I just saw a post complaining about the Mozilla layoffs.
I wanted to point out that the vast majority of their income (over 85% in 2022) is from having Google as the default search engine - Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
Expect things to get worse.
Please don’t assume it was just a cruel choice.
Honestly I’ve been saying for some time that Mozilla’s resources would be much better spent making Firefox a soft fork of Chromium. Primarily: use the Blink browser engine and V8 JS engine, with only the changes to those that they deem absolutely necessary, and maintain a privacy-forward Chromium-based browser. Maybe try and enlist the help of Brave, Vivaldi, and other browsers that are currently Chromium but which prefer more privacy than Google offers.
It’s not zero effort, and especially as Google continues to develop Chromium with assumptions like the removal of Manifest V2 it might take some effort to maintain, but it cannot possibly be as much effort as maintaining an entire browser.
No no nonononono. The moment you do that you become at the mercy if whatever they choose to do, including changes that will sabotage you. There are examples out there such as Novell, who should have made a Linux-based client OS for the Netware architecture. For the longest time prior to a brief period where they had their server GUI (sloppy, inefficient and barely completed as it was) that you literally could not do any GUI-based configurations without a Windows client. How is that not begging for the competition to screw you every chance they get?
Firefox stands on its own and that’s how it needs to be.
They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works. If it changes in a way that breaks things for you, don’t pull that change. At that point, if the change is drastic enough to require it, you can turn that soft fork into a hard fork and hope that Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. join you; something that would significantly hamper Google’s ability to maintain their dominance of the browser engine market. That’s a choice that they simply don’t have today when being based on Firefox and Gecko means using an inferior browser platform.
Yyyyeeeah, all ideally. Things don’t always go ideally. Something will always happen. That’s the truth no matter what, and I’d think it’s best to eliminate externals as much as possible. That’s my position. No actual right or wrong here.
The point is that with open source you can effectively leech off of Google for now, while still retaining the flexibility to nope out and do your own thing at any point you decide.
Considering just how severely behind they are already (as I mentioned in my other comment, they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards or operating system features), I see anything they can do to reduce how much they need to maintain independently as a good thing. In an ideal world where they had all the funding and development power they could want I might say sticking with the completely independent Firefox would be great. But that just isn’t where they’re at today.