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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Like many here, I think Mozilla has done a terrible job managing their money and they are largely to blame for the pickle they are in.

However, I don't see who picks up the reigns if Mozilla dies. Like it or not, Firefox is essential for a somewhat (increasingly less) open web, and (at least for now) Mozilla is essential to Firefox. For those who want to see Mozilla die but Firefox live on, what are the more likely outcomes in your opinion if Mozilla went down? Do you see a big corp (which it increasingly seems is the only way to keep up with the needed pace for a browser) stepping up?

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Not at all, the golden age of FOSS is gone.

It might appear that FOSS has won, however in reality what happened is that corporations have managed to control the message thanks to business friendly licenses.

Exactly, and now that these same businesses have LLMs, the savings they got using open source is no longer relevant. I expect we will see far more personal open source projects and a divestment from larger ones. More 1 or two people open source projects and less 100+.

Firefox will continue to exist and be maintained by open source efforts.

I often wonder if the current model has been driving away contributors, since it _feels like_ contributing effort to support someone else's paychecque.

Continue to exist in what form? Seamonkey aka Netscape Navigator still exists. Firefox can keep existing but not get updated enough to be a viable alternative to Chromium anymore.

Maintaining a Web browser is hard. I'm not convinced that an open source community would be able to continue the development.

Lets flip the question, does it have to be at the break neck pace that nobody can catch up without spending huge money?

How many of those features were really organic, driven by actual pressing need and not driven by Google's needs.

In that I fully agree, but the reason it has to be at a fast pace is because when Google adds things to chrome, developers will use them and don't have to care enough about market share. I think unless Firefox gains enough market share to matter, we'll be stuck in this race.

How is firefox essential to the open web?

How is firefox not essential to the open web?

If what is left are Chrome forks, the Web is gone, replaced by Chrome OS Platform.

We've seen what happens when almost everyone uses one browser engine (Internet Explorer): that vendor gets undue influence over the direction of the web, and their proprietary extensions make it difficult for others to compete.

We would end up in the same place if everything is based on Blink/WebKit; arguably we're partway there already.

Hopefully Servo will provide a competitive browser engine and full browser in the future as well, with the bonus of being great for embedding. But it's not quite there yet. And other potential competitors have their own problems. Firefox is, for the moment, the most popular and only viable browser not based on Blink/WebKit.

Firefox provides one of two browser engines.

If there's only one browser engine the Web immediately closes up like a giant impenetrable clam. All of humanity will be left outside, doomed to scrape forlornly on the shell with our nails and dream of the pearls within.

Blink and WebKit have diverged enough that there are minimum 3 engines now, not 2.

Don't forget Ladybird. It's coming along nicely too and it's currently being rewritten in Rust, which should give it a leg up on the rest of the bunch.

There are a few others, mostly A.I. slop like NorthStar.

I will 100% forget Ladybird until it actually matters.

This is a discussion about real browser engines in the wild, not in-development ones.

More competition is better than less.

Without pressure from Firefox Chrome would have removed the hooks extensions need for effective ad blocking a long time ago.

Despite the oodles of money Mozilla receives it manages Firefox poorly. Because of that its market share has been slipping for years. Soon it may become so insignificant that Google will cut back funding to say, tens of millions a year.

And Mozilla keeps attempting to diversify its income stream by coming up with commercial services for which there are loads of alternatives, such as VPN. Why don't they just give up on that and spend all their money on Firefox? Hire someone with a deep technical background and a vision to take Firefox forward. As long as it doesn't involve A.I. I think it's worth a shot.

And when the Google money runs out, what will they do?

Then they'll go bust.

Having all those side projects won't make any difference in that sense because they can't even pay the rent. But it does make a difference in their focus on improving their main product: the Firefox web browser, which they are neglecting.

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