Why doesn’t Mozilla just fork Chromium? Anything bad sneaks in, they rip it out. New feature? Develop it specifically without paying for the whole browser. From the user’s perspective, very little changes, but cost savings would be massive.
It would also be a good high profile tab of “bad things Chrome/Chromium is doing”
EDIT: It would also justify regulating Chromium like a monopoly, though I think that government ship has sailed.
Chromium is code that Mozilla is not familiar with and has a reputation for being poorly documented.
A fully divergent fork isn’t likely to make development any easier for Mozilla. And a soft fork puts them at the whims of Google’s development decisions. If Mozilla needs to pivot, joining with WebKit seems the more feasible option, though that would also likely be a battle to keep a Windows port maintained.
But they do have an interest in displacing Google’s monopoly, kinda like how they contribute to OpenStreetMaps with Apple Maps, or how Facebook finds llama.
Why doesn’t Mozilla just fork Chromium? Anything bad sneaks in, they rip it out. New feature? Develop it specifically without paying for the whole browser. From the user’s perspective, very little changes, but cost savings would be massive.
It would also be a good high profile tab of “bad things Chrome/Chromium is doing”
EDIT: It would also justify regulating Chromium like a monopoly, though I think that government ship has sailed.
Chromium is code that Mozilla is not familiar with and has a reputation for being poorly documented.
A fully divergent fork isn’t likely to make development any easier for Mozilla. And a soft fork puts them at the whims of Google’s development decisions. If Mozilla needs to pivot, joining with WebKit seems the more feasible option, though that would also likely be a battle to keep a Windows port maintained.
Apple could pitch in just for the sake of sticking it to Google.
Apple has the funds to maintain WebKit by themselves, and they wouldn’t want it to be cross-platform.
But they do have an interest in displacing Google’s monopoly, kinda like how they contribute to OpenStreetMaps with Apple Maps, or how Facebook finds llama.
Apple is already displacing Google’s monopoly.