this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Not everyone?
Does anyone?
Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it's kinda sad to watch a previously good org die
Fork, blah, blah, blah.
When one of these forks doesn't depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.
So just stick with firefox?
Well, if users don't the source of the actual work, then none of the forks survive. I don't know what people think are going to happen.
Shitting on Mozilla seems to be a competitor sport around here sometimes, and it's fucking self-defeating. In 5 years, there will only be the Chromium engine, and then Google will shut down the opensource side like they pretty much did with Android. And then we're truly fucked.
I've been using librewolf over the last week. Honestly.... It's a drop in replacement for me
Does it support containers and sync settings between installs on multiple systems? If so I’m in without hesitation.
Yeah
Thanks. Just set it up on one of my computers. I’ll be doing the rest as time allows. There’s a lot I love about it already, familiar but with better defaults, and including search engines like SearXNG. I hope enough of us can switch and send a message to Mozilla, though that feels very unlikely to stop the enshittification.
oh they're full on corpo now it sounds like, which is too bad. They should have gone the proton route and go full non-profit org controlled, but here we are.
It's basically hardened Firefox, you can do all the same things here too. Alas using it with an account kind of defeats the purpose. However you can use your account once to sync everything.
The problem with those sorts of forks is they still require moz to do most of the heavy lifting.
If Firefox stopped being developed they'd all pretty much freeze in place.
I agree to a point, I think some people would pick up the development. Idk if it'd be librewolf or if someone would fork off that, but if Firefox completely shit the bed I think someone would pick up the mantle a bit. We wouldn't have nearly the release cadence of firefox though.
I don't want to see Mozilla shutdown because Google no longer pays them, or due to the loss of another funding source.
Diversifying their income sources is a good thing.