With the enshittification of all-things-Google, a lot of us have left Chromium-based browsers for Firefox. But still, over the last 15 years, Firefox has gone from 30%+ market share to about 6% now.
With the big backlash against them over the last week, I’ve seen a number of people advocating for Librewolf and Waterfox – Firefox forks focused on security and privacy – but if Firefox loses what little revenue it has left, what will become of the forks if Firefox dies?
I would imagine since Firefox is licensed with Mozilla Public License (MPL), that they would be able to continue using the source code and adding additional features and other improvements (as long as they follow the MPL). However, since the base code itself would no longer be getting updates, anyone wanting to continue with a fork would have to fix any bugs and security issues that may be discovered going forward.
Don’t forget also the need to keep up with new web standards otherwise they will quickly become irrelevant due to not being able to go on new sites and I don’t think that will be possible without another company/foundation funding and taking over the project
Great point! Also, keeping things updated to ensure support with all the other libraries and APIs it may use, supporting new operating systems…
Firefox’s codebase is of the scale of an operating system. I don’t think people realise just how complex web browsers are. If you took the drivers out of the kernel, Firefox dwarfs Linux.
It’s not something someone casually just forks and carries on.
Our codebase at work is bigger than Linux (with drivers) and Firefox combined, it gets real wild at scales bigger than a modern OS