As a multi-decade long Firefox user, I am going to say no.
Firefox is produced by a single company and its users are completely beholden to the choices that the company makes.
In some ways, Chromium is closer to being the Linux of browsers. There are multiple “distributions” or instances of the technology ( Chrome, Edge, Brave, and others ). There is at least some collaboration on the core.
Chromium is not developed nearly as collaboratively as Linux though and certainly it is dominated by Google.
What we need is something like Ladybird which is community driven prior to corporate involvement and that is led by that community and not by a company.
Not that we have not lost this opportunity before. KHTML was community driven before Apple co-opted it for WebKit which Google later forked to Blink.
Ladybird is perhaps already in a better spot being cross-platform vs only the browser in SerenityOS. It is also a “complete” project with JavaScript and multimedia already built in. Let’s work to keep the project together as a browser and not chase bits of it getting ripped off and taken elsewhere.
Agreed. There are far more differences/changes between Chromium-based browsers than Firefox ones (which just remove Mozilla telemetry or provide a way to use old-style extensions). It really was a huge shame that they chose to base Edge on Chromium instead and I feel it points to clear issues in Firefox that prevent it from being the Linux of browsers.
I do wonder what's so wrong with FF that nobody wants to base their fork on it.
> I do wonder what's so wrong with FF that nobody wants to base their fork on it.
It's compatibility. I use Firefox now it less exclusively, and sometimes I'll need to go on some "normie" website to book a flight or something and the Continue button will be broken or some shit. Seems like lots of web devs will just make the sure works in Chrome and call it a day.
> sometimes I'll need to go on some "normie" website to book a flight or something
I have ungoogled chromium installed alongside firefox for exactly this reason. A lot of mainstream sites clearly do not care about supporting other engines.
Nobody cares there's only one implementation that's really used widely for Java. I don't see why I should care what VM is used for the web. Chromium can be that and you can build whatever tooling on top to interact with that VM
I think this argument would have credibility if it wasn't for the fact that Google is ostensibly waging a war against the ability to extend the browser in any way that harms their ads business (with Manifest v3).
Google has a massive conflict of interest with the free and independent web in a way that Oracle does not have with the ability to build and run arbitrary Java applications.
I'd say to keep antitrust suits off their ass is even too strong a formulation ;) considering US antitrust is what has led the acquisition of DoubleClick and YouTube by Google happen (and that of WhatsApp by Facebook). Time to hold those responsible for this ... responsible.
