Instead of funding Mozilla, perhaps funding the many non-Blink, non-Gecko browser authors out there would be more impactful? Even if it's indirectly through spreading responsible ownership of standards discussions and components like Skia/ANGLE/etc.

Disclaimer: independent browser author, unpaid.

I’d personally favor both — funding Mozilla as well as non-Blink/non-Mozilla browsers. We need stronger contenders for the present (like Mozilla) and stronger contenders for the future (others, assuming they’re still nascent and aren’t on the radar for most people). Though I support Mozilla for various reasons, I see value in supporting smaller competition that could ultimately help everyone (including Mozilla).

Please share your project and other independent browsers/engines. It’s been some time I’ve checked this space out (and I do know that I could also go to Wikipedia to get some information on this).

Does your independent browser properly render a page like the following:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

?

There should be a left column wide enough to read the text, and some transient menus which appear when mousing over the links there, and a switch to icon-only left column when you scrunch the window size small enough.

So the only competitor to Google’s monopoly on web browsers is... funded almost entirely by Google? Yikes

While Safari’s desktop market share is minimal and it really only competes with Chrome directly on Macs. No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.

> No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.

Mostly facetious, but who except Americans cares about iOS anymore? Total iPhone market share is down to ~15% of smart phones worldwide. Android has the big lead now and doesn't look like it will relinquish it soon. Chrome only feature, works on ~85% of smart phones today? "Ship it," says the bottom line.

It’s not about market share. It’s about where the money is.

Being equally facetious. No one cares about a bunch of poor people buying $40 Android phones running 4 year old operating systems...

Look at the countries where iOS market share is above 30% and compare it to per capita GDP

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe

That feeds the point about market share though, at what point is iOS too much of a luxury brand that doesn't support the effort to get over that hump of "works in Chrome, ship it"?

"I don't care if the Maserati owner can't buy these wiper blades, because look how many more GMs and Fords there are on the road every day. I bet the Maserati owner flogs themselves if they accidentally even drive in the rain, how often do you think they replace their wipers?"

iOS market share, and it's luxury brand demeanor, leaves it at great risk. I don't know where that line is, myself, but pinning hopes on iOS preventing a browser monoculture seems increasingly desperate looking at current world figures.

No one is marketing “worldwide” with the same website. In the US, Europe, Japan, etc if you want to reach the middle class - you have to care about iOS.

You’re not talking about reaching people that can afford Maseratis versus Fords. More like the people who can afford a car vs people who can barely afford a bicycle.

If I was trying to reach poor people in developing countries the equation may be different.

I hope you are right.

Why? Apple has been playing the game of vendor lock-in for quite some time now. How does it make the situation any better? Heck, they have changed - and set a nasty precedent - their hardware for this exact purpose.

Large companies usually don’t act with a single voice. The iPhone is what stopped IE’s ability to dictate what the web would work like — not entirely without help but it’s what forced companies to treat support for other browsers as mandatory rather than nice-to-have – and WebKit was a huge win for open source, eventually including Chrome.

That doesn’t mean that things like Lightning connectors don’t also happen but in the context of the web Apple has generally been helpful for fighting monoculture since it used to be a huge threat to their continued existence.

By the way, just came across: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/18/11/10/1656225/apple-bloc...

Ugh.

Thanks for your reply! Yes, I can see now how it would be beneficial in this case at least. :)

> To all those who evangelize Firefox, please also see if you can donate money to Mozilla

As a Firefox user for years I lost all the motivation to donate to Mozilla because of their mixed messages.

I would like my money to go to their engineering efforts, to make the best browser in the world. You could guess to what kind of "places" I don't want my money to go to. It's nice to advocate for the free web but in the end if your browser isn't competitive everything else will fall apart.

There's a lot of FUD with things like the Mr Robot "ad" (Mozilla wasn't paid for that) but there are legitimate concerns about some of their behavior. It wasn't so long ago that I clicked on anything Mozilla with joy, but now my brain bullshit detector is automatically deployed. I love reading about Servo and anything tech related but that's about it.