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by polote 1381 days ago
The current Mozilla might disappear but if it brings back the old Mozilla it can only be a good news
2 comments

Yeah it seems like the right kind of attrition. I would definitely pay patreon-wise for Firefox.
Unfortunately you would be in the vast minority. I’m not sure there’d be enough individuals willing to do it to keep up with chrome
A big part of the reason browsers are so expensive to build and maintain is because Google keeps expanding the set of features browsers are expected to implement (and Mozilla offers no meaningful resistance to this.) Google creates a problem so large that only Google has the funds to solve it.
Right kind of attrition? Execs would fire every dev rather than themselves take a pay cut. The fact that this would actually kill the project is beyond them because they'd stay in office a little longer.
Sadly, old Mozilla won't come back even if we get rid of the current one. Building web infrastructures is now a completely different story than 20 years ago. You're not going to build a new functional web browser from scratch without hundreds of millions of bucks every year.
> You're not going to build a new functional web browser

Then thank god that Firefox is FOSS, so whoever picks it up won't have to. The abolition of Mozilla would mean that more thoughtful forks won't have to compete with upstream for either cash or attention. Although I'd bet $1000 that if Mozilla died, they'd give Firefox and its trademarks to the Apache Foundation Openoffice-style to protect Chrome even after the company's last breath.