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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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[-] 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 4 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.