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How much funding would a new nonprofit need to hard fork Firefox and try to actually get it right? Unless FF becomes a compellingly better browser for the aver

How much funding would a new nonprofit need to hard fork Firefox and try to actually get it right? Unless FF becomes a compellingly better browser for the average user, it will keep on losing to the default Edge/Chrome/Safari.

djbusby 4y ago
Working with my finance team, we guessed, minimum, three persons per component team, for very narrow definition of components. There were roughly 50 components we identified (poorly) and some overlap but...we were looking at (again min) 150 good (expensive) devs and like 30 to 50 eng-managers. And still need to fill roles for vision, finance, architecture, etc. So, at this point...millions per year. However, I've been maintaining a small fork, with just small tweaks by my self, and LibreWolf has some patches too - for very little money.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  > However, I've been maintaining a small fork Do you mind elaborating? I'd really just like some "Unmozillaed Firefox" or "Firefoxium" that removes some of the crap Mozilla tries to impose ("no, you can't install extensions from outside of the store", "using a userChrome.css? haha, no"). But all prominent FF forks are full of crazy "privacy enhancements" that mean virtually no web app will work.
  - djbusby 4y ago
    Sure. Building Firefox is pretty easy. And then you can pick/choose the patches from LibreWolf maybe. And also for example strip out the Pocket shit, or frob all the defaults to what you like (no DNS over HTTP) and tweak the style too, and even "fix" the default HTML styles.
throwaway_4ever 4y ago
Brave, Brendan Eich's (previous Mozilla CEO) new company and browser, has raised $42m and has probably ~220 employees. He said even then, they had to fork Chromium because they didn't have the resources to actually do all the work involved in a feature complete browser engine. So I'm guessing $500m funding, because even Microsoft didn't invest in an outside-Chromium engine for Edge.
- fabrice_d 4y ago
  Brave forked Chromium to not face an uphill battle on web compatibility - they never had plans to write their own engine (they actually started with a Gecko based product in the very early days).

djbusby 4y ago

Working with my finance team, we guessed, minimum, three persons per component team, for very narrow definition of components. There were roughly 50 components we identified (poorly) and some overlap but...we were looking at (again min) 150 good (expensive) devs and like 30 to 50 eng-managers. And still need to fill roles for vision, finance, architecture, etc. So, at this point...millions per year. However, I've been maintaining a small fork, with just small tweaks by my self, and LibreWolf has some patches too - for very little money.

solarkraft 4y ago
> However, I've been maintaining a small fork Do you mind elaborating? I'd really just like some "Unmozillaed Firefox" or "Firefoxium" that removes some of the crap Mozilla tries to impose ("no, you can't install extensions from outside of the store", "using a userChrome.css? haha, no"). But all prominent FF forks are full of crazy "privacy enhancements" that mean virtually no web app will work.
- djbusby 4y ago
  Sure. Building Firefox is pretty easy. And then you can pick/choose the patches from LibreWolf maybe. And also for example strip out the Pocket shit, or frob all the defaults to what you like (no DNS over HTTP) and tweak the style too, and even "fix" the default HTML styles.

throwaway_4ever 4y ago

Brave, Brendan Eich's (previous Mozilla CEO) new company and browser, has raised $42m and has probably ~220 employees. He said even then, they had to fork Chromium because they didn't have the resources to actually do all the work involved in a feature complete browser engine. So I'm guessing $500m funding, because even Microsoft didn't invest in an outside-Chromium engine for Edge.

fabrice_d 4y ago
Brave forked Chromium to not face an uphill battle on web compatibility - they never had plans to write their own engine (they actually started with a Gecko based product in the very early days).