@onepict @chessert maybe a good project for a community college (or network of community colleges?) to run, and use to attract and train students and gain access to grant funding and donations?

@onepict I am surprised that the EU hasn't stepped up and funded this, not just a Mozilla fork but all of it. Being subservient to US tech right now, when US tech is in turn subject to the whims of a malignant fascist, seems insane. The money is there to fund thousands of developers, and there is so much open source code to start with (and yes, it will need serious investment to able to dump the big US companies).

I am American. But please just crush us.

@onepict Apache Foundation maybe ?
European initiative would be tremendous but nothing ever came from the EU from a software perspective since Tim Berners-Lee created the web so I'm a bit hopeless...

@onepict

True, but how do you fork the billion dollar a year funding from google ?

@onepict Right, and silicon valley endowed Mozilla with billions of dollars. Who is going to fund the alternative? Wikipedia?

@onepict Exactly. After decades as a Firefox loyalist, Vivaldi (lovely Scandinavian worker-owned anti-AI initiative that it is, still based on Chromium) is what I now rely on for workspaces and synchronisation and tab sharing and while I miss containers, the Firefox forks that I know of don't offer me that via account sign-in. So yes, I totally agree! Not least because Google's little "Look, we can't be monopolists, we're funding Mozilla" project isn't cutting it any more, not by a long shot, and not for a long while now. It's almost as if they *want* to seal their fate by alienating the ~5% of browser users they had left.

@onepict

For some time (2 - 3 yrs?) I've worried about the "veteran tech" folks who've taken senior roles at Mozilla.

Putting folks from #Google, #MS, #Salesforce, #Airbnb, #Meta, etc in charge seems antithetical to Mozilla's mission of "building a better internet."

I'd installed FF when Google was paying users to install FF circa 2005.*

And after 20 years, I switched to Vivaldi early this year.

* Haven't found much info about this bounty program except for a Slashdot post in 2005:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/11/05/1436226/google-paying-for-firefox-installs

EDIT: much more info about the referral program here

https://leonidasv.com/til-google-paid-websites-for-referring-firefox/

@onepict forking yes

@onepict that's what PaleMoon did: went hard-fork when Mozilla droped XUL, and they've been maintaining the code and adding support for more recent standards, without deprecating the old ones. It could benefit from a bit of an UI polish, but with my latest checks it's definitely looking like my next fallback when Firefox goes off the deep end.

@onepict hey @EUCommission theres topic for you

@onepict yes

@onepict
Tbh I've been thinking of contributing nee features to librewolf to help encourage that

@onepict yep, just another VC money seeking hustle. Like so many other SillyCon Valley denizens, they were great at spending money and poor at producing anything good.