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Servo never had significant market share of any kind, but it has recently been picked back up by a foundation. Firefox has been outcompeted by Chrome and Mozill

Servo never had significant market share of any kind, but it has recently been picked back up by a foundation. Firefox has been outcompeted by Chrome and Mozilla has made a number of strategic blunders over the years. But by and large people stopped using Firefox because Chrome/Chromium was better on most metrics users care about. Even developers tend to use Chrome/Chromium because of the superior native debugging tools. But last I checked Firefox is still very much maintained by Mozilla.

illiarian 4y ago
The original statement was "If Google ever discontinued Chrome support it would be picked up by the community in a flash." Why doesn't community pick other browsers in a flash?
- chrisco255 4y ago
  What other open source browsers have been left without maintainence? Ones with no market share? As mentioned, Servo was never really finished and yet it has recently been scooped up by the Servo Foundation. Mozilla still very much maintains Firefox. We have plenty of examples of open source databases, operating systems, libraries and languages leaving the major companies they were created at and being scooped up by a foundation or consortium to maintain. WebOS is a great example. Created by Palm as a mobile OS before they sold it to HP, who open sourced it. Now the primary contributor is LG, who uses it in smart tvs. But there's plenty of other examples in the open source world. Chromium is far too important, and there's already thousands of eyeballs on that code base. There would be a Chromium Foundation established very quickly if Google abandoned.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > We have plenty of examples of open source databases, operating systems, libraries and languages leaving the major companies they were created at and being scooped up by a foundation or consortium to maintain. We have just as many left to die. We just don't know or don't talk about them anymore. > WebOS is a great example. Created by Palm as a mobile OS before they sold it to HP, who open sourced it. Now the primary contributor is LG, who uses it in smart tvs. Ah. So the mythical "community" that will scoop in and continue developing is a compani with a 60-billion yearly revenue. Got it. > Chromium is far too important, and there's already thousands of eyeballs on that code base. Eyeballs rarely, if ever, translate into understanding the codebase, or being able to do anything about it. > There would be a Chromium Foundation established very quickly if Google abandoned. Can I interest you in Apache Foundation where great amazing projects no longer supported by their original company go to slowly slide into oblivion?
- chrisco255 4y ago
  > We have just as many left to die. We just don't know or don't talk about them anymore. Yes, irrelevant products that no one uses eventually die. At present, Chromium is not one of those, and is installed on billions of devices and used every single day on mobile and on desktop. Entire businesses and derivative ecosystems have been built on top of Chromium (Edge, Brave, Node.js and all of its dependencies, Electron, etc.). If there's an economic incentive to keep an open source product going, it will keep going. Anyway, here's the repo if you're interested in contributing: https://github.com/chromium/chromium https://github.com/chromium/chromium

illiarian 4y ago

The original statement was "If Google ever discontinued Chrome support it would be picked up by the community in a flash." Why doesn't community pick other browsers in a flash?

chrisco255 4y ago
What other open source browsers have been left without maintainence? Ones with no market share? As mentioned, Servo was never really finished and yet it has recently been scooped up by the Servo Foundation. Mozilla still very much maintains Firefox. We have plenty of examples of open source databases, operating systems, libraries and languages leaving the major companies they were created at and being scooped up by a foundation or consortium to maintain. WebOS is a great example. Created by Palm as a mobile OS before they sold it to HP, who open sourced it. Now the primary contributor is LG, who uses it in smart tvs. But there's plenty of other examples in the open source world. Chromium is far too important, and there's already thousands of eyeballs on that code base. There would be a Chromium Foundation established very quickly if Google abandoned.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > We have plenty of examples of open source databases, operating systems, libraries and languages leaving the major companies they were created at and being scooped up by a foundation or consortium to maintain. We have just as many left to die. We just don't know or don't talk about them anymore. > WebOS is a great example. Created by Palm as a mobile OS before they sold it to HP, who open sourced it. Now the primary contributor is LG, who uses it in smart tvs. Ah. So the mythical "community" that will scoop in and continue developing is a compani with a 60-billion yearly revenue. Got it. > Chromium is far too important, and there's already thousands of eyeballs on that code base. Eyeballs rarely, if ever, translate into understanding the codebase, or being able to do anything about it. > There would be a Chromium Foundation established very quickly if Google abandoned. Can I interest you in Apache Foundation where great amazing projects no longer supported by their original company go to slowly slide into oblivion?
chrisco255 4y ago
> We have just as many left to die. We just don't know or don't talk about them anymore. Yes, irrelevant products that no one uses eventually die. At present, Chromium is not one of those, and is installed on billions of devices and used every single day on mobile and on desktop. Entire businesses and derivative ecosystems have been built on top of Chromium (Edge, Brave, Node.js and all of its dependencies, Electron, etc.). If there's an economic incentive to keep an open source product going, it will keep going. Anyway, here's the repo if you're interested in contributing: https://github.com/chromium/chromium https://github.com/chromium/chromium