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Half the point of asking questions in a public sub is so that everyone can benefit from the answers—which is impossible if you go deleting everything behind yourself once you've gotten yours.
As far as using a fork of Firefox, if Firefox doesn’t live on, neither will these forks.
Why? The other teams have the source code, they can just continue extending it or just maintaining it.
And having just switched from Firefox to LibreWolf yesterday, it took all of 20 minutes to do. It's not like you'll be hung out to dry without the Internet if you are correct. You would just switch to another browser again.
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I don't think developing a web browser to keep it up to date with new web technologies and new security requirement is just "maintenance". LibreWolf or any other Firefox fork don't have the ressources do that, that's the problem.
You need at least a mid size company that pays top developers continuously for years, and believe in open source, open web and privacy at the same time, we don't have a lot of those.
If Mozilla Corporations and its 700 employees goes down, I don't think we'll have another one like this. We may get new actors due to governments wanting to break Google's monopoly, but I doubt they would take the same open stance as Mozilla. Other fantasies include some philanthropist billionaire or the EU deciding to create an open software foundation to finance the open web.
I don’t think developing a web browser to keep it up to date with new web technologies and new security requirement is just “maintenance”
Internet standards are pretty stable and mature at this point, and they can always port over security fixes.
I wouldn't imagine it would be that difficult maintaining the existing code base.
Obviously I'm not saying it's super easy, but once the product is mature you don't need a huge staff for it, at least not in the short term.
Having said that, my point was just to alleviate the fears of the OP, who didn't want to move away from Firefox because they were afraid that what they moved to would die if Firefox does. My point was just to say they would be a long lag time before that would happen.
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There's a bit more changing on the web than what you may expect.
The web moves so fast that we ditched W3C standards for the WHATWG living standard because it took too long to release new features. I guess the "move fast and break stuff" stood too much in contention with W3C's vision of a standardisation track, and it did take a good while in the past. Anyhow, the last updatebto that stabdard was yesterday. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/document-sequences.html
Features like WebRTC, HTTP/3, CSS grid, JavaScript decorators, ... do not come for free. This is just a tiny fraction of what appeared in the past few years. The web is a highly evolving platform which (used to be? is? aims to be?) backwards compatible. This even ignores updates for required maintenance due to base platform APIs or frameworks changing.
It could be very smart to bring its evolution back under W3C so it would move at a more achievable pace with an equal voting process, but that's not the case today and I doubt it will happen any time soon.
In the coming years, building or maintaining a browser engine will be expensive.
The web moves so fast that we ditched W3C standards for the WHATWG living standard because it took too long to release new features.
That's because the W3C was focused on XHTML 2 at the time, which nobody outside of the W3C actually wanted. So any proposed amendments to HTML 4 was met with "But we'll have XHTML 2 soon!"
I'm skeptical of claims from browser makers that the spec process wasn't moving "fast enough", since it's not like they actually implemented it fully anyway.
I'm not disputing that change happens, but it doesn't happen as fast as you suggest, or as slow as I've seen in the past.
In either case, a small group of developers can maintain an existing code base and add new features to it. I've seen it (AND done it) with my own eyes before.
I truly don't mean to be argumentative, but I have to push back when someone tells me the equivalent of "0% chance of that being possible", when I know that's not true (and apologies if I'm misinterpreting what you said, but that's the impression I'm getting). Agreed, its not 100% possible either, but its closer to 100% than it is 0% possible.
Even for the sake of argument, lets say some "BIG NEW THING ™️" comes along, and the devs don't have enough resources to implement it. It doesn't mean the browser dies that very moment in time. There's plenty of time to migrate to another browser at that point, it takes something along the lines of less than an hour to move from one browser to another (we're talking personal here, not corporate).
Anyway, I take your point that WHATWG has apparently replaced W3C, and that they move faster. But I've also seen allot of products/standards come and go in the name of HTML5 over the years (and even before HTML5, the days of Client/Server, and other coding religions before that) to know that each don't have to be supported completely on day one, but just the ones that "win" the popularity contests.
One last thing ...
In the coming years, building or maintaining a browser engine will be expensive.
If an OS like Linux can be done, and well, so could an open-source codebase inherited browser. An OS is allot harder to maintain than a browser engine is.
Edit: Typo.
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You think the librewolf team is up to doing feature development and that they'll get a seat at the standards table? Because they're not doing that now, feature development is way more work, and if Mozilla goes the way of the dodo who knows if anyone else gets a seat at the standards table. The only other members are megacorps that don't any incentive to let in new groups and Mozilla is only there because of history
Nobody follows the actual web standards anyway. Everybody just follows Google because all the web devs can't be bothered to do anything but Chrome compatibility, and Google can't be bothered with updating the actual codified standards before pushing out new shit.
