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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Apple. Currently the most valuable company of all time.

And there are interesting parallels, Apple too was kept alive by their competitor as a fig leaf in light of anti-trust troubles.

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Apple was the ultimate outlier in that respect. It would be great if someone could pull this off for Mozilla. The odds are slim, but one can hope.

Edit: Cal Peterson's article clearly shows how we got here. Such a shame.

If played smart Mozilla could be another. I have some ideas about how this could be achieved but Mozilla in its present day configuration would never be able to make any of them work so I'm curious to see if and how they will get out of their current predicament.

So far what I am seeing and hearing does not make me very hopeful.

FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.

There is also a possibility they will start updating it with adware, IMO they've come close already.

Auto update strikes again. I'll react to that when it happens. One of the main reasons I use firefox is because I hate advertising, if there is one thing that would make me jump ship that would probably be it.

What makes you think Google will drop linux support? As far as I can tell it's in their interest to keep a (2nd class) linux version around: linux is no competitive threat to anything they do, a large fraction of their staff use linux machines, and leaving linux without any viable browser (killing it dead as a desktop and development platform) would concentrate a lot of money, smarts and political power into seeking alternatives that could pose a serious threat to Google.

Precedent. Companies tend to spend effort to keep others at bay but as soon as they are no longer a threat they move their effort elsewhere. As long as FF has a viable territory Chrome will be there to compete with it.

> I have some ideas about how this could be achieved

Could you expand on this?

I did so in an earlier thread about Mozilla.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121689

Those ideas look solid. It will require the board to make some critical decisions and there has to be a person for the moment. Do we have the analog to Steve Jobs in this situation - Brendan Eich?

JWZ? That would be a fun turn-around, I think the bar/restaurant business is maybe not such a great spot to be in and it would be a nice return for him. For sure I'd trust him to do the right thing from a tech perspective.

JWZ quit tech years ago because he hates other programmers. He's not going back to Mozilla

Those are good points, and it’s frustrating that they don’t seem to be in Mozilla’s focus, but do you really believe this could lead to an Apple-style comeback?

Well, I'd certainly hope so or I see myself as a Chrome user in a few years time and that's not the best possible future. I already have to for browser/midi stuff.

I don't think your ideas there result in more market share or a sustainable business model to support Firefox. Because fundamentally you're trying to shove a new value (privacy) down the throats of consumers who don't share it, they want functionality first.

I think the goal should be to make Firefox the sane default firstly for business and secondly for consumers. Business users care about privacy and security, yet Chrome and IE are the standard platforms for business webapps.

If you want an example of how misaligned those values are from reality, I need to use Chrome to talk to my doctor. Safari and Firefox aren't supported. That's entirely because Firefox doesn't do enough to make it the default platform for developers and by focusing on the wrong users.

Since ChromeOS itself is just a stripped down flavor of Linux, they can hardly just drop Linux support. Unless they also give up on ChromeOS, which is unlikely but not impossible for Google.

It would be trivial to stop supporting the linux version publicly while still allowing the ChromeOS one, it's not going to compile for regular linux if Google does not continue to put effort into that.

It's a one person effort to adjust a few flags to port ChromeOS app to Linux.

That's reassuring to know. I don't think I would want to give up linux as my daily driver OS and if there were no current browser for it that would be the end.

I thought that was one of the drivers for Fuschia.

Google uses Chrome on Linux internally. Most Google employees use it on their main computers. There's also ChromeOS.

> I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.

There is a bigger reason. Literally every software engineer at Google/Alphabet uses Linux, other than a very few exceptions (likely only a fraction of a percent).

Even if your laptop is a Mac or Windows machine, your source code access is exclusively on your Linux box in the office.

Google is a Linux shop. Regardless of their reputation for dropping products, Chrome on Linux isn't going away any time soon, for the simple reason that they need it internally.

Excellent news. For now though, I sincerely hope that FF will somehow manage to stay alive, and that Mozilla will put all of their effort behind it.

>FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.

I also use FF as my daily driver. However, should FF become unsupported, I'll go with Palemoon[0] rather than Chrome.

In fact, there really isn't anything that could get me to use Chrome. I find its interfaces to be insulting to my intelligence and not at all friendly enough to the idea that I should never see ads or be tracked through my browser.

[0] https://www.palemoon.org/

Edit: Added link to Palemoon.

Bookmarked.

>Apple was the ultimate outlier in that respect.

Yes and in Apple's case, no one could have pulled it off other than Steve Jobs.

So basically the answer to the original question is none, zero.

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