“Last month, Mozilla made a quiet change in Firefox that caused some diehard users to revolt…”
Which (pr nightmare aside) I wouldn’t be against. It’s not gonna fly, people are accustomed to ‘free’ browsers to the point they’d balk at the idea. Even if they weren’t most would take a free chromium based browser or Firefox fork over a paid alternative that doesn’t give them anything extra. But browsers are massive pieces of tech, they need a lot of dev time, and the money needs to come from somewhere, just relying on volunteers won’t cut it.
Mozilla has been looking for sources of funding for years, sometimes in ways that are their own type of pr nightmare and sometimes in ways I’m not thrilled by, but I get their predicament. I wish there would be (more) state funding. EU, US. Whatever. Much like governments should invest in public transit we should invest in critical software infra.
I also wish Google’s other branches were divorced from their browser dev branch. The stranglehold on the web given to Google by chrome is a huge part of the problem.
