I doubt it. This company seems to have major structural problems, and cutting some stuff here and there isn't going to fix it. Its expenses are huge, and it pays its executives obscene amounts of money, and meanwhile they've been wasting tons of money on stuff like Pocket, AI crap, and now they're pissing off supporters by getting into ads.

I think what we really need is for a new company to get started in some other country, where the cost of living and the cost of executive salaries is much, much cheaper. Have that company fork the Firefox codebase, and then only concentrate on Firefox (Newfox? Betterfox?) browser development and maintenance, and nothing else. They could work more like Wikipedia, just taking donations and building up an endowment with that to fund themselves, and keeping their operations very lean so they don't need that much money to begin with.

What they should have done was build an endowment when they were getting crazy google money. It obviously wasn't going to last forever.

Yes, definitely. It would have been easy back then to build an endowment if they hadn't blown money on so much BS and prepared for a future where they wouldn't have all that money coming in. I think it's too late for them now, and I don't see how they can possibly trim things down into a lean, efficient organization, especially not in the US. That's why I think someone in a cheaper country needs to fork the thing and take over Firefox development. This will probably have to wait until Mozilla is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy though.

Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?

They could fork Firefox or Chromium, poach some current developers, hire some more, and assert a strong presence on standards.

Microsoft gave up on building a Web Browser engine and you think a government can? Browser engines are really hard to build. They requires a lot of (very expensive) niche technical talent. Not to mention the need to keep up with the rate of Google's improvements to Chrome/Blink. We're at a point where Chrome has a 10 year head start to any other engine other than Firefox, building a general purpose new engine from scratch is basically off the table, and hard forking Chrome/Blink is also off the table (because why would you toss the ~1bn$ Google puts into chrome every year?). We're in a world of a single browser engine, no way to go back for the foreseeable future.

>you think a government can?

Do I think a government can fund a group of developers to fork some existing code and run with it? Yes, I do. Radical concept, I know...

I think you severely underestimate the size and complexity of something like Chromium. Not every project is fork and work material.

Well, a bunch of volunteers seem to have little trouble forking Firefox and creating Pale Moon, Waterfox, LibreWolf, and IceCat. You think a government can't do that? All they have to do really is throw some money to these existing groups.

Why do you keep bringing up Chromium anyway? We're talking about Firefox here.

Yes, yes, and now Pale Moon is four years of web development out of date, Waterfox is not really recommended, LibreWolf has some sketchy history and so on. Forking is easy - keeping it updated and secure is hard.

A government funding a 1 billion dollars a year software project? That would never fly in any country.

There's no way you need $1B/year to properly fund the ongoing development and maintenance of an existing web browser. The Ladybird team is making an all-new browser from scratch for almost nothing. Just because Mozilla is wasting so much money doesn't mean you actually need that much to do the same job.

> you think a government can? Browser engines are really hard to build.

As opposed to CERN being easy to build!? I'd say is totally doable, but it doesn't promise filling anyone's pockets at the moment so traction is hard. Who knows, maybe in the future..

Easily doable, let me guess you never worked on a browser engine?

I haven't, but the Ladybird browser devs are doing so at this moment, and they don't seem to need billions of dollars.

>Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?

As with many things, it's just like Dark Helmet said in Spaceballs: "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."

Not to say that the US (or Mozilla or Google) is evil and the EU and LATAM are good (LATAM in particular is a really screwed up place, with a few exceptions that aren't as broken like Chile), but while the US obviously has its problems and does really stupid stuff (see the current election), other places do incredibly stupid stuff too (see Germany disarming, shutting down all its nuclear power and trying to make itself dependent on Russian fossil fuel energy). Honestly, I think the main reason the US is still doing as well as it is (see the strength of the USD) is because everyone else is so busy shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun.

So yes, I totally agree: theoretically it should be pretty simple to just fork Firefox (or Chromium, though I think the former is a much better choice so we don't the whole web dependent on a single browser engine, if for no other reason), poach some current devs, hire some new ones locally, and then become the new "open standard". But good luck getting some national government (or even a group of them, like with the EU) having some vision and backing such a move.

Not sure that'd even work. The best developers would get paid a lot more by working for a for-profit company, probably US-based. It's just too tempting.

IME, the best developers tend to be genuinely passionate about principles.

They aren't necessarily working for Mozilla now, because they can see right through a lot of obviously bad moves Mozilla has made, and ridiculously overpaid executives.

