this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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They can be slow to adopt changes. I think the Mozilla foundation getting more funding, staffing, and refocusing on their browser would be the better solution.
While Chromium is an open source project, it is still developed and maintained by Google. For something as important as a web browser, I think it's imperative that there's an option outside of their control.
Sure, but Google has no control over any forks of Chromium. They can't control Edge, or Brave, or Vivaldi, or a hypothetical Mozilla fork. And if those other forks want, they can collaborate together to maintain any features they want to have that Google themselves don't want.
Like, yeah, more funding for Firefox would be the ideal case. But that's not something Mozilla really has the ability to effect. They can choose what engine they're using. And using Chromium would allow them to essentially "steal" the work Google has put in, while not preventing them from changing stuff that they don't like. In fact, in some respects it would help them even with that stuff they don't like from Google, since they can pool resources with other privacy-forward browsers like Vivaldi and Brave. I honestly see it as win-win.
Sorry but that's not how it goes, Google can exert control on forks by increasing the difficulty of maintaining changes. The forks have a vested interest in staying compatible with upstream to benefit from Chromium changes over time, which unfortunately means they avoid making any deep changes to the code. None of the Chromium forks are hard ones, unlike Chromium itself which was a hardfork of Apple's webkit, which in turn was a hard fork off KDE's KHTML.
Also, Mozilla should DEFINITELY NOT adopt Chromium. We need diversity in web browsers, the idea is that by having different user agents we give the user more bargain power over how they want to browse the web. Remember, Google, Microsoft and Apple are NOT your friends, all they want is to ransack everything and increase their shareholder values. If they can turn the web proprietary and fully locked down, they will.