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by skinkestek 475 days ago
Best thing we can do to influence it is probably to use and fund forks such as LibreWolf, hoping that they are in a position to continue development once Google decides to tell the manager of Mozilla to finally destroy it completely.

(Yes, that is a joke I hope, but if I compare what I think a puppet controlled by Google would do to destroy the Mozilla brand to what Mozillas CEO has been doing, I think there is a lot of similarities.)
2 comments
bad_user 475 days ago
Thinking that funding forks, like LibreWolf, would save said forks from dying if Mozilla goes under, is naive.

The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year. Estimates for Chrome range from 1 to 2 billion $ per year. In other words, take the donations of something like Wikimedia, which is arguably very successful in asking for donations, and you'd still be very short on the money needed to fund a web browser. And if you bring those costs down to something more manageable, like say, 100 million $, and assuming you can convince people to donate (IMO, when pigs will fly), then you'll have a browser that may be completely unable to compete with Chromium.

All the browser “forks” survive because Google and Mozilla are doing the hard work.

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hosteur 475 days ago
> The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year.

Are you sure that USD 500 million goes into the development of Firefox each year? Or does it go to funding of questionable Mozilla Foundation projects?

Admittedly, I have not checked the numbers recently but last I looked into it I got the impression that Firefox development was an embarrassingly small amount of what Mozilla spends their money on.

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skinkestek 475 days ago
> The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year.

Half a billion, IIRC, is what Mozilla gets from Google every year. This is AFAIK mostly not spent on developing the browser.

To add insult to injury AFAIK it arrives through Mozilla corporation (which develops the browser) and is then funneled through to the foundation to be spent on "initiatives".

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Idesmi 475 days ago
Librewolf merely applies a few patches on top of Firefox. It is in no position to maintain Firefox without Mozilla.
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