So, I’m staying with #Firefox, even though their CEO is tone-deaf and clumsy and destroying #Mozilla’s reputation because today I had to remove 6 extensions in #Vivaldi (my sometimes alternate browser), several of which were security-related, because of Google’s changes. I miss them. I want them back.
Bottom line. I definitely feel more secure using Firefox than a Chrome-based browser, and I won’t let my disappointment with Mozilla kill off the only alternative to Google. I will continue using Firefox.
As far as using a fork of Firefox, if Firefox doesn’t live on, neither will these forks.
I don’t think developing a web browser to keep it up to date with new web technologies and new security requirement is just “maintenance”. LibreWolf or any other Firefox fork don’t have the ressources do that, that’s the problem.
You need at least a mid size company that pays top developers continuously for years, and believe in open source, open web and privacy at the same time, we don’t have a lot of those.
If Mozilla Corporations and its 700 employees goes down, I don’t think we’ll have another one like this. We may get new actors due to governments wanting to break Google’s monopoly, but I doubt they would take the same open stance as Mozilla. Other fantasies include some philanthropist billionaire or the EU deciding to create an open software foundation to finance the open web.
Internet standards are pretty stable and mature at this point, and they can always port over security fixes.
I wouldn’t imagine it would be that difficult maintaining the existing code base.
Obviously I’m not saying it’s super easy, but once the product is mature you don’t need a huge staff for it, at least not in the short term.
Having said that, my point was just to alleviate the fears of the OP, who didn’t want to move away from Firefox because they were afraid that what they moved to would die if Firefox does. My point was just to say they would be a long lag time before that would happen.
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There’s a bit more changing on the web than what you may expect.
The web moves so fast that we ditched W3C standards for the WHATWG living standard because it took too long to release new features. I guess the “move fast and break stuff” stood too much in contention with W3C’s vision of a standardisation track, and it did take a good while in the past. Anyhow, the last updatebto that stabdard was yesterday. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/document-sequences.html
Features like WebRTC, HTTP/3, CSS grid, JavaScript decorators, … do not come for free. This is just a tiny fraction of what appeared in the past few years. The web is a highly evolving platform which (used to be? is? aims to be?) backwards compatible. This even ignores updates for required maintenance due to base platform APIs or frameworks changing.
It could be very smart to bring its evolution back under W3C so it would move at a more achievable pace with an equal voting process, but that’s not the case today and I doubt it will happen any time soon.
In the coming years, building or maintaining a browser engine will be expensive.
That’s because the W3C was focused on XHTML 2 at the time, which nobody outside of the W3C actually wanted. So any proposed amendments to HTML 4 was met with “But we’ll have XHTML 2 soon!”
I’m skeptical of claims from browser makers that the spec process wasn’t moving “fast enough”, since it’s not like they actually implemented it fully anyway.
I’m not disputing that change happens, but it doesn’t happen as fast as you suggest, or as slow as I’ve seen in the past.
In either case, a small group of developers can maintain an existing code base and add new features to it. I’ve seen it (AND done it) with my own eyes before.
I truly don’t mean to be argumentative, but I have to push back when someone tells me the equivalent of “0% chance of that being possible”, when I know that’s not true (and apologies if I’m misinterpreting what you said, but that’s the impression I’m getting). Agreed, its not 100% possible either, but its closer to 100% than it is 0% possible.
Even for the sake of argument, lets say some “BIG NEW THING ™️” comes along, and the devs don’t have enough resources to implement it. It doesn’t mean the browser dies that very moment in time. There’s plenty of time to migrate to another browser at that point, it takes something along the lines of less than an hour to move from one browser to another (we’re talking personal here, not corporate).
Anyway, I take your point that WHATWG has apparently replaced W3C, and that they move faster. But I’ve also seen allot of products/standards come and go in the name of HTML5 over the years (and even before HTML5, the days of Client/Server, and other coding religions before that) to know that each don’t have to be supported completely on day one, but just the ones that “win” the popularity contests.
One last thing …
If an OS like Linux can be done, and well, so could an open-source codebase inherited browser. An OS is allot harder to maintain than a browser engine is.
Edit: Typo.
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