• AncientBlueberry@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    Google accounts for some 80%+ of Mozilla’s revenue. Firefox struck a different kind of deal with the devil than chromium browsers, but Google is the one pulling the strings.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      Bit of a weird thought, but I wonder also if they see Mozilla as a sort of controlled opposition too? As in, keep Firefox around so they don’t get in trouble over antitrust or something like that?

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 years ago

        Mozilla.org is the corpse of Netscape that Google keeps animated so that it looks like they have competition when they really don’t.

        The existence of Firefox is something they can point to to say they’re not a monopoly. The fact that 80% of the revenue Firefox receives is from Google means that Google effectively controls them. Mozilla has to weigh every decision against the risk that it will cause Google to withdraw their funding. That severely restricts the choices they’re willing to consider.

        Firefox is only 5% of browsers, so it really doesn’t matter to Google if that 5% of users considers using a different search engine. Because of the Firefox user base, many of them will have already switched search engines, and because Google is such a dominant player, many others would switch back to Google if the browser used a different default. So, maybe 10% of that 5% would permanently switch search engines if Google stopped paying. Is that really worth billions per year? Probably not. But, pretending like you have competitors in the browser space and using that to push back on antitrust, that’s definitely worth billions per year.

    • drathvedro@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 years ago

      Yep, just like slack, spotify, and anything else looking fancy while wasting few gigs of ram to just open. They’re built on electron, which is practically chrome without tabs.

      • qwertychomp@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        I wish they could bring back mozilla prism. Like all this electron web app shit is popular, so we don’t we use the faster and more efficient browser engine and use gecko!

    • LeTak@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Chrome was not always based on chromeium. Chrome was based on Apple WebKit until 2013 when they forked WebKit and made the Blink engine.

  • Amy :3@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Brave, Vivaldi, Edge and other chromium browsers are forks of the main chromium project. They can decide whether to include or exclude features from mainstream chromium.

    As far as I know, Brave and Vivaldi will keep Manifest V2 extension support and said that they will not ship WEI (Web Environment Integrity).

    Discord uses a modified version of electron, and it’s also probably an outdated fork as well, although I am not sure about that.

    Steam, in the other hand, uses CEF, which they use as a way to render it’s interface and as a replacement of VGUI (a good example of this is the steam game overlay), I don’t know if they will ship WEI if it ever releases in chromium as there isn’t a statement from Valve yet.

    Sources:

    If I missed something, please tell me!

    • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 years ago

      Been using FF for about 2 decades now and I have never seen a single good reason to switch.

      • EricKendrick@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Ditto. As much as people pretend Firefox is niche, it is the only browser with lineage back to the start of the web.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
    1·
    2 years ago

    Mozilla doesn’t make it as easy to use the Firefox / Gecko engine in other projects, which doesn’t help for adoption.