this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
677 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59378 readers
3580 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Their question is: how much would you pay for not using a Chromium based browser?
People switching to the browser and zapping all ads, demanding open source and vitriol for any kind of monetization. How can they survive? They would have to become a subsidized utility, which not even the Internet as a whole has achieved.
There was a poll a while back on mastodon and the majority answered they'd be ok with 5$/year to support Firefox.
The kind of people you find on Mastodon following Firefox news are not the same as the average person. They are a bubble.
A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.
...people or dollars? 'Cos i don't think "hundreds of millions" of people are chippin' in, it's Google that's financing "hundreds of millions" of dollars...
But yeah, that target audience is a bubble, normies don't care.
Dollars.
Google is giving hundreds of millions because they fear regulators getting involved.
A handful of people who follow Mozilla on Mastodon saying they're willing to pay up to a meagre $5 per year won't do anything.
I get not wanting to use a google, microsoft or crypto laden browser, but I would be willing to use a well supported browser that used chromium as the page rendering engine. It seems to be extremely difficult to get another engine to be competitive in the marketplace. Maybe the resources would be better spent putting the chromium engine inside a different container. I’m sure there would be drawbacks, but I think there would be compatibility benefits too.
I believe WebKit is Chromium's rendering engine, as is Gecko for Firefox.
Opera used to have their own but now they're just rebranded Chromium.
I wouldn't mind paying money for a good browser. I paid for Opera back in the day, and browsers are significantly more complex (and cost several orders of magnitude more to develop) now compared to back then.