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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

I hope a sustainable Firefox fork emerges soon because it seems Google's illegal default search deals (aka the only thing keeping Mozilla afloat) are coming to an end. That's a great thing in general, but it would really suck if FF died and we all got stuck with Chrome derivatives.

Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for my web browser if it's good. I wouldn't pay for Mozilla's FF, but I would pay for a fork of it by a company whose business model doesn't involve ads or selling data. I happily pay for Kagi, and will happily pay for the app that I use the most.

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Mozilla could keep building FF without Google, but it would require that 90% of the C suite get laid off and dedicated focus from the company...

Good. They've lost market share continuously for fifteen years.

In 2009 they had a 30% market share.

Now they have a 5-6% market share.

4/5ths of their market share, gone.

The number of internet users have also gone up 300% over that time period, so on absolute terms they still have a sizeable user base.. but yes. They need to figure out how to increase market share.

They are even losing users in absolute terms: check https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

2.8% in July '24, Linux has a higher desktop market share than Firefox has browser share.

Nah, they would just enshittify like everyone else. This world is trash. The only hope is it pisses off enough people for them to contribute to some open competitor, the circle of softwarelife

For the fiscal year 2022 which is the most recent data on Wikipedia, it says that 81% of Mozilla's revenue is from Google (about 480 million) they list 220 million as expenses for software development.

If they lost the Google revenue they wouldn't just have to fire "the C suite" but lay off most of their engineers. An independent browser engine is a project with code in the tens of millions of lines, you obviously need to pay hundreds or of engineers to work on this, which is why there's pretty much only three competitive ones, all maintained with significant resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

Hundreds of developers?

It's a large code base, but it doesn't require hundreds of developers working concurrently to keep it up to date. Web standards move fast, but not that fast.

Take a look at Ladybird. There's a browser being built from scratch with a small team (less than 10?)

If Mozilla fired 90% of it's employees and kept the 10% to actually work on Firefox, it could be a great browser.

Have you taken a look at Firefox's bug bug tracker?[1] Keeping up with Web standards is nothing compared to the tremendous amount of work required to maintain a cross-platform web browser.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=...

> Take a look at Ladybird. There's a browser being built from scratch with a small team (less than 10?)

Ladybird is so, so far away from being comparable to Firefox. It only supports a fraction of modern websites.

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