Google's search deal with Mozilla is such a sizeable portion of its overall income that without it, Firefox would struggle to compete - or even survive,
  • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4211·
    16 hours 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
      20·
      15 hours 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
        91·
        7 hours 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.

        • brax@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          3 hours ago

          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

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
          3·
          7 hours 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.

      • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
        10·
        12 hours 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.