Google's search deal with Mozilla is such a sizeable portion of its overall income that without it, Firefox would struggle to compete - or even survive,
How much active development does a browser engine need? If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren’t supported? Because as it sits, Firefox feels like one of the most corporate pieces of open source software I use daily, and I need to know just how tragic it would be if Mozilla died.
In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most “alternative browsers” do - tweaking or repackaging.
These days, a browser is like it’s own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.
I’d say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.
So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop “apps”.
A ton. Mozilla is already behind on all kinds of miscellaneous less used standards implementations compared to Chrome AFAIK. On top of that there are security fixes needed monthly and realistically you need to be able to push emergency patches within 48 hours or less (really 1/4 or 1/2 that) or people are going to flee because they got cryptolockered because of you.
How quickly would sites be unsupported? Hard to say. Most likely large chunks of the internet would start blocking Mozilla user agents as an out of date security threat for their userbase before it actually ran into actual implementation problems. The problem would be that, websites and services no longer even bothering to try to support Mozilla and making changes that break things, and of course security holes and exploits which would likely eventually lead to no-click complete computer compromises and other very bad things. Once it falls far enough behind on standards a lot of sites will block it for that reason because they don’t want bug reports or to spend money chasing down an issue potentially caused by an out of date piece of software.
Google or whoever owns Chrome would keep pushing new web standards at a fast pace to kill and bury any attempts to keep Firefox running. At that point there’s nothing really stopping them closed sourcing large parts of Chrome to kill privacy forks and lock down control of the web which most big websites would be fine with as Google’s interest is in getting through ads and preventing the end user from control over their own computer in favor of the interests of the website owner.
It would be apocalyptic potentially for what remains of the open web and user freedom.
How much active development does a browser engine need? If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren’t supported? Because as it sits, Firefox feels like one of the most corporate pieces of open source software I use daily, and I need to know just how tragic it would be if Mozilla died.
In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most “alternative browsers” do - tweaking or repackaging.
These days, a browser is like it’s own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.
I’d say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.
So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop “apps”.
A ton. Mozilla is already behind on all kinds of miscellaneous less used standards implementations compared to Chrome AFAIK. On top of that there are security fixes needed monthly and realistically you need to be able to push emergency patches within 48 hours or less (really 1/4 or 1/2 that) or people are going to flee because they got cryptolockered because of you.
How quickly would sites be unsupported? Hard to say. Most likely large chunks of the internet would start blocking Mozilla user agents as an out of date security threat for their userbase before it actually ran into actual implementation problems. The problem would be that, websites and services no longer even bothering to try to support Mozilla and making changes that break things, and of course security holes and exploits which would likely eventually lead to no-click complete computer compromises and other very bad things. Once it falls far enough behind on standards a lot of sites will block it for that reason because they don’t want bug reports or to spend money chasing down an issue potentially caused by an out of date piece of software.
Google or whoever owns Chrome would keep pushing new web standards at a fast pace to kill and bury any attempts to keep Firefox running. At that point there’s nothing really stopping them closed sourcing large parts of Chrome to kill privacy forks and lock down control of the web which most big websites would be fine with as Google’s interest is in getting through ads and preventing the end user from control over their own computer in favor of the interests of the website owner.
It would be apocalyptic potentially for what remains of the open web and user freedom.
It requires a lot, you can try running an older version of a browser to see
Or look at all the memes people made about up to date chrome being better than out of date explorer
Likely yes, as Google will keep enshittifying the web unless stopped by antitrust or whatever. Which isn’t looking so likely.
If Palemoon can still run the bulk of the web on a forked version of the old firefox engine, I doubt you’d notice anything breaking in the short term.
Palemoon’s last update was a month ago
Here’s a version from 11 years ago though
https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/releases/tag/24.5.1_beta4