On the other hand, due to its big market share, Chromium had insanely good website compatibility. Needless to say Firefox followed this trend recently, it used to be much more modifiable in the past.īack to Chromium: The philosophy of simplicity behind the browser meant that it was ill-suited for any project attempting to create a customizable browser. This was a big reason for its widespread success, basic users like things being simple and straightforward and uncluttered. So developing a highly customizable browser was never on the table, Chrome always was and was always meant to be simplistic. Easy to use in Google‘s mind means that there is a very straightforward way of doing things that is easy to learn and to understand, but this excluded Chrome from having any customization options whatsoever, since these might confuse basic users and might hurt brand recognition (Chrome looking the same everywhere is part of its marketing). If you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, the money will not(!) be used for Firefox development, but to further other projects supposedly related to the open web, some of which I find to be very questionable (look up the incident where Mozilla donated $100K to RiseUp, for example).Īs for your other question, I‘ll try to answer to the best of my knowledge: When Google developed Chrome, they wanted the browser to be fast and easy to use. Firefox is fully developed by the Mozilla Corporation. This structure was necessary because of the legal ramifications of donations in the US, which made the Mozilla Foundation a necessity. I mean, they had to lay off people at the beginning of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation fully owns the for-profit Mozilla Corporation. I give them a maximum of three years, unless they morph into yet another Chromium-based browser, thereby reducing their expenses. Need I go on? I think I‘ve made my point. Ad companies want to target as many Internet users as possible with ads, and at some point, when Firefox‘s market share is even lower than now, Google will question whether or not their funding of Mozilla is still worth it. Google is also their competitor in the browser market, and is also an ad company.
About 80% of Mozilla‘s annual income comes from Google. This situation is in turn compounded by the fact that they are not funded by a group of sponsors, but rather by one big sponsor – Google. This situation is compounded by the fact that Mozilla is entirely dependent on being sponsored by someone big, by virtue of not having any other successful product that could potentially fund Firefox. Developing a new browser based on a preexisting browser takes substantially fewer resources. Developing their own rendering engine is complex and requires them to be a bigger operation compared to the companies behind Brave, Vivaldi etc. It seems unlikely, considering that Adobe won't distribute security updates anymore for Flash in Mozilla develops its own rendering engine.
Mozilla plans to remove Flash support in Firefox 85 but there is a chance that these plans may change. No version of Firefox will support Flash anymore from that point in time.