Importantly, that was also the reason that Brendan Eich used Chromium as a base for Brave, rather than Firefox. Had that even not occurred, we might be in a position where more than one organization had a business interest is Firefox, which would be a complete game changer.
I really doubt that is true. Speaking from the experience of working in a project that tried to build "enterprise Chrome OS, but based on Firefox instead", I can tell you that Firefox is still a lot harder to fork and customize than Chromium is.
thanks, I'm sure there were more factors involved than just the firing, so that would make a lot of sense.
Given your experience, If one were to fork Firefox entirely from Mozilla, very loosely, if one were a non-profit dedicated to just the browser and not trying to build a diversified company around it, what type of funding do you think an org would need to keep up with web technology changes and build a foundational engineering team?
No idea, because honestly part of the reason our project failed was that we he had zero in-house knowledge of browser internals.
Mind you, our idea was to build a "browser-based OS", which meant at the time that our initial design was customize Ubuntu to the point that it could boot straight into a single-user windowless Firefox and to build all the "shell" as extensions. (I wrote a bit about on https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...)
The problem is that Gecko is not that customizable, everything in Firefox is tightly integrated, and they abandoned all initiatives to make Gecko embeddable -- and this was a very big mistake imo.
If Mozilla tried to address this, I think many Chromium-based browsers today would at least try the possibility to be Gecko-based.
> Importantly, that was also the reason that Brendan Eich used Chromium as a base for Brave
This is factually incorrect, the worst kind of incorrect. Brave Browser was initially built on Graphene, which uses Gecko. They then switched to Electron because Graphene was too raw, and from there to Chromium. Also, Brave contributes basically nothing to Chromium, so why would you think they would contribute anything to Gecko?
Not linkable, just my memory from a podcast interview at the time. IIRC the firing wasn't the only reason to go Chromium-based, but it made the decision a lot easier
