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I take that to mean that they know where their bread is buttered. If you're rival is paying you much more than you can earn otherwise, best not to rock the boa

I take that to mean that they know where their bread is buttered. If you're rival is paying you much more than you can earn otherwise, best not to rock the boat. The best thing in the long run for firefox in my opinion would be to not renew the contract with Google when it comes up again. It's pretty drastic and it might kill the Mozilla foundation, but firefox itself can be forked and continue on. I'd love to see a group of developers (or more than one group) do a hard fork of the project and move in the direction of "performance, bug-fixes, standards compliance, and a healthy add-on infrastructure" as their main goals. A firefox-focused dev team wouldn't be adding things like Pocket into the mix or bothering the user so much.

542458 4y ago
I don’t believe that Firefox going from N paid devs to 0 would be positive. As much as I didn’t care for Pocket + etc, I doubt they consume anywhere near 100% of the paid developer time. As a result, zero paid devs would almost certainly leave less dev time for performance, bug fixes, standards compliance, add-ons, leaving us further away from those goals. Put another way, there’s absolutely nothing stopping this hard fork from happening today. It’s just that maintaining a browser engine is a Herculean amount of work, and having full-time devs is a huge asset.
midoridensha 4y ago
If a bunch of people want to fork it right now and do this stuff for free, nothing is stopping them. Obviously, it isn't happening, so if Mozilla dies, FF will end up abandoned and we'll be stuck using Chrome.