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

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douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨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.

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