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by SushiHippie 1048 days ago
> In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop – KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions – would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop.

Is it really the best solution to create a fork?

Why not invest in people to directly work on Firefox?

The author even mentions a few paragraphs before that sentence that maintaining a browser is hard:

> The problem here is that making a capable browser is actually incredibly hard, as the browser has become a hugely capable platform all of its own. Undertaking the mammoth task of building a browser from scratch is not something a lot of people are interested in [...]

And who guarantees that the fork will further exist without weird funding?

EDIT: sorry, after reading my comment again, I think it sounds a bit snarky. English is not my native language, and I don't know how to phrase these questions better, so they don't sound that way.

6 comments

Mozilla has boatloads of money, but they don't seem keen on increasing investing in FF- if anything, cutting servo seemed quite the opposite.

To me, Mozilla is like the Wikimedia foundation- they take in a lot of money, but it seems like very little actually goes to the projects people think of when they hear the name.

Maybe that isn't a bad thing- surely there are worthy projects they could be investing in, in addition to FF or Wikipedia - but supporting them isn't as simple as offering more bodies in seats, because lack of money and talent isn't what is holding them back.

I'm confused. I get a new Firefox version on my Windows, Android, and Linux machines consistently, with new features, fixes, and the latest web tech minus the privacy nightmares Google is trying to feed, at a regular basis. How are they not investing in FF?
The person you replied to did not say that Mozilla is _not_ investing in Firefox. I too am worried that Mozilla was cutting Servo development, in a time where Firefox already has a problem keeping up with new web features.
The problem is that you cannot donate to Firefox's development.

Donations all to to Mozilla, and if the article is to be believed, Mozilla won't use the extra money or FF for Linux.

Hell, in the past we've seen Mozilla divert funds away from Firefox to support unrelated stuff.

There is currently no way, right now, to give financial support to Firefox development without forking it.

> There is currently no way, right now, to give financial support to Firefox development without forking it.

This is not true. There is no way to fund Firefox development by giving money to Mozilla, but you can send as much money as you want to Firefox contributors, incl. hiring someone to fix bugs full time, just like any other project.

Yeah this is the issue.

I don't have any money giving Mozilla money to go mismanage.

However I would be willing to schedule recurring donations for Firefox and Thunderbird development.

I also think "the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop -- KDE, GNOME, various major distributions" are not necessarily in _any_ better shape than Mozilla is, unless you think IBM is going to open their wallet...
Isn't IBM more in the server sector, which wouldn't care that much about Linux desktop anyways?
100%

How the author arrives at the conclusion that the answer is to create another browser is beyond me.

Advocate for Firefox. Invest in Firefox. There you go.

I'm not saying you have to agree but it's pretty clear how the author arrived at that conclusion if you read the article.

To summarize: Firefox's shrinking marketshare is an existential threat to Mozilla. The vast majority of its revenue is tied to the search engine deal with Google that the author describes as quasi-charity. Linux is clearly a lower priority than Windows and Mac (and the author even says that it's logical for Mozilla to prioritize Windows/Mac). So if there is a substantial drop in revenue (like the Google deal falls apart or Google just decides to pay Mozilla less) then Linux will bear the brunt of the reduction in resources.

The author sees reliance on Mozilla as a risk

> Firefox's shrinking marketshare is an existential threat to Mozilla

yeah, so the best thing to do is to try to reverse that. the article just takes it as given that mozilla/firefox will probably fail.

and if it does fail, there's a lot of linux users out there installing chromium on their desktops that will have helped it along.

its so weird how the browser is arguably more important than the operating system at this point, but open source nerds don't even see the problem in shitting on firefox and using google's browser instead. that attitude could be changed.

I think you concluded with a very key point, though.

> And who guarantees that the fork will further exist without weird funding?

Kind of funny, the author wants to create a fork to evade from the weird funding that Mozilla has, but doesn't talk about how the fork could sustain without weird funding.

I think creating a fork could be possible, but I don't really see how this solves the core problem that the author is worried about and how this is the "ideal solution".

>> In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop – KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions – would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop.

> Is it really the best solution to create a fork?

This is funny considering that WebKit was originally a fork of KHTML.

Well, WebKit was created by Apple and not something small like KDE, GNOME where mostly volunteers would participate.