> Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away as well
No, they won't. The community will pick them up and maintain them sensibly because there will be a need. The best thing that could happen to Firefox would be Mozilla dying.
If you disagree, you can look at decades of Linux being successful despite endless bellowing about how it couldn't survive until it did. It did because it fit a sorely needed open source operating system niche. BSD failed to meet that exactly because it was controlled at the time by selfish garbage organizations.
Linux is majorly being developed and maintained by paid company employees. What interest would companies have in maintaining Firefox? They don’t seem to be very interested in contributing to Firefox development today. Another data point is that Microsoft gave up on their original Edge browser engine because using Chromium was ultimately easier than chasing Chrome compatibility. Who will defend Firefox’s interests in WHATWG? In the best case, it would result in something akin to today’s Mozilla Foundation.
A “maintenance and security only” trajectory for Firefox would be most interesting to me. Microsoft couldn’t keep up with Chrome, but that’s because they are a company that needs to be seen doing flashy things.
Firefox developed by the community could reject frivolous new features and move a lot slower than Chrome. The web is heading in a shitty direction anyway, so moving slower is better.
New features are not cost-free. They translate to increased code size, increased browser build time and decreased performance. At some point the maintenance burden becomes too high, even for Google. I don't think they have an interest in endlessly adding new features.
It has stopped everyone except for Google and arguably Apple (I mean Apple is a bit of a weird case because they only have to support their platform really, and everyone kind of expects Safari on iOS to be a little restricted anyway).
Yeah, this is a worry. Google or someone will just come up with some not needed but slightly better (from a mere feature perspective, not from a privacy one) thing, that websites will use. Lets say a new codec or protocol for something like ... VR in the browser! or similar stuff. That thing will be somehow easier to use with Chrome and they will call it a "standard". Then people will try to use those websites using it and ... Oh? You use FF? Too bad! It doesn't work there! But you could use this "modern" and "secure" browser, _made by Google_! (and half-informed people online will claim FF doesn't implement the "standard") ... and tada, the badly informed user switches away. Not to forget, when they install Chrome, they probably are asked to make it their default browser.
It is all quite dystopian and depressing to think about.
It's not only about big thingys. It's any small difference in behavior where some developer tests only on the browser with 90% usage* and ignores the small niche of Firefox users, leaving them accidentally with a broken site. Some CSS property, some JS API whatever.
*) The stats are somewhat wrong, I guess there are more Firefox users with different privacy blockers than Chrome, thus hiding from Google analytics and similar, which people use for stats in higher percentage
> The web is heading in a shitty direction anyway, so moving slower is better.
I completely agree, though what I believe would happen if Firefox went to maintenance mode is that fewer and fewer websites would work on it. It's already the case that I sometimes need to switch to Chromium to do some things because those shitty websites only work on Chromium.
They could partner with Apple. As long as the courts don’t force Apple to allow Chromium on iOS, those shitty web sites will work on safari. Firefox tends to be ahead of safari in new features.
As an iOS user, I am happy that I cannot install alternative browsers. If I could, those shitty websites would force me to install Chrome. I currently have zero google branded apps on my phone. (Some third party apps that I need bundle google tracking crap…)
Edit: I guess I should add that I prefer Firefox to Safari, but I’ve watched devs try to only support Safari and Chrome. Once they do that, they almost always accidentally support Firefox too.
The main problem with Chrome is that anything you do in it goes into Google’s surveillance network (or at least you can’t prove that it doesn’t). If some sites require Chrome, we can use Chrome just for those sites (and vote with our feet, not very many websites are really necessary). A web browser sitting on the disk not running most of the time probably isn’t a huge problem.
A lot of the internet doesn’t even need JavaScript enabled. I think we over-state the compatibility nightmare. I mean it depends on your use patterns of course…
I can live without many of those bad websites (or rather "webapps").
But what's annoying me right now is that it happens more and more that passkeys work with Chromium but not Firefox. And I want passkeys (well, I want to log in with my Yubikeys).
