@kevinrns @Pineywoozle
And, for anyone concerned about Firefox / Mozilla continuing to exist in the face of recent FTC actions against Google (Google is a major financial underwriter of Mozilla), there's an even more secure and private browser based on Firefox called Floorp Browser:

https://floorp.app/en

@yoasif @kevinrns @Pineywoozle
Probably a better question for the devs, we were just offering an alternative for those who didn't know about Floorp or the financial realities of Mozilla.

We presume you understand the risk to Mozilla, given your statement "when the upstream goes away."

We don't know who or whether the FF code base would be maintained if Mozilla goes away, though we are cautiously optimistic that FOSS true believers with the requisite technical skills will step into the breach -- either by maintaining the code, or by making the next thing.

We'd be cool with just using Qutebrowser, but then we're weird that way... Not everybody wants to use a keyboard-based web browser  

@strangeculprits @kevinrns @Pineywoozle I don't understand how you think this is an alternative if you think that Mozilla may not continue to exist.

It's not like this browser has any real marketshare, any way of monetizing itself (in order to hire people), or even a significant contributor base.

Are you comfortable saying "use it for as long as it lasts, and don't think about whether using this actually hurts the upstream"? Because I don't really see how Floorp can replace what Mozilla does.

@yoasif @kevinrns @Pineywoozle
Perhaps we misunderstand each other.

Our post was simply to share, *with end users,* that a FF based browser --with better default user security protections-- is available now.

As you are the former moderator of r/firefox, surely you know the following:

1. Google supports FF as a fig leaf against FTC antitrust claims. The current FTC sees through that ruse. Google may pull financial support of Mozilla as a result.

2. Mozilla, fearful of going dark from losing the Google money, has started changing Firefox in ways that, in the long run, could turn FF into nothing more than Chrome with a different rendering engine.

Gecko, Blink, and WebKit --the 3 largest actively maintained rendering engines-- are all open source licensed. Even if Mozilla loses its Google blood money and disappears, other organizations with an interest in continuing Gecko could (we think *would*) step in: the Linux Foundation, Apache, KDE, Framasoft, RedHat, SUSE, to name a few

@strangeculprits @kevinrns @Pineywoozle I'm pretty doubtful of your third point -- the support given to Gecko *today* is minuscule - why would organizations attempt to replace Google's revenue entirely, rather than contributing to Chromium or WebKit on the margins?

What is more likely -- that developers will gravitate towards forking or contributing to a fully funded codebase with paid developers, or one that has no upstream and will quickly experience user flight?

@yoasif @kevinrns @Pineywoozle
Is your point that Firefox is already dead?

What if people resigned themselves to "well, we're such with Twitter" after Elon bought it, because it (was at the time) well-funded? If that happened, then we're wouldn't even be here in the Fediverse talking about this, or any other, topic.

We believe enough well-funded interests care enough about "free as in freedom" software that there will *always* be FOSS browsers available to the small number is us who truly care.

Indeed, FF was born from the ashes of Netscape, after Microsoft bundled IE with Windows expressly to kill Netscape. We believe FF will have a successor if it goes away. We also believe there are enough current interests to step in and continue to fund FF (though maybe not Mozilla) if Google's money goes away

@strangeculprits @kevinrns @Pineywoozle I have no idea what your Twitter comment meant - Firefox *is* the alternative that has paid labor. Floorp is cool, but a developer working on the margins isn't going to keep Gecko going if the upstream dies.

Where does your belief come from? Do you have any evidence to support it? For example, Igalia and Microsoft have contributed to Chromium. Google has contributed to WebKit and developed Blink.

Where is the extensive outside work coming to for Gecko?