Thats the beauty to silly idealists who pretend they can’t understand that hundreds of employees getting paid full time wont materialize out of thin air to keep a massive project like a web browser alive in the absence of that structure.

Do people realize that if Firefox dies (in the many ways that could be interpreted), all of these downstream forks will also die right?

Like, the work to in essence remove unwanted parts of a code base is admirable but its an utterly miniscule fraction of the work that goes into maintaining a modern browser, keeping up with standards, sending people to be voices at conventions, etc.

Literally Firefox.

I feel like the reasons are obvious and I am constantly amazed at people who choose offshoots that end up having problems jsut as bad or worse than Chrome.

• Firefox actually uses an engine independent of Chromium

• Firefox keeps developer documentation for the actual open web in a a clear fashion better than anyone else with MDN.

• Firefox is responsible for all of the heavy lifting for any of the browsers downstream of it that people seem to want to switch to so that Mozilla is less supported and the browsers they are on also break (which is bizzare footgun behaviour in my opinion, and exactly why the people who are idealists inherently can’t win. They shoot themselves in the foot with idealism so hard that companeis don’t even have to care about their opinions).

• Firefox has more resistant than the engine makers of any other browser to anti autonomy web changes like Chromes manifest 3, tvarious new tracking mechanisms and more.

Excuse a little bit of snark at hypothetical responses below, but Im just so frustrated Ill let off a little steam here:

bUt Ai.

So they have a few AI features you have to purposefully find or stumble into, and that means you are going to do everything in your power to make sure your last actual chance to avoid completely Google domination dies too?

You are basically begging for the even more intense enshitification that will come if Firefox actually dies.

bUt SoMeOnE eLsE cAn CoNtInUe DeVeLoPmEnT

Oh yeah? Someone else is going to take on this project with a massive amount of legacy code, inside knowledge and hundreds of people working on it constantly to keep it completely up to date??

You must have been confused when I mentioned above Mozilla does the heavy lifting for the browsers down stream. Just because someone makes a fork that removes features doesnt mean they are equipped to handle the level of work done in the code they are downstream of.

Anyways, the bottom line is, for now, if you actually value open source, the answer is Firefox.