Comment on Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks agoI believe the Firefox development organization could be a lot leaner, and not all of the work has to be directly salaried. There are plenty of huge open source projects that are progressing fine without being run by a single for-profit company. E.g. the Apache ecosystem, the Linux foundation projects, FreeBSD, etc.
I think that if that was feasible a successful protect would exist already to develop . it is not like people does not want it to exist. sure, there are tons of projects making variations of existing browsers but none of them do much besides minor tweaks.
From the top of my head Servo is the closest one and it has a big head start since mozilla developed originally. and that is just an engine, not a full browser.
I think such projects don’t exist precisely because Mozilla is still developing it. If Mozilla abandons Firefox then someone else will take up the torch.
saigot@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
A huge chunk of FreeBSD and Linux development is done by salaried workers who want specific functionality. Microsoft is the biggest contributor to the Linux kernel for instance. I don’t think there is much apetite for that in web browsers. Linux is an industry leader in the server space, adding features to it that complement whatever you make for profit is a good move. Firefox is unfortunately barely relavent in the browser space, if your product relies on Firefox exclusive features it isn’t going to go well for you.