3 ms·
I don't think anybody will bother. Firefox fighting IE was successful because it allied three groups: people who cared about open source, people who cared about
by will4274 6y ago
I don't think anybody will bother. Firefox fighting IE was successful because it allied three groups: people who cared about open source, people who cared about modern web standards, and people who cared about user-first free software and privacy. Security research like fuzzers and people who like to customize their software are really in the first group. Firefox vs Chromium only captures the third group. If what you think is cool is privacy and free speech, you don't know how to fuzz software; if what you think is cool is fuzzing, you'll fuzz Chromium because that's what everybody uses.
I think the future is a rebase on Chromium. With so many companies (Brave, Google, Microsoft) each shipping their own integrations in Chromium, integrations will naturally become plug-in based (or at least, have a fairly stable API), allowing each vendor to opt in or out of each customization. Then, projects like Tor will move the TorBrowser to Chromium with their own implementations that are tracker free and one of them will eventually take the place of Firefox as the rallying point for the free software ideologues.
Which is a shame because I have a lot of sympathy for the free software ideologues. I'd like to win the browser fight for user-first free software ideology, not just corporate directed free software. But I no longer see Mozilla or Firefox as a banner under which that can be done. At the same time, I'm not sure how next free banner gets started.