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?
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.