Is It Worth Killing Mozilla to Shave Off Less Than 1% From Google’s Market Share? - Open Web Advocacy
Is It Worth Killing Mozilla to Shave Off Less Than 1% From Google’s Market Share? - Open Web Advocacy
cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/25446027
only looks at title
doesnt it seem like a large portion of problems today are caused by monopolies/bad companies and having some competition would fix it? so killing mozilla doesnt sound good to me
They won't. Firefox is all that stands in front of Google to avoid being called a monopoly. It's why they pay for Firefox. They'd be broken up in multiple countries for being a monopoly. This is just their easy way to say "see, look, we're totally not"
If Mozilla's programs keep being more privacy friendly than Googles, then no.
If the enshitification continues, yes.
But something is bound to take Mozillas place, if they get worse, and that might be the best scenario.
But something is bound to take Mozillas place
how can you be so sure?
Can't be sure of course. But there are at least some forks of FF that devs of FF could keep doing work on if Mozilla just stopped FF. I have been daily driving Zen-browser for at least six or eight months. It is very good as far as FF forks go, and if folks that do the work for the core browser things that aren't UI/UX were to jump-in. It could be able to keep moving forward as far as standards and security updates are concerned.
The only major issue (aside from the above) would be setting up an extension "store" since Zen does just point to FF's "store." Which is an issue for basically all the Chromium-based forks that aren't Edge and Opera to my knowledge. I hate that those forks still lose things like uBO even if they still support it instead of the V3 stuff.
Those are very much not trivial things and are honestly what would kill all of FF and the forks if not able to happen. Funding would be the first thing needed for devs to keep going if their main income is from their work for Mozilla. It would be at least easier than completely starting from zero.
Ladybird is quickly shaping up.
See Brodie's interview of Andreas Kling, the lead developer of the Ladybird Browser: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IXdBndEipps
There are several clips of the interview on his channel if you don't have time to watch a 2 hour interview.
As for something taking place of the Mozilla Foundation itself, their activism in influencing web standards isn't really enough anymore anyways. They are silent about fingerprinting, which their main source of funding engages in openly to track users across devices.
Mozilla is in a tight spot where they want to separate themselves from Google's funding, but to do that they need to make money.
They have a user base that is very difficult to monetize.
Which means the user base which cares about privacy has put themselves in a position where they will now lose privacy in order for the tools they use to continue existing.
It's a shitty situation all around.
Mozilla has plenty of money but they are spending it on weird side projects.Then they pretend they don't have enough money and add need to start selling user data to make up for it.
