The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”

  • halfapage@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    I’m a total layman, so please be patient with me: what would happen to Firefox without Mozilla? Do forks have a chance to survive indefinitely?

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      7 hours ago

      We’re talking something like 500 full-time devs currently working on Firefox vs. a handful of unpaid volunteers working on the forks.

      So, they might survive, but they won’t make a ton of progress. And security vulnerabilities would become increasingly difficult to keep fixing.

    • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
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      14 hours ago

      As long as people work on forks, they survive. I think the more interesting question is about standardization and feature support in general: if FF and its forks are no longer a real force in the browser world, how will this shape what websites support and code for (i.e. making things slowly lose compatibility with firefox and its forks without major development).

    • Vik@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      I’ve daydreamed about the Linux foundation or sovereign tech fund agency taking ownership of Firefox away from Mozilla.

      Maybe they could maintain a fork of it instead, I’m not sure. At this point I think it’s become a necessary measure. Firefox is quite far back in terms of security features that it’s actually becoming kind of silly. I still use it, carefully. I feel less inclined to recommend it to less savvy users in its current state.

      • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Linux Foundation Europe has taken over the rust-based Servo engine that Mozilla started several years ago. It’s not ready to replace any other browser yet, but progress has been picking up speed quite a bit the last few months. Could end up being better than a Linux Foundation Firefox fork simply due to the advantage of being a newer codebase with (hopefully) less baggage than Gecko and the added bonus of rust’s memory safety.

        • Vik@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          In was thinking about TLF with servo in mind, though I wasn’t aware much progress has been made. Great to hear!