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Comment by manfredz | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty ways to fund digital commons, including people volunteering their time.

A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.

Right. Firefox stands alone as the most successful self financed full stack browser that's ever been made without being subsidized by outside revenue streams. I like to use the example of Opera. If "make a better browser" won market share and business creativity won stable revenue, we'd all be using Opera right now because (sorry Mozilla), no browser company was ever better than Opera in my opinion.

In 2026 the rules to making a good browser are (1) already be a trillion dollar company, (2) use Chromium, (3) have some form of distribution lock-in over billions of devices. Otherwise you're cooked. Mozilla swims against the stream better than anyone.

The EU says it cares about privacy. although it's actions have normalized enshittification; the EU could fully fund Firefox or a Firefox fork or another browser in a second and stop all the trackers right in their tracks.

It's American company... unlikely.

Then fork it.

Besides, the one thing Mozilla could do to be relevant to 99.9% of web users is to move somewhere other San Francisco and turn their office their into a homeless shelter. They should go to Dublin or Frankfurt or Barcelona, anywhere.

Monetary contributions via government grants have happened in the past. Iirc that's how VLC got their start.

I don’t know, but there are other ways of funding besides -completely- volunteer run.

Take look at Ladybird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser)?wprov=s...

You can't seriously compare ladybird, a mostly broken browser nowhere ready or even remotely close to it, to Firefox.

Ladybird will be dead in a few years.

There's a strong desire to keep the web an open platform, if the alternative to WebKit isn't going to be Firefox, it'll simply have to be something else. I'd gladly contribute to the cause, beit ladybird or something else. For now it would be monetarily until my impending retirement when I can contribute hours without impacting my family.

I wouldn't discount ladybird or others simply because they haven't shipped their mvp just yet. They're closing in on a usable product. Maybe they never make it, but servo and others may. Saying they'll be dead in a few years isn't contributing much besides pessimism for anything but the status quo.

But several entire operating systems can an do operate entirely by the volunteer model? I don't follow...

I don't think volunteering is going to cut it. Big orgs have big money and public commons are just targets to be controlled exploited.

mozilla employs 750 people and has a 1/2Bn dollar deal with Google and still their browser is absolute hot garbage. i think volunteering won't cut it.

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