Changing World, Changing Mozilla – The Mozilla Blog
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This is a time of change for the internet and for Mozilla. From combatting a lethal virus and battling systemic racism to protecting individual privacy — one thing is clear: ...

This includes the entire Servo team which was working on its next generation web engine that was supposed to be Firefox's ticket to staying afloat in the future. Servo also popularized the Rust language afaik

Aside from Servo, they also axed the entire threat management team, because why would a browser need threat detection and incident response, amirite?

Relevant links:

https://nitter.snopyta.org/directhex/status/1293352458308198401

https://nitter.snopyta.org/MichalPurzynski/status/1293220570885062657

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865

    • shyamalamadingdong [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      The thing with konqueror/epiphany/surf/qutebrowser/midori and all of these independent projects is that while they might be decent on their own, the lack of any kind of decent and robust extension system really undermines your privacy

      You can set up a DNS-level/host-based ad blocker but it's still not as good as a dedicated extension like uMatrix/NoScript/uBO in advanced (medium/hard) modes.

      I think FF is still it. Or at best a fork of it like IceCat.

      • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        It will still be a long time before anything becomes comparably as good an option as Firefox, even with the engines stalled and the project adrift. A lot of responsibility for the future of the a Internet just fell in the laps of thankless volunteers though.

        I'm not sure how things can be changed, but I think it is essential for us to stop building web browsers (and web services) as if they were space elevators. For all intents and purposes, browsers have grown to levels of complexity rivaling operating systems. I mean, it legitimately takes longer to compile Firefox than it does to compile the Linux Kernel with nearly all the modules enabled.

        Obviously we can't go back to gopher, but we have to do something to bring the standards of the web within reach of being implemented by mortals.

      • Bloodshot [he/him,any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        They all ultimately use Chromium/WebKit to render. They're not really independent.

        Konqueror can be configured to use KHTML, I recommend you try it to see how it looks. It isn't really compatible with most sites in 2020.

        • shyamalamadingdong [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          yeah I'm aware. Also isn't Konqueror dead? Afaik the browser that KDE develop now is Falkon.

          Also I believe Midori and PM/Basilisk have their own engines but they also inherit the compatibility issues that comes with that.