Google's search deal with Mozilla is such a sizeable portion of its overall income that without it, Firefox would struggle to compete - or even survive,
I’m not that pessimistic, development for Ladybird seems to be going well and those crazy people are building it from scratch rather than basing it on Chromium or Firefox. There’s also Servo. When Mozilla dies the forks will hang on for a while then we’ll have alternatives.
These are projects sitting years, maybe even a decade, away from maturity. IF web standards and capabilities don’t change at all over the next 5-10 years.
Hopefully that puts this into perspective. These are really cool projects, but without a massive influx of engineering effort and organization, they will likely be perpetually, hopelessly, behind the standard rate of change required of browsers. Nevermind meeting the current standards of performance, security, observability, ecosystem, user and developer experience.
It’s always good to check in on these projects yearly, see how it’s going, see if they are accelerating or slowing down. Eventually one of them will take off, and potentially leech resources from other similar projects.
Though, the nature of FOSS is that 1000 people will work on 200 different projects all trying to do the same thing, instead of combining and organizing efforts to go after the same unified goal.
This isn’t really a statement of fault but rather a statement of reality. Without dedicated full-time organization, this is usually how scattered resources solve problems. Which is a core problem here in that dedicated organization to rapidly grow the engineering effort for a particular project usually requires funding and full-time employees. To both market it to engineers as an interesting project, mature documentation and DevX, mature the onboarding experience for devs, and to handle the organizational aspects of distributing said work.
This is going to probably sound like a stupid idea, but I mean this earnestly:
Can we just make Internet 2? Just a new underlying protocol with less restrictive browser requirements, sure you might need to use Chrome to log in to your bank, but we could just host everything else on the fedinet. Just like back in the old days, webrings hosted on closet servers and rented racks.
Google didn’t build the internet so why do they have so much clout about how it’s run? We can just start over again with self hosting. This time we even have all the knowledge we gained from already doing it the first time. I’m picturing an entire second layer of internet unlinked with the first one. Kind of like onion sites I guess, the more I think about this the more I’m realizing that the tor network is probably exactly what I’m talking about. Just that, but instead of hosting pirated content or weird porn or bitcoin assassins it’s just a low stakes noncorporate internet protocol. You probably won’t want to do a lot of transactions on it, but social media or personal websites or video hosting would probably be fine.
Any fork will die a slow and painful death of it can’t get the necessary funding for project management and maintainer salaries.
It will also dwindle, hard, towards irrelevancy.
In world where the only viable browser is one owned and operated by Google.
I’m not that pessimistic, development for Ladybird seems to be going well and those crazy people are building it from scratch rather than basing it on Chromium or Firefox. There’s also Servo. When Mozilla dies the forks will hang on for a while then we’ll have alternatives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2YGzaaDXgQ
I’m familiar with them.
These are projects sitting years, maybe even a decade, away from maturity. IF web standards and capabilities don’t change at all over the next 5-10 years.
Hopefully that puts this into perspective. These are really cool projects, but without a massive influx of engineering effort and organization, they will likely be perpetually, hopelessly, behind the standard rate of change required of browsers. Nevermind meeting the current standards of performance, security, observability, ecosystem, user and developer experience.
It’s always good to check in on these projects yearly, see how it’s going, see if they are accelerating or slowing down. Eventually one of them will take off, and potentially leech resources from other similar projects.
Though, the nature of FOSS is that 1000 people will work on 200 different projects all trying to do the same thing, instead of combining and organizing efforts to go after the same unified goal.
This isn’t really a statement of fault but rather a statement of reality. Without dedicated full-time organization, this is usually how scattered resources solve problems. Which is a core problem here in that dedicated organization to rapidly grow the engineering effort for a particular project usually requires funding and full-time employees. To both market it to engineers as an interesting project, mature documentation and DevX, mature the onboarding experience for devs, and to handle the organizational aspects of distributing said work.
This is going to probably sound like a stupid idea, but I mean this earnestly:
Can we just make Internet 2? Just a new underlying protocol with less restrictive browser requirements, sure you might need to use Chrome to log in to your bank, but we could just host everything else on the fedinet. Just like back in the old days, webrings hosted on closet servers and rented racks.
Google didn’t build the internet so why do they have so much clout about how it’s run? We can just start over again with self hosting. This time we even have all the knowledge we gained from already doing it the first time. I’m picturing an entire second layer of internet unlinked with the first one. Kind of like onion sites I guess, the more I think about this the more I’m realizing that the tor network is probably exactly what I’m talking about. Just that, but instead of hosting pirated content or weird porn or bitcoin assassins it’s just a low stakes noncorporate internet protocol. You probably won’t want to do a lot of transactions on it, but social media or personal websites or video hosting would probably be fine.
The thing you describe is probably I2P and epsites.
Even worse - it looks like Google might be forced to sell Chrome to some AI company.