Personally I hope firefox dies as fast as possible so we see some focus on good alternatives.
Gecko is not a good platform, there is a reason why people who use geckoview eventually all migrate away from it, the most recent example I can think of is wolvic, which hasn't replaced geckoview yet, but does have the version 1.0 of a chromium release now.
The sooner we get real alternatives to chromium and stop pretending that gecko is one the better. Currently servo is progressing really fast, has good APIs and usability for both a full desktop browser and embedded usecases (but still very immature).
The numbers you have quoted so far don't make a dent in the 400M though - we haven't even reached 1% yet. How much do you think Mozilla is spending on Firefox? How much of that is "extra" per your back of the envelope math?
Nothing is stopping public funding of Firefox, so I don't see it as an either, or situation.
Would you deny Ladybird search revenues? It is an interesting question.
Do you have numbers behind these assertions? How much money is spent on "crap"?
That doesn't really discount the argument. Not a lot of investment for a decent return. Why is that bad?
Pocket and VPN make money, that would be like firing IRS auditors in the name of efficiency.
I agree that general purpose AI isn't really all that interesting, since I don't think it is going to drive involvement or investment. I also imagine that it doesn't really cost that much - they don't have any real products behind it, and they all seem clearly experimental.
I guess I understand your aversion to contributing to "junk projects", but if they are junk projects, there isn't likely to be a ton of investment. Harder to shift the bottom line.
I don't really get why you think developing Ladybird will progress faster than Firefox - or a Firefox fork.
There's a larger community behind Gecko and it is a more complete browser. It doesn't make sense to me that paid development would go into Ladybird over Chromium or Gecko.
Without paid development, you don't have a browser that stays working, so I don't really see that as an option., sadly.
More of an option for Gemini, imo.
I see this sentiment sometimes, but just like with the US Federal government, everyone thinks that what everyone else is working on is superfluous.
It's easy to say generally "there's all this wasted money".
Yeah? Where?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/
I really am curious. I'm not a fan of AI, so I would agree that those seem superfluous -- but at the same time, the AI based image summarizer actually sounds cool - and good for accessibility. The translation service is VERY useful, and it is amazing that it runs locally.
So yeah, I'm curious. What is junk?
Thanks for letting us know to discount what you say -- if you prefer monopoly over choice, we're really not having the same conversation.