With the enshittification of all-things-Google, a lot of us have left Chromium-based browsers for Firefox. But still, over the last 15 years, Firefox has gone from 30%+ market share to about 6% now.
With the big backlash against them over the last week, I’ve seen a number of people advocating for Librewolf and Waterfox – Firefox forks focused on security and privacy – but if Firefox loses what little revenue it has left, what will become of the forks if Firefox dies?
Who isn’t to say that the forks will just simply branch off and be self-sustainable? See, that’s the beauty of open source and the licenses of which these things operate under. It would suck if it was as close-sourced as Windows is because if all of the forks functioned off of the licenses something as Windows operates under, we wouldn’t have choice.
Because web browsers are stupidly complicated and expensive to maintain. The only real competitor is google who has infinite money to maintain the chrome superiority and you need resources to maintain safety, fix bugs, and adhere to new standards, which get every time more complex (also thanks to google that doesn’t want competitor). You need a lot of budget for that.
Without lots of money, it’s not doable reliabily