Isn't Firefox already the Linux of web browsers?
Firefox is produced by a single company and its users are completely beholden to the choices that the company makes.
In some ways, Chromium is closer to being the Linux of browsers. There are multiple “distributions” or instances of the technology ( Chrome, Edge, Brave, and others ). There is at least some collaboration on the core.
Chromium is not developed nearly as collaboratively as Linux though and certainly it is dominated by Google.
What we need is something like Ladybird which is community driven prior to corporate involvement and that is led by that community and not by a company.
Not that we have not lost this opportunity before. KHTML was community driven before Apple co-opted it for WebKit which Google later forked to Blink.
Ladybird is perhaps already in a better spot being cross-platform vs only the browser in SerenityOS. It is also a “complete” project with JavaScript and multimedia already built in. Let’s work to keep the project together as a browser and not chase bits of it getting ripped off and taken elsewhere.
I do wonder what's so wrong with FF that nobody wants to base their fork on it.
It's compatibility. I use Firefox now it less exclusively, and sometimes I'll need to go on some "normie" website to book a flight or something and the Continue button will be broken or some shit. Seems like lots of web devs will just make the sure works in Chrome and call it a day.
I have ungoogled chromium installed alongside firefox for exactly this reason. A lot of mainstream sites clearly do not care about supporting other engines.
This appears to be the mindset, anyway.
Google has a massive conflict of interest with the free and independent web in a way that Oracle does not have with the ability to build and run arbitrary Java applications.