>So why isn't anyone trying to replace Mozilla yet,
Because writing manifestos is easy and making a browser is proper hard work ?
Because writing manifestos is easy and making a browser is proper hard work ?
I'm wondering why don't they try to step it up further by selling a paid version alongside their open source product. What is the worst that can happen? Nobody pays for it and they continue making $0 just like they are happily doing now.
The hard part is the rendering engine and security. Both are done by the maintainer of the upstream source, i.e. Mozilla.
Something like this is regarded as the enshitification process, so what typically happens is they (e.g. VC) want to do such after they lured in their users. Which Firefox has (or arguably: had), but Waterfox and Librewolf have not.
Good thought experiment.
It ain't the first drama or controversy with regards to Mozilla, who have had a long tendency which didn't occur recently (and included the time Eich was there). Nostalgia just makes people forget the bad.
However, the default assumption is that all open source software is free to download and use.
Of course, there's the matter of revenue. If you get 100 dollars or 1000 dollars a month, is that significant to do anything useful for the project?
I'd donate to Firefox for no additional service if they would guarantee my money only goes to the browser and not crypto or AI initiatives.
Note donate. As in one time payments at a time of my choice. They also try to push towards subscriptions when you hit that donate button.
Rather, I wish we would stop accepting web standards that don’t come with reference implementations. Then, we could have a reference browser, and just run that. I don’t expect it to be performant, but I also don’t think browser performance matters much at all. Web pages are not HPC applications.
Currently we’re accepting the anti-competitive behavior of Google, just DDoSing the community with new standards to implement. This is the root problem. The fact that Mozilla is being killed by funding problems is downstream of the fact that maintaining a web browser requires multiple full time engineers.
Librewolf doesn't want to deal with the administrative overhead of donations - which if they'd only get a few donations makes sense. It likely costs several hundred a month just to hire the accountants and lawyers needed to get the paper work right (you can do it yourself at cost of time doing other things. Often you can find accountants and lawyers who will donate their services, but it is still several hundred dollars worth)
Especially in a crowded market, where we're arguing extensively about a browser that has 2.54% of the market share. Chrome (67%), Safari (18%), Edge (5.2%) [1]
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Most of those also have a browser mostly as add-ons, bundling, ecosystem value, or trademark / brand name trojans.
Admittedly, if you're looking to make a browser, there's a lot of various prior attempts that remain in existence, yet have never really received that much attention. [2]
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline...
Personal preference is that somebody would implement a scripting language alternative other than Javascript. Anybody heard of TCL lately? It's supposed to be a browser scripting language alternative according to the w3.org specification [3] Really, almost anything other than Javascript as an alternative. Just for some variety.