This is largely in anticipation of the devastating drop in revenue if Google can no longer pay them to be the default search engine. That's where they get 86% of their revenue [0].
How about it becomes a squeaky clean non-profit, gets classified as a digital public good and gets funded by the widest collection of public sector / ngo's.
We are talking about the literal window to the digital world, with potentially billions of users. Its a dysfunctional world that cant sort out funding for such a super-critical software piece and has let adtech have this charade and fig leaf of "browser competition" going on for so long.
A chromium based solution would double down on the monoculture. If anything now is the time to envision what a users-first browser should be like, not what adtech wants it to be. From wasm to fediverse and (dare I say) AI, its a good time to snap out of the stagnation.
Problem is that they've told for too long that they didn't want money or people who didn't align with one specific USA political party so I can understand if people don't come rushing in to try and contribute.
It's unfortunate since Firefox is key to an open internet but at some point, they lost their true way and now it's going to take a lot of effort to regain it.
> It's unfortunate since Firefox is key to an open internet
Was. A long time ago. Now it is only an extension of Google ("safe" browsing) used by enthousiasts (who do not want to hear that Mozilla is now an advertising company).
Yes. 100% purely about party since that party calls their opponents bigots no matter what. The hypocritical response and blame game after the US elections shows that calling others bigot is projecting more than anything else.
> Maybe the main FOSS browser will be a Chromium fork so it's cheaper to maintain?
Likely not. If the fork would need to fight against any privacy-threatning actions, it will start to be quite different. It can be cheaper to maintain your own browser than massive, very diversed fork. And Google would get all power over web standards. You would need to fight them too if there is something controversial, and the code is getting different, again.
We have a base assumption that they would continue with the Firefox as own browser as an alternative. The most work has been already done. The assumption is that they would want to keep going with more privacy-friendly alternative that also try to avoid web standards that would be harmful for the end-user (tracking, specific kind of remote attestation, e.g.).
If they would fork Chromium, they likely want to redo the GUI. This is the easy part and that does not likely need upstream updates. That's what most forks do, and that is why they are maintainable.
However, if you start changing core, extension interface e.g., and if these browsers starts go different ways due to conflicts of interests, then the challenges and extra work start appearing.
Especially because of the security updates. Not all of them are CVEs, you need to look every possible bug fix if that introduced an additional issue if you used that part of the code differently. That must happen almost immediately as it is merged/notified in the upstream, or you might give too much time for someone to exploit it. The more different your fork is, the more challenging it is to get any update from the upstream.
What if the upstream makes breaking internal API changes and you must adapt it, before you can merge new things. What if new CVEs are discovered after this API change that you are already lacking, and the fixed code goes for the code that has this API change? And so on.. and you can't stop merging upstream because reported bugs are much easier to exploit than discovering new ones from the new code.
The above is all extra work. You still want to test your own code. Even if you had more bugs in your own browser code, you have better control them and the process is always faster.
I can't really estimate the difficulty, but are you sure about that? There's dozens of Chromium forks, would it be that hard to maintain one with a fraction of the development capacity that goes into developing an entire browser with its own rendering engine etc?
Yes, what I meant is that if Firefox development starts lagging too much to be a real competitor to Chrome one of those forks, or a new one will start becoming the main FOSS competitor and the default in Linux distros.
>Revenue consists of the following:
x Royalties - Mozilla provides the Firefox web browser, which is a free and open-
source web browser initially developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Corporation.
Mozilla incorporates search engines of its customers as a default status or an optional
status available in the Firefox web browser. Mozilla generally receives royalties at a
certain percentage of revenues earned by its customers through their search engines
incorporated in the Firefox web browser.
Yes, the Mozilla Corporation paid US$19.1 million in trademark royalties to the Mozilla Foundation in 2022, per their most recent annual report. Also, the Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation.
And a lot of people don't realize that "wholly owned" is just a legal construction, it does not mean that they have any say over what the corporation does, how the corporation does that, or that they have any kind of access to any money in the corporation's accounts. The foundation owns the corporation, part of that ownership is that they can't run it. If they did, they'd no longer be a separate non-profit.
But it does mean that the Corporation's dividends all go to the Foundation, its sole shareholder. It has paid such dividends in the past, though as far as I can tell, dividends have been replaced by royalty payments in more recent years.
Do funds go from the Corporation to the Foundation exclusively, or is it ever bidirectional? Common knowledge is "If you donate to the Foundation, the Corporation will never see a penny of it for browser development."
Fine, I thought the context was obviously Google's search engine monopoly.
> ruled that the tech giant has illegally maintained a monopoly through the billions of dollars in annual payments it makes to partners to secure the default search engine position on popular web browsers and mobile phones
Google search is about to be made irrelevant by AI, and yes I believe it is a stretch to compare Google's search "monopoly" to Microsoft's browser monopoly of yore.