As the guy from whose line said: You don't need a million dollars to do nothing. Look at my cousin. He’s broke and he doesn’t do shit.

Is Google your default search engine? If so, you should send them an invoice. :)

So in market terms, you are infinitely more efficient!

The DoJ is arguing in court that Google should be barred from paying off Mozilla because of Google's search monopoly

https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...

Last I checked they have some money from the Yahoo settlement. But nowhere near something they can use to operate in perpetuity.

It's good to know they have brought in new talents.

Note that Mozilla Corporations, Mozilla Ventures, and Mozilla.ai mentioned in the articles are all subsidiaries of Mozilla Foundation. If there are issues with the subsidaries' leadership, they could be easily removed by the foundation. If there are issue with Mozilla foundation's leadership then, according to the bylaws, it's not possible for the foundation's board to be removed unless they self remove.

Section 3.3 Election Of Directors, Term. All directors of the Foundation shall be elected annually by the Board of Directors and shall hold office until their respective successors are elected and have qualified, or until their death, resignation or removal.

Section 3.5 Removal. Any director may be removed from office, with or without cause, by the vote of a majority of the other directors then in office.

https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pd...

That doesn't sound like she and her fattened board were ousted at all.

Surman same problematic "leadership" type.

That a browser either maintain your own entire browser engine or you can't support additional types of extensions is a false dichotomy. Vivaldi chooses nto to support it just as much as the choose to integrate VPN, an email client, RSS, Atom, a completely custom UI, and probably other things I'm forgetting that Chromium doesn't ship for them.

What is changing is what Chromium will maintain, what Vivaldi decides to continue supporting is their own choice. My guess is it will be more random crap as well, but not because Chromium is/isn't supporting those things.

I’m not super familiar with Servo; I’d heard of the Mozilla layoffs but hadn’t followed the work. I believe I can now split my hopes between the Ladybird and Servo; thank you!

Ladybird is moving to Swift IIRC?

Who is going to fund Firefox if not Mozilla? Maybe a new organization can pop up or maybe a new one won't.

> why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way chromium is?

Ease of integration. It's impossible to integrate Firefox compared to chromium. Unless this is solved, Firefox will die. The hope is new engines like Servo (maybe ladybird), where they are actually putting time and resources to make it easy to integrate. I'll never switch to chromiumia, but as soon as one of those new engines is mature enough, I'm definitely dropping Firefox.

Yeah, I dont like either, but I wont support Mozilla closed mind and stupidity. They pretty much abandoned Firefox (when was the last time they really updated the browser, other than incremental small corrections?), and I refuse to give my money to fund the type of shit they expend it.

They should have through about that before going all political in their positions as an organization. It was easy with the cushion of google and federal goverment money under them (impressive how easy is to do "charity" and activism with other people money).

Now I wanna see if they will put their wallets where their mouth is, and apparently, they will not.

Every time I receive a e-mail from mozilla fundation asking for 10 bucks to fund their precious inclusivity program that have nothing to do with firefox, because they lost goverment funds, I just laught and think they should ask for a loan from their previous CEO, since she receive 7 mi in one year. I just delete the e-mail after that.

> My question to the FOSS community is why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way Chrome is?

I actually looked into this. Say you consider yourself as part of the FOSS community, and want to build a new browser, and you start to look for your options. The only things readily available as libraries are webkit (currently owned and open sourced by Apple) and webkit-gtk (based on the former). Apple is like Apple and doesn't really want you to use their open source lib, so even though webkit-gtk team made it happen anyway, good luck if you want to do it yourself. If you decide to just use webkit-gtk, you've made a decision similar to lots of other members of the FOSS community in this area (luakit, the Rust webview crate, etc.). Another option is Qt WebEngine. It's based on Chromium. It's part of the Qt ecosystem and though I think you can use it as a standalone library, carving it out still requires some engineering. So these are the options that are available as libraries. And where are the Firefox ones? Servo makes it clear at the beginning of The Servo Book that it isn't available as a library yet. And Gecko? Firefox source doesn't even include a directory named gecko. It's so tightly coupled with the other parts that you'll need a lot of engineering to carve it out. And this is in contrast to Blink, the engine of Chromium, which is nicely placed in its own directory, having its own webpage with some learning resources.

My guess is that browsers like ice weasel, libre wolf, while good pieces of software, they dont have a whole company behind them.

Libre wolf "about us" page, dont even have the developers real name, only their online handle.

The closest of a "professional" port of firefox is pretty much Zen Browser.

Is what I been using, alternatin with Brave Browser.

How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.

Thunderbird is quite healthy and received $8.6M in donations in 2023[0] which is used to employ 24 people[1].

Unlike Firefox, donations are used to fund development.

[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

[1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

I did change quite significantly in recent times, so there is certainly work done.

On the other hand it is a mail client and it does exactly what it is supposed to do for years on end. And I believe it is the best mail client too.

> It's not long until Brave won't be able to support Manifest V2

That's true but not that big of a deal in their case. The built-in ad blocker works quite well and removes the need to run uBlock Origin.

I use Brave and it's totally fine. People love to complain about it on HN but I have never had any bad experiences.