There are Firefox derivatives, listed in the article, whose goals are roughly that. But I don’t think they can be successful long-term, meaning other than for a 0.1% niche, if they don’t keep up with web standards. And currently Mozilla is doing the heavy lifting for that.
If you're fine only being able to browse existing and past websites, sure. Don't forget to donate to the Internet Archive or make your own local copies, though, or that'll become infeasible relatively quickly too.
It isn’t an exact match to what you have claimed, but if it was going to start happening I’d expect it to have started by now. But for example, my favorite sites works fine in Lynx, let alone old versions of Firefox.
I really don’t get it. It isn’t obvious to me if people are really experiencing compatibility issues, or if it is just a boogeyman…
In many cases, you are not experiencing compatibility issues precisely because Firefox is still being actively maintained.
For new web technologies, the consequences of Firefox not supporting them is obvious. But even for existing sites, Mozilla is maintaining a long list of "Web Compatibility" patches that can be updated outside of regular browser updates (which is important for long-term support versions and managed environments): https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/07/firefox-68-bigints-contras...
That's exactly the type of thankless but essential work that I fear people are always underestimating when talking about "just developing a new web engine". It's probably difficult but still feasible to become "standards complete"; becoming and remaining compatible with HTML/JS as it's actually written in the real world seems much harder.
At the time of early Linux, BSD was still a UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group project, though the CSRG would disband after 4.4BSD was released sometime in 1994-1995. BSD had a user base even in the days when using BSD required an AT&T Unix license. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an effort to replace the AT&T bits with open source bits. This reached a breakthrough in 1991 when all that was remaining was six kernel files, which 386BSD was able to fill in that gap. 1991 was the year Linux 0.01 was released.
Unfortunately, BSD’s growth was stunted due to the lawsuit between AT&T (USL) and BSDi, where there were allegations over the open source code:
By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had already captured the attention of those wanting a FOSS Unix-like operating system. However, it’s quite remarkable how FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD found niches in the 1990s and are still around today. They may lack Linux’s market share, and admittedly they don’t have the same levels of driver and application support as Linux, but they are excellent operating systems that serve their niches well.
> The community will pick them up and maintain them sensibly because there will be a need.
The community can't offer the resources and competence necessary for maintaining a Browser on the same high level as Mozilla is doing now. The community would likely also not be able to influence, or even just follow, the workgroups for web-standards. Ultimately, they would be left out and have to play a game of catch.
Of course, how much of that would be necessary is a different question, but long term, in a world without Mozilla, any Firefox-fork would become slowly useless, or even fast if Google decides to abandon the free web and go down a different route. If you want to see how useful this will end, look at all the other browser out there which are not Blink-based, a Firefox-fork or Safari. They do exist, and they all are pretty awful for general usage.
Ladybird is on the trajectory to do this. I agree it's an enormous project and different from a lot of other open-source offerings, but I think there very well could be even corporate offerings support. They'd support it the same way Linux and other big projects (like what Red Hat and Apache do) because there's business needs for browsers that aren't Chrome or Safari.
It's not all, but it doesn't take much imagining some industries want a stable open source browser with, say, security features they can toggle in to their standards. I hear people here all the time who say they would pay for a good browser but won't because Mozilla doesn't spend it on the browser. I can see a productive marriage.
Ladybird has the advantage that they can start with a new architecture, and they seem willing to sacrifice features. But I doubt we will see them become a real competitor for Chrome and Firefox. And we will have to see whether they will at least support DRM-services like Netflix, YouTube, etc. making them a viable alternative for the casual users, giving some foundation for gaining traction in mainstream.
the owners of the original code that BSD is based on. BSD was free, but the code owners thought otherwise, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, which stopped it from filling the needs that linux then ended up filling.
No, they won't. The community will pick them up and maintain them sensibly because there will be a need. The best thing that could happen to Firefox would be Mozilla dying.
If you disagree, you can look at decades of Linux being successful despite endless bellowing about how it couldn't survive until it did. It did because it fit a sorely needed open source operating system niche. BSD failed to meet that exactly because it was controlled at the time by selfish garbage organizations.