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Mozilla Say Google Search Deal Vital to Firefox's Survival (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 5 days ago by warmaster@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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[-] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 38 points 5 days ago

Well goodbye mozilla it wasn't great knowing you. Hopefully you are able to fuck over the devs and golden parachute your c-suite bastards one last time.

[-] brax@sh.itjust.works 22 points 5 days ago

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...

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 22 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

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

[-] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

The thing you describe is probably I2P and epsites.

[-] unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 days ago

Even worse - it looks like Google might be forced to sell Chrome to some AI company.

[-] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 13 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 13 points 5 days ago

and before that it was Netscape

[-] brax@sh.itjust.works 8 points 5 days ago

I thought Netscape turned into Mozilla, which was different from Firebird

[-] grue@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

Correct. Firefox was a rewrite separate from the old Netscape/Mozilla SeaMonkey codebase.

[-] swelter_spark@reddthat.com 2 points 4 days ago

There are already several forks that are fairly popular.

[-] unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] swelter_spark@reddthat.com 1 points 2 days ago

That's true of most of them, probably. I think Palemoon is independent enough to survive on its own. Some of the others might be able to move into that role, if they had to. If the entire line of browsers died out, I guess I'd go to something webkit-based.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 10 points 4 days ago

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.