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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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I feel like of a group of dedicated Firefox engineers should fork the source code and start their own company.
If they would focus on adding really useful features at a rapid pace, people would be willing to pay for it.
Similiar to Kagi, if you make a really good software, you will get a group of dedicated people to support you.
Just a tech company without these super expensive CEOs that are not needed in a smaller company.
Aren't there already a bunch of forks of Firefox already? How will one more help anything?
There is a difference between forks made by other people to tweak a project/do something specific for it, and the base project's dev team moving away from whatever it became.
I'm usually not in favor of such fork because the reason for moving away is sometime dubious; some project just rename themselves to "start fresh and drop legacy compatibility issue". But in the case of Firefox, Mozilla is the thing holding back features while adding bloat. Since it can't change to a saner structure with more long-term sustainability plans, devs/engineers could move into a fork to not be bound to that anymore.
Of course it's not that easy; for all the bad Mozilla (foundation or other, I don't care much that they are two entities at this point since one is owned by the other) is doing to the actual software, they do provide salaries. At least, for now.
Servo is a fork of a Mozilla research project, it's moved to the Linux foundation.
They are rebuilding a web engine built for the internet today, rather than adapting the older web engines of yesterday. Mozilla already uses some of their components in Firefox.
But they are only building a web engine, for other people to turn into browsers, we views, electron alternatives etc.
Lol. Firefox cost of development is $500 milions a year. Stop bs. No one can develop a browser anymore, even Microsoft. And the salary of CEO is not the problem.
Cost of development was 221 mio in 2022
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
Same magnitude. We can not fork firefox with serious support
Yeah, I guess your point stands. But also, it's 221 mio for Mozilla as a whole. Firefox might again be a fraction of this. While e.g. the Linux foundation has a lower budget, with all the contributed work hours of volunteers / corporations, a fork of Firefox is more realistic than the 500 mio make it out to be.
It is not the same software. A lot of drivers are developed externally for Linux. You can not do that with Firefox. Firefox is the main project of Mozilla
I don't think your idea is bad but remember that the reason that small companies (like the one that makes arc) can maintain a browser is that they're using chromium, and maintaining a browser engine is the hard part