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 6 days ago (4 children)

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 23 points 5 days ago (3 children)

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 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 20 minutes ago* (last edited 16 minutes ago)

I'm familiar with them.

These are projects sitting years, maybe even a decade, away from maturity. IF web standards and capabilities don't change at all over the next 5-10 years.

Hopefully that puts this into perspective. These are really cool projects, but without a massive influx of engineering effort and organization, they will likely be perpetually, hopelessly, behind the standard rate of change required of browsers. Nevermind meeting the current standards of performance, security, observability, ecosystem, user and developer experience.

It's always good to check in on these projects yearly, see how it's going, see if they are accelerating or slowing down. Eventually one of them will take off, and potentially leech resources from other similar projects.

Though, the nature of FOSS is that 1000 people will work on 200 different projects all trying to do the same thing, instead of combining and organizing efforts to go after the same unified goal.

This isn't really a statement of fault but rather a statement of reality. Without dedicated full-time organization, this is usually how scattered resources solve problems. Which is a core problem here in that dedicated organization to rapidly grow the engineering effort for a particular project usually requires funding and full-time employees. To both market it to engineers as an interesting project, mature documentation and DevX, mature the onboarding experience for devs, and to handle the organizational aspects of distributing said work.

[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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 4 days ago

The thing you describe is probably I2P and epsites.

[–] unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 days ago

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

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 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 6 days ago (1 children)

and before that it was Netscape

[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] grue@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

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

[–] swelter_spark@reddthat.com 2 points 5 days ago (3 children)

There are already several forks that are fairly popular.

[–] unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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 3 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 5 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.

[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yup. I've been using Floorp for a few months now. But I think a lot of these forks rely on Mozilla for the heavy lifting

[–] unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 4 days ago

A lot? All of them.