I just saw a post complaining about the Mozilla layoffs.

I wanted to point out that the vast majority of their income (over 85% in 2022) is from having Google as the default search engine - Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.

Expect things to get worse.

Please don’t assume it was just a cruel choice.

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  • namingthingsiseasy
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    3 days ago

    The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I’ve seen it done - if you’re familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn’t really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.

    With Firefox, it’s practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The “forks” that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.

    Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they’ve had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I’ve read, they’re struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it’s pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.

    Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don’t have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can’t really implement it… unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.

    That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don’t forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.

    • Laurel Raven@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      Webkit is the engine used by Safari (among a few others) and, though I think the project is controlled by Apple, it’s licensed LGPLv2.1 and BSD 2-Clause

      According to the wiki, it’s also used in PlayStation, Kindle, Nintendo devices, and the Tizen mobile OS… Additionally, it’s apparently the rendering engine used by the default browsers provided by both the KDE and Gnome projects

      Honestly, though, I want to see something that’s not part of the Mosaic or KHTML families be made and gain at least some foothold…I hate having the Internet basically controlled by one or two mega corporations.

      I still wish Opera hadn’t abandoned Presto…