Idk why but I love this post haha

You can’t for a number of reasons. As other people have said this catastrophically underestimates the complexity of maintaining a code base for a browser.

they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards

I don’t even think that’s remotely true. My understanding is that it’s on the order of a few months to a year, and it relates to things that are negligible to the average end user. They are edge case things like experimental 3d rendering. The most significant one I can think of is Webp, but they resisted adoption for principled reasons relating to Google’s control over that format and aggressive pushing of it, which is a good thing not a bad thing, and an important example of how rushing to adopt new standards it’s not necessarily just a sign of browser health but also an anti-competitive practice intentionally pushed by companies that have money to throw around for that purpose.

They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works.

That’s how Chromium works.

Anyone can see the source, but it doesn’t mean that anyone’s code makes it into Chromium, because Google picks and chooses. Chromium has a “reviewer pool” of Google developers doing all the picking and choosing. Getting into the reviewer pool takes months to years of building up a contribution history and being vetted by the Google team.

They’re completely at the mercy of how Google integrates things like DRM, or web standards that Google wants to push, like a deeply integrated into the browser and actively maintained with little to no alternative. The engineering overhead of sustaining and increasingly complex fork of Chromium is unsustainable and unless you have the development capability to compete, Google controls the destiny of any chromium browser.

You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

Okay, that’s an interesting point. I mean, there are forks galore of Firefox so I’m not entirely sure I understand. But certainly chromium-based browsers have been getting more traction.

But wasn’t the original point something about how hard it is to make a browser?

And if I have this right you’re suggesting that it would be achievable for Firefox to make an accessible browser tool kit but they’re not due to ulterior motives?

I’m not sure I understand that, either in terms of motive or just impractical terms what it is you think they’re doing to make it hard to develop.

Hold on, why are we talking about this like it’s something that’s not happening? There’s all kinds of forks of Firefox.

Mozilla does not look any reliable

People keep saying this, but why? Because if it’s anything like what people have been saying in these Lemmy threads, good god.

Found the one sane comment in this entire thread.

Google may or may not stop paying Mozilla as part of the antitrust scrutiny. I have no idea if there’s actual reporting to this effect, or any form of legal analysis suggesting this is the most plausible outcome. If anything, antitrust scrutiny might lead to this funding being more secure and more robust.

So this might not happen, but this whole threads carrying on like it’s a fait accompli.

VLC I would say

The CEO is like slightly more than 1% of their annual revenue.

What things that matter have insufficient engineering resources at the moment?