla SeaMonkey codebase.
There are already several forks that are fairly popular.
What does it matter? They all rely on Mozilla to do the hard work - maintenance and keeping up with web standards, and then just slap a couple of features and customizations on top of it. If Mozilla dies the current forks are dead in the water.
The problem isn’t the existence of forks, it’s rather how many developers are behind them. Mozilla has around 750 employees, so I’d guess maybe around 500 full-time devs work on Firefox. Tor Browser and such have significantly fewer contributors, who only do this stuff in their free time.
Yup. I’ve been using Floorp for a few months now. But I think a lot of these forks rely on Mozilla for the heavy lifting
A lot? All of them.