For a browser, that's not really possible without a significant team of over-the-average and paid developers. There are a lot of complexities in a browser. It has to have its own GPU driver, JIT compiler, optimized scheduler to pull page components, another scheduler to run JS, a cross-platform rendering abstraction, hacks for 30+ years of WWW. All of that should be fast. Because everything else is extremely slow and wasteful on Web.

People who can handle this complexity are extremely mobile in the industry. They can always find employment in a much better paying place than Mozilla. And a competitive browser has to have such developers on generous payroll.

One of the issues with Firefox is its codebase. Some parts of it are slowly rotting and it has its own fair share of 20-year-old bugs. Mozilla is slowly failing to keep up with the ever changing landscape and dealing with the age of their codebase. There is a reason why Electron could be developed with Chromium but not Firefox. Mozilla really tried this as well, it just didn't work.

If you're forking, Chromium or Safari are a better start point than Firefox.

Something like Firefox is so complex that I could not fork it and make my own. I mean, I could, but the amount of changes I could put in would be trivial unless I'm getting paid full time. Even if I was paid full time, realistically, one person paid full time, no matter how good, just can't make an impact in the browser today.

I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to dedicate to that. I could do a few lines here and there if I really got dedicated, but like most people, I have a life. I have kids and such. My retirement account won't fund my midlife crisis to quit my job and work on a web browser, so I depend on something to build a good browser. And that is assuming I even would work on a web browser if I could afford to do whatever I want full time. There are a ton of other activities in my community that need volunteer help, some of which I'm helping a little bit, but I could do more for.

I, like many here, have wished that we could donate a small amount to Firefox every month to fun development, however it turns out that the Mozilla Foundation does not fund development of Firefox and so any money would go not to Firefox but to other causes of which I may or may not support but are not a web browser which is what I want to support.

The moment it comes to that level of complexity is well past the moment it matters for browser diversity anymore. There is no shortage of open source browser codebases or random forks using them, there is a shortage of development paid in some form other than selling out the users.

You don’t want a “never upgrade frozen version” for a web browser that is terrifying.

Also without Mozilla (and Google’s funding), “just fork it and make your own” isn’t reasonable either.

If Mozilla/Firefox goes away, so do all those ragequit forks maintained by a group of people I can count on one hand.

It would be up to companies like Redhat, Suse and/or Canonical (preferably AND) to step in but realistically I don’t see that happening either.