Well goodbye mozilla it wasn't great knowing you. Hopefully you are able to fuck over the devs and golden parachute your c-suite bastards one last time.

[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Maybe, but what are the odds of a fork taking off? It was started under the codename "Phoenix" and went by "Firebird" for some time before becoming "Firefox".

Maybe it's time for a fork to rise from the ashes and take off...

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 13 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Any fork will die a slow and painful death of it can't get the necessary funding for project management and maintainer salaries.

It will also dwindle, hard, towards irrelevancy.

In world where the only viable browser is one owned and operated by Google.

[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 minutes ago

This is going to probably sound like a stupid idea, but I mean this earnestly:

Can we just make Internet 2? Just a new underlying protocol with less restrictive browser requirements, sure you might need to use Chrome to log in to your bank, but we could just host everything else on the fedinet. Just like back in the old days, webrings hosted on closet servers and rented racks.

Google didn't build the internet so why do they have so much clout about how it's run? We can just start over again with self hosting. This time we even have all the knowledge we gained from already doing it the first time. I'm picturing an entire second layer of internet unlinked with the first one. Kind of like onion sites I guess, the more I think about this the more I'm realizing that the tor network is probably exactly what I'm talking about. Just that, but instead of hosting pirated content or weird porn or bitcoin assassins it's just a low stakes noncorporate internet protocol. You probably won't want to do a lot of transactions on it, but social media or personal websites or video hosting would probably be fine.

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 12 points 23 hours ago

The fork that takes off will be the one where the Firefox devs move to. Which isn't predictable. We could make our own foundation, without the blackjack and hookers (cause based on how mozilla was doing things it sure seems like all they did), and make it more as a means for the devs to get paid for their work.

[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

and before that it was Netscape

[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I thought Netscape turned into Mozilla, which was different from Firebird

[–] grue@lemmy.world 7 points 21 hours ago

Correct. Firefox was a rewrite separate from the old Netscape/Mozilla SeaMonkey codebase.

[–] swelter_spark@reddthat.com 2 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

There are already several forks that are fairly popular.

[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 4 points 13 hours ago

Yup. I've been using Floorp for a few months now. But I think a lot of these forks rely on Mozilla for the heavy lifting

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 7 points 17 hours ago

The problem isn't the existence of forks, it's rather how many developers are behind them. Mozilla has around 750 employees, so I'd guess maybe around 500 full-time devs work on Firefox. Tor Browser and such have significantly fewer contributors, who only do this stuff in their free time.