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?
They die. Full stop.
Not even Microsoft had the strength to maintain a browser engine, that’s why they moved Edge to Chromium, they gave up.
The dynamics of commercial companies and open source are completely different. Microsoft moving to Chromium was a business decision. They didn’t see the value in spending money on a niche browser that didn’t give them any leverage. People developing open source aren’t doing it for profit or market dominance.
But microsoft is garbage company so that doesn’t say much. They’ve been trying to remake their settings page for more than a decade and it is still shit.
Bad argument, Microsoft is among the three most valuable companies in the world, when something is important to them they get it done properly (e.g. hyperv is the best made part of windows, because they need it for azure). The settings page doesn’t get them money, only nerds care if it’s bad, a browser does.
Maybe if all the forks merge into a single project, and if that project becomes part of some foundation like the Linux foundation or most likely freedesktop, and if some folks from big tech companies get paid to work on it full time (probably google would, for obvious reasons, but it wouldn’t be enough), and if distros start shipping that in place of firefox, and if for some reason the less tech savvy get to know about this project…
…Then if all of that happens, forks might have a chance of still existing.
This is how most big open source projects (like Linux, gnome, mesa, etc) thrive. With the catch that while most tech companies have some stake in Linux and friends, no company other than google has any stake in Firefox existing.
I’d say the more likely version of that scenario is not all the forks merging, but them all collaborating on a common base project from which they each can still produce their own spin.
This is viable because this has already happened in gaming.
https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher
Lutris, Heroic, Bottles use this in their backend.
I really hope that the forks coordinate for this to happen, soon, if not yesterday.
Maybe a group that keeps track what is to be done if Firefox development stops or if Mozilla folds or somehow abandons Firefox. Things such as:
Maybe I’m imagining some sort of a cooperative formed by Firefox forks with the main aim of keeping Firefox alive despite of (or after) Mozilla.
But since Chromium has soooo much of the market share, Firefox will always be playing catch-up. If Google decides to go full rogue and ignore W3C specs entirely and make up a bunch of their own shit, that devs then start to use because why not since the majority of their userbase use a chromium based browser, then Firefox can easily be taken out.
Which is basically the ending of the first browser wars, as far as I can remember. Internet Explorer had a little bit less market share than Google Chrome has nowadays, but still an overwhelming majority. Moreover, Internet Explorer had these IE-only tags and features, which further reinforced such things.
But here we are. Yes, Google Chrome and Google has an overwhelming majority right now, but so was IE (thanks to Microsoft’s practices) back then. Google Chrome came at the right time with what people actually wanted at that time, and so was able to gain the upper hand, and eventually a chokehold.
My response though is more about “keeping things alive for its users”, at least until such a breakthrough happens (maybe Servo has it?) or more pessimistically, until internet browsers fade away into obscurity (or perhaps just like IRC clients, it’s still a thing, right?)