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>How did Mozilla survive as a business? On one end by almost literally being an extension of Google. On the other end by constantly laying off engineers. A big

>How did Mozilla survive as a business? On one end by almost literally being an extension of Google. On the other end by constantly laying off engineers. A big problem people are just handwaving away is that browsers are incredibly complex nowadays and how do you fund development of a browser engine? If you think the "Linux" model would work, well browsers already have that - it's called Mozilla and there is never any good news about them. Brave is also funded by Google - Brave doesn't develop a browser, they develop a skin around a browser engine that Google pays millions to develop and has decided to open source.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
Browsers are way more complex than OSs these days. Mozillas Servo project had over 40,000 commits and still wasn't ready for production and it was only a small part of the browser. I don't think there is anything else that could have 40k commits and still be a tech demo.
- trhway 6y ago
  back in 1999 looking at nspr (Netscape Portable Runtime - the foundation of Mozilla) i remember thinking - it just can be packaged alone as an OS, similar to Java OS (which i had been working with before that our Mozilla project). There is also another aspect to it - one can imagine that the time of an OS which would run web apps as first class citizens (in the correctly engineered sandboxes/etc.) just hasn't come yet. In the meantime the browsers are just ugly stop-gap 0.x version of such an OS (there is a reason they are "browsers" as their roots (incl. deep architectural roots) are in browsing of static content, and everything else is bolt-ons - the integration of JavaScript engine for example back then could be best described exactly as a "bolt-on").