I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.
Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.
And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.
Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and Safari they can't lose the market.
Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt it with Servo.
https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...
Uh, [citation needed]?
Firefox was a valid target in Pwn2Own 2021: https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2021/1/25/announcing-...
Nobody attacked Firefox successfully, but that's hardly a point against it. I don't know what "made no improvements at all in previous 2 years is supposed to mean", either, since we had just released a major overhaul of the optimizing compiler a few months before Pwn2Own: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/11/warp-improved-js-performan....
> One change in the 2016 event is that the Mozilla Firefox Web browser is no longer part of the contest.
> “We wanted to focus on the browsers that have made serious security improvements in the last year,” Gorenc said.
https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...
Literally provided citation in my comment above.
But if we were to buy the premise, whether Mozilla can't or chooses not to use the money for browser development doesn't matter in the slightest.
And I think there's a pretty big citation needed on "they can't". Sure, they can't divert non profit funds in to the for profit corporation. But they could use it to build open source software with strategic alignment - like funding Rust.
I stopped using Firefox years ago because of such “improvements” they obsess over instead of stewarding one of the very few web browsers which could have helped keep the web open but is instead borderline controlled opposition.
join us!
(More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks" of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)