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Comment by KoftaBob | Hacker News Reader

These FF forks will all be nonviable within a few years of Mozilla going under. Google and Apple will keep moving the web (for better or worse), and these forks will be unable to keep up for lack of resources.

Whether they get relatively slower, or just can't support some new web tech, the writing will be on the wall.

"A few years" is at least 10 years, though. That's a lot of time to pivot or get morally sounder funding sources (users for example).

A decade seems optimistic to me, personally.

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I doubt user funding would cover more than a small fraction of the costs. Someone crunched the numbers in the Lobsters comments, and compared it to Wikipedia's funding. They concluded Mozilla would have to be more popular than Wikipedia to make it work, and it almost certainly isn't.

I think an intergovernmental EU funding initiative might work, though.

They made too many decisions on their own to be a 1:1 replacement. I think there needs to be a new fork, which would just remove all of the spyware bits.

If you think Librewolf is too opinionated, try Waterfox [1]

[1] https://github.com/BrowserWorks/Waterfox

Waterfox seemed a bit too opinionated as well, especially in terms of extra code, weird versioning, patch delays.

Which decisions? LibreWolf ist exactly that + hardening used in tor browser maybe you mean those but all of them you can change in setting.

Like I need to watch DRM for my job, and it doesn't work at all. I also already ported most of their configs that I actually researched each and every line of myself + Waterfox + Arkenfox's configs into my generic Mozilla Firefox, and it works great.

There is literally a "enable DRM" setting (might also need disable resist fingerprint). Also librewolf is almost 1:1 with arkenfox.

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