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Comment by elithrar | Hacker News Reader

> and also believe Firefox is going to be forked

Out of curiosity: by whom? I don't think this is likely at this point, short of some truly benevolent benefactor pushing tens of millions of dollars per-year into a competing foundation.

None of the "alternative" browser companies today built upon Gecko or forked Firefox itself, because _it's really hard to maintain a browser engine_. Mozilla itself barely manages to keep up, and Apple sort-of-does (and can riff off work on Blink due to WebKit's shared history). This is also why Chrome & Chromium tend to drive de-facto standards (some good, some not so good) with an implementation-first approach.

Building browsers is hard. Really hard, especially as we consume more media and build richer applications on top of the web. Dedicated teams for video & audio, WebRTC, Wasm, CSS, JS itself (huge, let alone the security challenges), etc.

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Not even Brave, founded by Mozilla's ex-CTO/CEO forked Firefox. Microsoft Edge switched from homegrown to Chromium.

These two clues should be enough to cement your idea about how hard it is.

Even more important though is that it doesn't matter. You don't have reach. Apple locks you into Safari on mobile and Google pushes Chrome on Android and services having billions of users, like Youtube.

That's Mozilla's real problem. They lack in engineering power but engineering isn't the problem anyway. It's reach.

I think it's less about being hard and more about it being expensive redundent work. You will have to spend a lot of money to essentially make a duplicate version of an existing piece of software which you can use and build upon right now.

True, and if we're honest, the result of this hard work is a negative. Nobody in commercial software development benefits from having multiple slightly different engines. It just means more testing and more bugs, differences in feature support, the like.

> None of the "alternative" browser companies today built upon Gecko or forked Firefox itself, because _it's really hard to maintain a browser engine_.

What we really need isn't a fork.

It's for someone to do the same deal of selling the default search engine to the highest bidder, but then commit to using all of the money for promoting and improving the browser instead of all the non-Firefox things Mozilla does with it.

Then the extent of the fork is to change the browser name and the search engine link and all the improvements go back to upstream Firefox instead of having to maintain an independent one. But when it gets out that someone is doing this, who isn't going to want the one which is actually funding the browser and is otherwise identical?

In time the "fork" could become the dominant contributor to Firefox and just take over. Or convince Mozilla to commit to doing the same thing to make them go away.

> It's for someone to do the same deal of selling the default search engine to the highest bidder, but then commit to using all of the money for promoting and improving the browser instead of all the non-Firefox things Mozilla does with it.

That's a really, really minor part of the costs of Mozilla. Most of the money, by far, is spent paying engineering, design and marketing.

It would be nice if there was some way to know that, but the browser is developed by Mozilla Corporation, which is a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation and not a public company so as far as I can tell it has no published budget.

Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation that does have published financial statements spends millions on all kinds of not-Firefox things. Including the money it gets as donations from people who think they're donating to fund Firefox and the money it gets from the for-profit Mozilla Corporation that actually does develop Firefox and should be using the money for that instead.

Well, last time I checked (which was before the recent layoffs) Mozilla Corp had around 1,000 employees, most of whom were working either on technology or around technology (i.e. I'm including designers, support, end-user research, managers) and a revenue of ~800 M$. I'd be really surprised if the budget per employee (including salary and employer taxes) was below 300 k$ per annum.

That's already close to half of the revenue. I won't try to guesstimate operating costs, but Mozilla needs to rent plenty of cloud computing power for both CI (heck, Mozilla pretty much invented Continuous Integration), Telemetry, Sync, Accounts, MDN, ... Offices in Silicon Valley and around the world (several of which have closed in recent years) can't be cheap, either.

I also seem to remember that Mozilla had marketing campaigns that cost dozens of millions of dollars. Pretty cheap in comparison to what e.g. Google can afford, but less so for a smaller company.

I realize that there's lots of guesses here, but I believe that my earlier claim makes definite sense.

> short of some truly benevolent benefactor pushing tens of millions of dollars per-year into a competing foundation.

TBH, there's no shortage of new billionaires that could do this. If they committed to it hard, they might be able to get it to break even after a while. Google pretends that default search engine rights on firefox are worth half a billion per year. They have to be worth some fraction of that.

there's a lot of things that could happen if only there were a concerned billionaire that didn't care about profit

none of those things seem to ever happen. if you are not one of those billionaires start thinking of another approach

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