The talk about Firefox saddened me a lot, it was really sad, I defend Firefox but yeah, its getting harder by the day

Just fork the code?

In response to Noah’s statement. A modern competitive browser is not only complex in the extreme and constantly having to support new standards, it also has to interpret somtimes gigs of code written by random people on a daily basis making it a huge easily accessible attack surface.

There’s only a limited supply of people with time-earned expertise to work on something like that, they’re in extremely high demand and you need a lot of them.

A fork of that magnitude won’t produce a secure competitior unless it’s taken on by a major corporation that hires a lot of the former FF developers.

Would you pay for a browser?

A paid browser is a serious problem.

• It gatekeeps arguably one of the most critical peices of software from countries that can’t afford it or at best forces most of the World to deal with nagware or some other disadvantage.
• It’s anti-FOSS because otherwise the license is a fork away from being removed. The least-worst solution i’ve seen is forcing people to compile it themselves and do it again every update (see: most people just won’t update).
• If a license is required to request an update, it opens the door to interdiction targetted at single individuals by billing information which may be compelled by a gov’t agency. If they’re savvy and use words like “insurrection” I have my doubts on Mozilla’s leadership to keep a clear head.

That isn’t to say it should be free but it shouldn’t come at the cost of those who have less, FOSS, journalists and so on… Wikipedia’s model is pretty good and things like just having a colorful icon for the app got me to pay for Plumble. There’s a lot of avenues for funding.

You could minimize amount on work need on fork, by limiting your chances to disabling unwanted features and then integrate all changes that are integrated into Firefox’s master, making sure those features keep being disabled.

All that resource-consuming work will be copied from Firefox. Making a fork still won’t be easy, but should be totally meanable by small team.