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,
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
There are already several forks that are fairly popular.
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.
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.
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
A lot? All of them.