Comment on Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

Eternal192@anarchist.nexus ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I hope you know that Waterfox and LibreWolf have their fate tied to Firefox, right?

  These aren’t hard forks. They consume the engineering efforts of Firefox itself in order to stay relevant. They aren’t developing their own solutions to web standards and CVE patches, except in extreme circumstances.

  If Mozilla loses funding for their engineering organization, which is the grand majority of their entire budget, Firefox stops keeping up to date with web standards and security patches and rapidly falls behind. Leaving just Chrome as the only option, or Safari, but I know none of us want to choose Safari.

  All the soft forks go with it.

  ---

  Now, if all the soft forks abandoned their own projects in order to pool their efforts together to maintain a single fork in this scenario, then they might make some success in staving off irrelevancy, which, instead of becoming irrelevant in the course of a couple of years, might take half a decade instead. Which does leave enough time to cobble together enough contributors and a large enough project to keep it afloat.

  But I highly doubt that all these various forks will pool their engineering efforts into a single project, at least not immediately and at least not willingly.

  source

  • XLE@piefed.social ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Mozilla’s funding is provided by Google. It’s not going to dry up while Google needs to maintain the appearance of a non-monopoly.

    source

    • LucidNightmare@anarchist.nexus ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Why would that be safe to assume? As far as I can see, the US admin wouldn’t bat an eye if Google had a monopoly on the internet standards.

      Just going off a quick glance here I can see the latest Fox corpos buying Roku. There was the Bytedance merger too.

      I’m not trying to argue with you, but you seems to have high hopes, and I would like to have some hope myself if you can explain your reasons to me?

      source

      • XLE@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Companies have a long history of funding their competitors to avoid looking like monopolies. Microsoft did it for Apple. And while the Trump administration has been allowing more mergers than ever before, two competitors in a single space collapsing into one would be very unprecedented.

        But even in a scenario worse than if Google stops contributing to Mozilla, they’ll have three years worth of stored money to draw upon

        source
  • wyldrstallyns@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    On the off-chance you have some experience with of, what’s your take on Vivaldi, currently?

    source

    • jimmy90@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      not as great as Brave but stilla good browser

      source

      • Eternal192@anarchist.nexus ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        That is one of the worst alternatives you could have given, might as well say use Chrome, it’s super safe!

        source