this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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It's Mozilla that's slowly enshittifying, Firefox itself is theoretically insulated from the worst decisions they could make, but those safeguards are going to be put to the test real soon I bet.
You think Thunderbird is insulated? Their latest big drunk UI lift seems to have somehow made it even less intuitive.
Well to that end chromium is still around and I'm sure there's deshittified builds of that floating around too but it is going to quickly become harder to find not shitty browsers the way things are going over at Mozilla.
The big problem is the browser engine at the heart of all browsers, all the FF or Chromium forks very rarely modify the core. When they do, it's minor stuff. That's why AFAIK not a single chromium fork is maintaining manifest v2 in defiance of Google.
If Mozilla goes full tilt enshittification, all the FF forks will suffer a similar fate, they'll make changes all over, custom interface, cool little features here and there etc; but they'll never make major changes to the core and that's assuming they keep the core open source. If they take the core closed source and the forks can no longer get upstream updates for it they'll wither and die
A browser engine is kinda like the Linux kernel, it's large, complex and takes a lot of time and effort to make and keep it usable. I've seen estimates that if we needed to start from scratch on the Linux kernel it'd take 2-4 years just to get something decently usable.
Browser engines are similar, Ladybird for example, is a new open source browser AND engine from scratch that's been in development for about 2 years, they're estimating to have something "generally usable" in 2026
Timelines change based on interest.
Servo is a new browser rendering engine in Rust - seems interesting and gathering steam.
Don't be too fatalistic - every time the corpos have come for the internet they have been circumvented. I don't see it stopping now - especially since people like us are tired of this brand of bullshit.
I try not to be, but attention does need to be called to it, and I see a lot of handwaving away in regards to Mozilla. People should be demanding more answers from them to at least delay enshittification a little to give more time to the alternatives like Ladybird and Servo to develop and refine for widespread usage
Which thanks for pointing me towards Servo, I missed that one lol, but I still don't think it has yet achieved feature parity with Gecko or Chromium
There is a point when throwing more ressources at a problem will not increase the speed.
aka: "you can't use nine women to make a baby in a month"