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Comment by Gualdrapo

5 days ago

I still strongly believe Servo can be a real counterpoint to Chrome/Chromium's hegemony in the long haul. Not sure why Mozilla ditched it nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it.

> nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it

The Linux Foundation is mostly a dumping ground for dead and dying projects. Particularly they seem to specialize in abandoned commercial open source projects.

I dont think the Foundation provides much, if any, developer funding for these projects. They list $193M in "project support" expenses but host over 1000 projects.

WebKit is a nice competitor, too. Look at Orion browser, it's a pretty decent competitor. Although they only target macOS, WebKit can be used on Windows and Linux, too.

Because Mozilla benefits from Google's donations (the majority comes from Google), and being a counterpoint to Google's Chrome is bad for Google, which means less or no donations to Mozilla. Google holds the key here. They have leverage over Mozilla.

  • They don't get donations from Google, but get paid to include Google as the default search engine, right?

    No important difference though. Mozilla tried to switch to Yahoo a few years back and backpedaled. In terms of what users expect, they don't have a lot of options. Google OTOH could do without the users Firefox has left. And I've personally observed Google strong arm "partners". Not sure I see a conspiracy here, but I'm pretty sure that if Google asks for concessions, Mozilla will see what they can do.

    • You are right, it is not a "donation", more like a business arrangement or something. I am not sure it is limited to "be the default search engine" though.

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