This is just straight up bullshit.
Which is even worse, of course. Already it's basically impossible for Mozilla to keep up with all of Google's underspecified whims.
google heads whatwg. they are the web standard.
No. They may have the source code, but they don't have the human resources to work on fixing security problems, major bugs or maintain it to keep following internet standards. They're just a small team working on anonymizing it.
Why are you licensing your comments?
I don't think anyone here who talked about switching away from firefox even considered the chromium browsers as an alternative.
What the other comment also said its a baseless assumption that the forks wont live on without firefox. Thats just not how open source works.
New web technologies
Do you mean the ones that we are creating with the fediverse that are all equally open source or just those that google wants us to adopt?
developing Firefox costs $500,000,000 a year, according to Mozilla's books. you won't get the kind of hours that money buys you from a volunteer only project.
and for better or worse (it's worse), google dictates the Internet's shape. any browser that can't keep up with what google offers is untenable.
This is like saying Linux can’t be viable because Microsoft spends an estimated 3-5 Bilion on windows annually.
To me, the value of the internet is in connecting people with freedom of expression. I don't know what you believe any of us is gaining by letting google walk over us.
If we just stop playing along it looks like the enshitificated corpo owned sites are doing us one favor by isolating themselves from us, motivating innovation. But we wont be isolated from the net. We will be right here.
And if we look at historical references of a split internet. Facebook has an .onion version to be used with tor. So actually, they will still be chasing us. Because they need us way more then we need them.
it's more like saying Linux wouldn't be viable at the scale it exists at today if it suddenly had the resources it had in 1995.
i want to believe development on Firefox could continue without Mozilla, but browsers are a fast-moving target with a massive attack surface.
No, because Linux is backed by big corpos, Microsoft included. Firefox isn't.
Google only dictates the internets shape because we allow them to. It's time to start moving away where we can, and encouraging others to do the same.
You don't have to completely degoogle all at once, but moving your emails to a privacy-respecting alternative is a quick, one-time step you can take to reduce their market share
agree, with the caveat that "we" isn't us the individuals, but rather the companies that pay google.
Agree, with the caveat that "we" is all of the above because fuck every source of data and income for Google
I was more thinking along the lines of, google doesn't care what free users do. they are an advertising company with a business service arm, so their money comes from advertisers and business accounts. every private individual could degoogle right now and google would keep running just fine.
You are absolutely correct on every point. I just really don't like Google so I want them to choke
In every post I've seen of the change in Firefox TOU there's been people asking for alternatives and proposing chromium based browsers as alternatives (even chrome). I just can't grasp how anyone escaping Firefox because of these changes would willingly go to any based in chromium... But so many are just doing that. It seems many people using Firefox are just following recommendations and this whole issue with Firefox might hurt a lot more than any one thinks having a free web.
Better Firefox than Chrome, I agree
@[email protected] same here. I tried some #Firefox forks in the last few days. No one convinced me to switch from the original browser. Firefox is strong, more since they have brought the vertical tabs. And at work, the Multi containers extension is a no brainer for me. I still use Brave, and since a few days I give another try to Vivaldi. But FF is still my default browser.
I have never used the containers feature, could it be used to sign into work mail completely separately and have its own shortcut?
I want zero cross contamination with microsoft.
@[email protected] I completely agree! Firefox is a vital alternative to Chrome, and it’s frustrating to see Mozilla struggle with communication and PR.
As someone who's complained a lot about Mozilla, I feel like I should've added more often for people who don't know it: ... but at least it's not as bad as Chrome.
Holding onto LibreWolf as a patched Firefox while donating and supporting Servo in hopes that if Mozilla actually shits the bed in two or three years there's an alternative ready.
Vivaldi is my second browser too (I like the customizability) but I don't see why you had to remove some extensions now?
They will likely support mv2 until it gets removed from the browser codebase in ~at least 6 months later, but probably longer than a year~.
@[email protected]
I didn't remove them. They were removed and in the manage extension screen it listed 6 extensions that were removed
Fun game is to watch the network traffic in vanilla Firefox, long before this latest switch. Just server connections to 6-10 servers, some outside my county on immediate start up. Firefox has been trash for a long while
I don't think some network connections means anything bad, there are checks for updates on the browser and addons, the safe browsing list data, the adblocker list data, and so on.
Its like saying a Linux distro is bad because it checks the repos for updates.
That's absolutely the argument for why Microsoft is "spyware". The terms of use and having network connections.
From a privacy perspective, at least in the US, any traffic outside of the country is analyzed differently than traffic only in the US. Not that it really matters much, since US gov likes to track everything, I just found it annoying watching FF connect to so many servers before ever going to a website. Seems sketchy, since harden FF don't do this