On Mon, 13 Sep 2021 15:40:25 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:
You don’t need $100 million a year to develop a browser, though. Much of that money seems to go to other projects.
Diversification, in order to attract other sources of revenue apart from search engines (which can easily disappear once an agreement expires). Relying on just a single source of income is never a good idea...
Source is an entirely separate issue from amount.
There seems to be no shortage of forks already: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on_Firefox>.
How much do those forks rely on the base project to add features, develop the rendering engine, etc?
Picking a few at random, e.g. from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_(web_browser)>: * its motto is "Your browser, Your way" * Replaces the Gecko browser engine with the Goanna fork * Uses the pre-Australis Firefox user interface * Supports add-ons exclusive to Pale Moon, including dozens of themes. (etc)
* includes additional security features, such as the option to block third party zero-length image files resulting in third-party cookies, also known as web bugs * also has functionality to set a different user agent string each for different domains
From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilisk_(web_browser)>:
* Like Pale Moon, Basilisk is a fork of Firefox with substantial divergence.[11] Basilisk has the user interface of the Firefox version 29–56 era (unlike Pale Moon, which has the Firefox 4–28 interface). And that was just from five minutes spent looking. Want to know more? Go see for yourself.
If the base project stops, how many of these projects will continue to exist?
That’s up to their communities, same as for Firefox itself. Forks can fork, too. Stop thinking in proprietary terms.