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Is It Worth Killing Mozilla to Shave Off Less Than 1% From Google’s Market Share? - Open Web Advocacy
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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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If Mozilla's programs keep being more privacy friendly than Googles, then no.
If the enshitification continues, yes.
But something is bound to take Mozillas place, if they get worse, and that might be the best scenario.
Mozilla is in a tight spot where they want to separate themselves from Google's funding, but to do that they need to make money.
They have a user base that is very difficult to monetize.
Which means the user base which cares about privacy has put themselves in a position where they will now lose privacy in order for the tools they use to continue existing.
It's a shitty situation all around.
Mozilla has plenty of money but they are spending it on weird side projects.Then they pretend they don't have enough money and add need to start selling user data to make up for it.
how can you be so sure?
Can't be sure of course. But there are at least some forks of FF that devs of FF could keep doing work on if Mozilla just stopped FF. I have been daily driving Zen-browser for at least six or eight months. It is very good as far as FF forks go, and if folks that do the work for the core browser things that aren't UI/UX were to jump-in. It could be able to keep moving forward as far as standards and security updates are concerned.
The only major issue (aside from the above) would be setting up an extension "store" since Zen does just point to FF's "store." Which is an issue for basically all the Chromium-based forks that aren't Edge and Opera to my knowledge. I hate that those forks still lose things like uBO even if they still support it instead of the V3 stuff.
Those are very much not trivial things and are honestly what would kill all of FF and the forks if not able to happen. Funding would be the first thing needed for devs to keep going if their main income is from their work for Mozilla. It would be at least easier than completely starting from zero.
ff forks depend on mozilla's work. if mozilla dies, they die
also, again, making the browser is only part of mozilla's job
What I meant was that the could just start doing what they were already doing with the fork already having the same code under the hood. Kind of like how LibreOffice happened after the holders of OpenOffice pulled their shit. Obviously Mozilla is more than just FF. They just keep it from being directly donated to, which is at least some money they just seem to not want. I also know that pure donation-based funding is nowhere near what they lose Google's money. But it is very frustrating that basically all of their other services have options to donate or sub to them directly.
libreoffice has the document foundation behind it, which is basically a continuation of the oo.o team after oracle bought sun: https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/libreoffice-timeline/
mozilla is already an independent foundation. i don't think the situations are comparable at all
Except for Pale Moon, but it's not exactly a great experience to use.
what do you mean? does pale moon develop its own browser engine?
Ladybird is quickly shaping up.
See Brodie's interview of Andreas Kling, the lead developer of the Ladybird Browser: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IXdBndEipps
There are several clips of the interview on his channel if you don't have time to watch a 2 hour interview.
As for something taking place of the Mozilla Foundation itself, their activism in influencing web standards isn't really enough anymore anyways. They are silent about fingerprinting, which their main source of funding engages in openly to track users across devices.
this is a bafflingly absurd comparison. ladybird is nowhere near the same scale as mozilla. not only is firefox a fully functional browser, available in multiple platforms, but also creating the browser is only one of the relevant things mozilla does
If you read the chain, I wasn't comparing. It's possible in a couple years that engines like Ladybird or Servo will take the place of Gecko, at least in part.
Mozilla has no public plan in place to deal with a loss of Google's funding.
sadly many of the other relevant things these days are AI slop and ads
I'm not going to trade Firefox for a browser that is years away from being even remotely daily drivable. Even once/if it's able to render pages mostly correctly, it will still take a while after that to make it fast.
Even with Mozilla's funding, they're behind on implementing featues. Ladybird has much less funding and their current policy is to just rely on donations.
It's going to take years once it actually renders pages correctly to not only be fast but also secure.
And then it's going to take at least a decade for it to build the necessary ecosystem and ancillary tooling (use. Devtools) that other major browsers have.
And very likely unless it gains significant funding it will never catch up.
At the end of the day, browsers are absolutely crazy expensive to develop. It takes a significant number of engineers not only to maintain it but to build new features and keep up with web standards.
I was satisfied with how Andreas explained the funding situation of the Ladybird browser. They are relying on sponsorships, in addition to individual user donations, and also engaging in fundraising (but not in the venture capital sense).
As Andreas (loosely) put it; they are melting the hearts of people that echo some of the same views as yourself. They are being careful with how they scale and utilize funding, and they aim to make a codebase where everybody working on it is generally proficient in the entire codebase.
Mozilla's funding isn't sustainable and (in my opinion) their leadership are not reliable actors anymore - merely masquerading as activists. They do not utilize their money effectively. Relying on the money of an ad-tech/search/browser/etc. monopoly that is openly engaging in mass surveillance, and more recently, selling their AI for war isn't ethical or compatible with Mozilla's mission.
The problem is that no matter how ineffective you believe Mozilla to be, it's simply fucking expensive to develop a modern web browser.
According to openhub.net, Chromium has 35 million lines of code, Firefox 32 million, the WebKit engine has 29 million. Compare that to the Linux kernel which has 36 million lines of code.
The Servo engine has 7 million and is not usable.
Ladybird has 757,140 lines of code. There's just no way that they don't still need to develop manifold as much code as what they currently have, to support the features we expect from modern browsers. And they will need more money for that.
I guess we'll see how it all pans out.
I don't trust ladybird's dev. he is vocally against a minority, calling their existence politics
Source? I read that there was an issue with gender neutral pronouns not being used in the codebase (he stated that he has no problem with gender neutral pronouns), but I'm not a simp for him or somebody to argue for lesser evils.
Edit - finally found it: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
awesomekling commented on May 2, 2021Not the best look for him, but if this is all the meat to your accusation, then I am going to have to disagree with your statements of him being "vocally against a minority" and "calling somebody's existence politics" - it seems like a stretch as nothing was said that targeted a minority or calling somebody's existence politics. Was he being needlessly pedantic and insensitive to a contributor whose only contribution was that PR? Yes, I'd say so.
The use of gender neutral pronouns or pronouns in a more general sense are not politics, I strongly disagree with him. It was his choice to die on this hill in this instance, but they now use gender neutral pronouns. Again, if there is more evidence besides this singular statement, I'm all ears. Is it still concerning? Of course.