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 16 hours ago

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.

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 12 points 22 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 23 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] grue@lemmy.world 7 points 20 hours ago

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

[–] swelter_spark@reddthat.com 2 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

There are already several forks that are fairly popular.

[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 4 points 12 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 16 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.