this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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But why?
Because Mozilla is the master of bad ideas and most open source projects are leaving github, not joining it.
They're switching their main repository from Mercurial to Git. Mozilla started using Mercurial before Git became de facto standard, but I imagine these days learning Mercurial is seen as an unnecessary obstacle for new contributors, hence the current switch.
As for why GitHub specifically, it's because that's where the rest of Mozilla's projects already are. They have been using GitHub for a long time (14 years or more), with thousands of repositories there. It's why Rust and Servo are on GitHub, for example.
Edit: See https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4346 for more thorough/accurate info.
I would guess Mozilla is making plans for what happens when Chrome is sold. Now that Firefox has proven to be an inadequate antitrust shield for Chrome, there is no longer any reason for Google to continue funding them.
how does moving to github help them if chrome is sold?
I'm not the OP, but it's probably easier to get (free) community contributions on Github than on any other spot.
Or it's to make it easier to fork, in case Mozilla goes out of business.
It's also likely a bit of cost-benefit analysis for self-hosting vs using a managed service.
Codeberg would be more in line with Mozilla's ideals IMO, but GitHub is a pragmatic choice anyway.
Yeah, I don't love that they're on a Microsoft service, but GitHub is not their worst product.