this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Does anybody expect them to say anything else? Web engine development is more costly than even OS development, we're talking costs that often run into the hundreds of millions per year – it's virtually impossible to fund unless you're a giant like Google or being funded by someone with very deep pockets, like... er... Google.
Even MS bailed and ceded power to Google, because it simply didn't make financial sense. Apple does it but they're pretty meh in terms of implementing standards and such... there's a reason 3rd party WebKit browsers are rare. They comparatively run it on a shoestring budget, and they're Apple FFS - their wealth is practically limitless!
People aren't going to start paying to use Firefox, and that money needs to come from somewhere. The community rejects giants paying Mozilla (understable sentiment), rejects paying for Firefox (also understandable), and rejects Mozilla selling data (definitely understandable). Some say donations, but be real, that won't make hundreds of millions per year.
What is the solution here? I'm not trying to be contrarian I just don't know what they can actually do. You'd hope that the Linux Foundation or something would chip in, but nope, they help Chromium instead. I worry for the future of web browsers.
That said, I'm also deeply uncomfortable with Google being able to pay to be default search on so many products. It gives them a huge advantage. I don't want them to have that advantage. It's anticompetitive and scummy as fuck.
Mozilla are definitely between a rock and a hard place here. I don't like some of the decisions they make, but damn, I'm not sure I have the smarts to come up with better ones, given the position and market they're in.
If I'm correct, the linux foundation took up development of the Servo engine when Mozilla dropped it. So they don't focus entirely on Chromium, and may be the ones to take back after Mozilla for Firefox/Gecko engine if needed (you did not said that ofc, but i think it's important to mention). There's still a long way to go with new engines such as Servo and Ladybird, but that may be good alternatives in the future.
I don't think Mozilla had any involvement in Servo.
They started the whole thing. They invented and implemented a whole programming language to implement the thing. Then they integrated Stylo (Servo's CSS engine) and a couple smaller bits into Firefox which made it a hell a lot faster. Then they set Rust free and shelved Servo because from the perspective of Firefox going forwards with rewriting more in Rust would've been a lot of investment for diminishing returns. Stylo was the big one, enabling before unseen parallelism in rendering.
Servo, even with FSFE funding, still has ways to go. Ladybird, I wonder why they even bother. If they want a C++ browser engine that hasn't been touched by big money then there's KHTML, Webkit/Chromium's direct ancestor. There's a reason KDE dropped development: It wasn't worth the effort. Qt wasn't willing to pick it up either.