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There are several Firefox forks of some note: LibreWolf, Palemoon, etc. I think you'll find that maintaining a huge, legacy codebase that supports a rapidly exp

There are several Firefox forks of some note: LibreWolf, Palemoon, etc. I think you'll find that maintaining a huge, legacy codebase that supports a rapidly expanding API is significantly more costly than a single engineer's salary.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The point is to ultimately take over the entire thing. Find some existing pain point that people don't like about Firefox, fix it, make sure people know the better version is available. People switch to it, you get more search revenue and donations, you hire more developers. It's the same way Mozilla operates, but this time you hire competent management so your market share goes up instead of down.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. I feel like you could have said the same thing about IE 4.0. It's more like, the incumbents don't care outside of what they need for their own purposes and Mozilla is the one supposed to be doing it but they're not. Except for the crowded market, but that's not even true now. We've got Firefox and the KHTML lineage and that's about it. > Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Chrome has 64% market share on desktop despite the proprietors of Edge and Safari having a combined ~90% desktop market share. Firefox itself had 32% market share in 2010. You can get people to switch from the default if they have a reason. > Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not). The problem is more than the CEO taking too much. They're not actually spending most of the money on making Firefox better. They should also be spending more of it on marketing, because their funding is directly tied to how many users they have, which keeps going down.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

The point is to ultimately take over the entire thing. Find some existing pain point that people don't like about Firefox, fix it, make sure people know the better version is available. People switch to it, you get more search revenue and donations, you hire more developers. It's the same way Mozilla operates, but this time you hire competent management so your market share goes up instead of down.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. I feel like you could have said the same thing about IE 4.0. It's more like, the incumbents don't care outside of what they need for their own purposes and Mozilla is the one supposed to be doing it but they're not. Except for the crowded market, but that's not even true now. We've got Firefox and the KHTML lineage and that's about it. > Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Chrome has 64% market share on desktop despite the proprietors of Edge and Safari having a combined ~90% desktop market share. Firefox itself had 32% market share in 2010. You can get people to switch from the default if they have a reason. > Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not). The problem is more than the CEO taking too much. They're not actually spending most of the money on making Firefox better. They should also be spending more of it on marketing, because their funding is directly tied to how many users they have, which keeps going down.