• I think his point is that as long as Google is the primary funding source for Mozilla it’s not worth relying on Firefox because there’s always the risk Google will demand Mozilla capitulates and tows the line. Once/If Mozilla secure independent funding then they can be ‘trusted’

      • Oh, I see. For some reason, I thought they were referring to content creators and others who profit from Google ads or something like that.

        And yeah, there’s a lot that Mozilla’s corporate branch needs to sort out, but Firefox and its forks are the only viable alternatives to chromium browsers right now, so people should still care about that.

        “Perfection is the enemy of progress” … or something like that

        •  BaconIsAVeg   ( @BaconIsAVeg@lemmy.ml ) 
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          9 months ago

          Making a browser isn’t terribly hard, and there’s dozens of ‘browsers’ (see nyxt, qutebrowser, vimb, brave, vivaldi, etc). Making a browser engine is hard, and expensive, which is why all of the alternatives i’ve used are either chromium or webkit based. The webkit ones seem to crash on anything with complex javascript. The chromium engine ones work great, however that doesn’t stop Google from making changes to the engine which people are up in arms about.

      • Mozilla cannot be unplugged on demand. That would cause Google to become a monopoly, and they would be held to extreme harsh laws by the EU. Like in the case of IE6 back in the day.

        Google does not want that, so they donate to Mozilla to keep Firefox as a competitor. And Firefox has to do jack shit in return other than exist.

        The only way Firefox could be unplugged is if a new non-chromium browser becomes one of the big browsers.

        • This is all technically correct. Although I think it’s a little naive to say that a corporation “cannot” do something today. There are lots of things they technically cannot do yet it happens on daily basis.