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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Yep. If we’re gonna be forking browsers, Firefox should be the base, not Chromium. Mozilla is in much less of a position to abuse their position, and more Firefox forks means more chances that one catches on with some slice of the larger public and helps chip away at Blink hegemony.

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Fully agreed. I am however worried by the fact that Firefox is basically kept alive by Google. I assume it's just so that they can pretend Chrome isn't a monopoly, but the minute Firefox becomes an inconvenience they can stop financing it. I hope we can find a way for Firefox to sustain itself long term.

It’s a valid concern, and it may not be possible to properly address so long as Mozilla in its current form continues to be the controlling party of Firefox/Gecko. The best scenario might actually be for Mozilla to collapse and some other NPO or PBC with better financial sense to pick up the projects and their engineers.

Google pays Firefox for traffic acquisition, not out of pity. If Google stopped paying, another search engine like Bing or Perplexity would be happy to take over.

True, but what happens when Firefox's marketshare decreases to the point where the amount of traffic lost by not having the Google deal stops mattering to Google?

If Google does the math one day, and determines that they won't lose out anymore by not paying Firefox they'll stop paying.

It's revenue share based, so the cost to google is the time it takes to renew the deal. This is a fixed cost that doesn't depend on the market share of Firefox.

Last time I suggested brave on hn to base off on Firefox and they said its pita but we have unpaid.volunteer run waterfox and others, then we have floorp, tor and others so I know for a fact brave not basing on Firefox is pure politics because of brendan

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