This is largely in anticipation of the devastating drop in revenue if Google can no longer pay them to be the default search engine. That's where they get 86% of their revenue [0].
[0] https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-poten...
[0] https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-poten...
We are talking about the literal window to the digital world, with potentially billions of users. Its a dysfunctional world that cant sort out funding for such a super-critical software piece and has let adtech have this charade and fig leaf of "browser competition" going on for so long.
A chromium based solution would double down on the monoculture. If anything now is the time to envision what a users-first browser should be like, not what adtech wants it to be. From wasm to fediverse and (dare I say) AI, its a good time to snap out of the stagnation.
It's unfortunate since Firefox is key to an open internet but at some point, they lost their true way and now it's going to take a lot of effort to regain it.
Was it ever about party? I thought it was more about executives who donated to bigoted causes.
Was. A long time ago. Now it is only an extension of Google ("safe" browsing) used by enthousiasts (who do not want to hear that Mozilla is now an advertising company).
Likely not. If the fork would need to fight against any privacy-threatning actions, it will start to be quite different. It can be cheaper to maintain your own browser than massive, very diversed fork. And Google would get all power over web standards. You would need to fight them too if there is something controversial, and the code is getting different, again.
That's an extraordinary claim.
If they would fork Chromium, they likely want to redo the GUI. This is the easy part and that does not likely need upstream updates. That's what most forks do, and that is why they are maintainable.
However, if you start changing core, extension interface e.g., and if these browsers starts go different ways due to conflicts of interests, then the challenges and extra work start appearing.
Especially because of the security updates. Not all of them are CVEs, you need to look every possible bug fix if that introduced an additional issue if you used that part of the code differently. That must happen almost immediately as it is merged/notified in the upstream, or you might give too much time for someone to exploit it. The more different your fork is, the more challenging it is to get any update from the upstream. What if the upstream makes breaking internal API changes and you must adapt it, before you can merge new things. What if new CVEs are discovered after this API change that you are already lacking, and the fixed code goes for the code that has this API change? And so on.. and you can't stop merging upstream because reported bugs are much easier to exploit than discovering new ones from the new code.
The above is all extra work. You still want to test your own code. Even if you had more bugs in your own browser code, you have better control them and the process is always faster.
Firefox is more or less a Chrome fork. /s
Or does the for-profit arm fund the non-profit?
[0] https://stateof.mozilla.org/
Based on the audit numbers I a bit puzzled about the reported amount of staff. Maybe I am reading it completely wrong
Do funds go from the Corporation to the Foundation exclusively, or is it ever bidirectional? Common knowledge is "If you donate to the Foundation, the Corporation will never see a penny of it for browser development."
Wow. Are they serious? that’s illegal?
> ruled that the tech giant has illegally maintained a monopoly through the billions of dollars in annual payments it makes to partners to secure the default search engine position on popular web browsers and mobile phones
It's still a stretch by the judge, and this article is a good hint that the ruling may be weak: https://itif.org/publications/2024/08/23/six-weak-spots-judg...