I just saw a post complaining about the Mozilla layoffs.
I wanted to point out that the vast majority of their income (over 85% in 2022) is from having Google as the default search engine - Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
Expect things to get worse.
Please don’t assume it was just a cruel choice.
You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.
If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don’t think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don’t do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome’s grasp on the web.
Because let’s face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don’t really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It’s because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they’ve taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).
They need to empower others to build the browser that they can’t. That’s what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.
Building a free (as in beer) engine for others to build great browsers on, is a pretty thankless task. Individuals may take pride in such a task, but for a company that needs to pay their staff, it’s a fruitless endeavor. I assume it’s much harder to earn money, if people are not using your software itself, but the forks that add all the cool stuff.
I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.
But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you’re predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn’t seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it’s only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.
Rather than guessing at the motives of others, let’s remember Hanlon’s razor.