Technology

There's a reason why every other browser maker has given up and adopted Chromium. It's not easy to support a browser and rendering engine across half a dozen OSes while keeping it secure, performant and stable.

Well, a browser is a massive piece of software, especially if you include the development of a render engine as Firefox does

Web standards evolve constantly, you need to keep up somehow, together with optimizations, bug fixing, patching of security vulnerabilities, etc

Mozilla is not a browser producer, it's a general internet charity that earns money by producing a browser. Most of their income goes to charity and reserves of which they have about 1bn -- roughly four times as much as wikipedia just for a sense of scale, wikipedia doesn't do any business deals to get at cash but instead does annoying donation drives.

They could scale down significantly while still keeping firefox development ongoing, they probably wouldn't have much issue finding enough donations to fund development, but the strategy seems to be building reserves and diversify commercial income, things like the revenue share they get from pocket for sending people to ad-ridden pages.

When you're currently donating to Mozilla you're not donating towards Firefox: Mozilla-the-company can't receive funds from Mozilla-the-foundation, those donations are going to charity work.

And, to make this clear: None of this is a grand revelation, or new, or outrageous, it's basically always been like that and it's always been a perfectly proper way to run a charity. Most of the recent pushbacks comes from people hating that Mozilla funds stuff like getting women into STEM, being outraged that the wider Mozilla community is not keen on having a CEO which opposes gay marriage (very staunchly so), etc.

I don't think it's quite as simple as someone just forking it. Realistically, a browser is an extremely complex piece of software that requires a lot of organizational effort to maintain, deal with security issues, etc. Pretty much every other piece of software on a similar scale I can think of (the kernel, KDE, Blender, Libreoffice) has some sort of organization behind it with at least some amount of officially paid work. All the major forks of Firefox or chromium follow quite closely to upstream for this reason (which is also why I'm skeptical of Brave's ability to maintain manifest v2 long term, despite their probably genuine best efforts to do so).

I do wish that Firefox were developed and funded by an organization specifically dedicated to developing it. This could of course happen if Mozilla dies. But that's going to require someone starting it, which is not at all a small or cheap task.

I could also see a future where Oracle or IBM buys it 😂🤡

This article doesn't even bother to explain the connection. I don't get it if I'm honest.

why do you think the Mozilla corporation losing 86% of their revenue wouldn’t hurt the Firefox browser?

I'm not sure what you mean, Firefox is already open source?

I'll add:

3. Buying some random companies

That doesn't produce any practical competition however. Some vertical splitting of the search business seems reasonable so we end up with multiple companies doing search out of it.

don't forget archive.org!