With the enshittification of all-things-Google, a lot of us have left Chromium-based browsers for Firefox. But still, over the last 15 years, Firefox has gone from 30%+ market share to about 6% now.
With the big backlash against them over the last week, I’ve seen a number of people advocating for Librewolf and Waterfox – Firefox forks focused on security and privacy – but if Firefox loses what little revenue it has left, what will become of the forks if Firefox dies?
Firefox’s codebase is of the scale of an operating system. I don’t think people realise just how complex web browsers are. If you took the drivers out of the kernel, Firefox dwarfs Linux.
It’s not something someone casually just forks and carries on.
Our codebase at work is bigger than Linux (with drivers) and Firefox combined, it gets real wild at scales bigger than a modern OS