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by constantcrying
1044 days ago
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I do get that they aren't in a position where they have easy choices, but what they are currently doing is wrong. They need to be a much smaller and focused organization, which can generate funds from various sources and use them to do effective development. You don't need 200M to develop firefox. In their current position they exist to give Google some protection against anti-trust allegations. That is about the worst spot for their organization to be in. >As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time. You are right. Google likely knows that they can completly ignore them, so they can say whatever they want. |
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Based on what logic? It's 20+ million lines of code touching half if the "hard" problems of computer programming - graphics, fonts, encodings, localization, JIT engines, hardware acceleration, support for multiple architectures (including aforementioned JIT), support for multiple operating systems, massive parallelism, sandboxing, WASM support, hardware support abstractions like WebUSB and WebMIDI, etc, and a massive swamp of compatiblity hacks, and literally books worth of new standards they have to implement every year.
Much of which has to be as high performance as possible while simultaneously not being ludicrously insecure, because the threat environment is basically as hostile as it gets.
The fastest way to "become a lean organization" would be to just give up and become yet another Chromium clone. Barring that, they have a lot of software to maintain if they want a truly independent browser. A modern browser is comparable in effort to supporting an entire operating system, because that's what browsers kind of are nowadays.
About the only other option is to lay off all their staff in SF and Paris and other HCoL areas and relocate to Central and Eastern Europe.