"Go where the biggest paycheck is" is people who care more about career than mission. Why would you even want those people, unless you can't get the mission ones.

Trick is to start some sort of commune in Colombia and attract talent with the local amenities. Nice private community full of 10-15 software engineers, private chefs, security, etc would be less than $1-2k/month per person. Maybe turn it into a vacation spot: “tired of your work? Take 6 month sabbatical to come party in LATAM while making meaningful software. Work hard/play hard - apply by linking to the most meaningful PR you have contributed to an FOSS project.”

Honestly not a bad plan.

After this election, not a horrible idea, but I'm not sure Columbia is the best choice for a destination. Panama would probably be a lot better, and you wouldn't need to make a commune. Panama City is a pretty decent-looking place, and even has a subway system that makes the public transit in the US look bad. Costa Rica would be good too.

Go for it. But based on reaction to my prior comment it looks like everyone wants someone to drop everything and dedicate their life to a web browser, but nobody wants to do it themselves.

Maybe, but if you actually want to poach people, you have to make large pay offers to get them to jump ship. So instead of just paying the prevailing rate for SWEs in $country, they need to actually look at how much those devs are making in the US and match that. Sure, it'll be expensive, but if it's only a handful of key people, it doesn't matter.

a EU funded/developed browser would have a built-in blacklist. malinformation is the greatest threat to so-called democracies

A built-in blacklist is fine. It's trivially easy to download some source code and delete a blacklist and recompile.

not that easy if your money source is your competitor... conflict of interest

Google being the source of their money did not, in any way, prevent Mozilla from spending their money more wisely and putting some into an endowment.

And yet, it did.

How exactly?

Either they need to do drastic cuts & focus on fundamentals. Or a fork with less funding entanglements can. Or an alternative project like LadyBird can.

What's wrong with Firefox? It's my daily browser and works great. What am I missing?

The managemant behind firefox does not care about web browsers. They carre about their vision of social justice and the browser is just a tool to get funds for that.

That doesn't really have anything to do with how it works though. I was looking more into its actual operation as a browser.

I use FF as well. I think the problem is lack of focus on core workflows. This is a problem with all major browsers.

For example, why is the address bar so tiny on high resolution screens? One would think this is an easy fix that would improve the UX for many people. Yet years go by with unresolved issues in the trackers.

> For example, why is the address bar so tiny on high resolution screens

Because in the year of our lord 2024, we for some reason still don't know how big a pixel is. Making a textbox 1cm tall should be trivial, but is for some reason either impossible or never done.

I would be happy to be able to adjust the font size. It's almost as if these orgs don't use their product...or the effort to make this small change would require a major re-architecture.

For a browser UI 1cm is NEVER a useful measurement. 1cm is useful if you are writing CAD software (which you could write as a web app so firefox should know what 1cm is only for purposes of supporting such web apps), so you can touch a physical part to your monitor and visually verify it fits before having a one off part made to do further verification of your design. For everything else what matters isn't the physical size, but if it is visible, which in turn is a function of how far away the monitor is from your eyeballs and your glasses. My phone, laptop, desktop, and movie room (I don't have all of the above, but someone does) all need different sizes of address bar to be useful.

What's high resolution for you? I'm using Firefox on a 32 inch 4k display and would not want the address bar to be bigger. Of course I could make it smaller / bigger thanks to Firefox supporting custom CSS

If management cared about the browser they would have never had this staff in the first place, a similar amount of staff for programming, testing, and marketing their browser would have been effective at making a better browser and getting more market share.

It's funded by its main competitor.

Now that few people use it, major sites are not just no longer testing on Firefox they are actively blocking it. Slack, for instance.

Source? I've been using Slack through Firefox for years, and I remember only one issue - huddles didn't work at the beginning, but it was a minor one, since I use Zoom.

Huddles worked just fine if you spoofed the user agent, they actively blocked the functionality on firefox.

I went back and investigated: Huddles is blocked and I was using a user agent switcher to get around it. Then I had to switch back to Firefox agent string so Google Meet would work. Apparently my user agent switcher has out of date agent strings for Firefox so Slack started blocking me entirely.

So Slack was blocking me entirely because it thought I was using an out of date Firefox but using the default user agent string it works again.

I use Slack on Firefox for over 3 years now, without any issues. I've never seen any blocking attempt.