Comment by eviks
> that some other FOSS group...could take its place with a firefox fork
What stops them from contributing improvements now?
> that some other FOSS group...could take its place with a firefox fork
What stops them from contributing improvements now?
To be fair, Mozilla-affiliated developers have accomplished some serious cleanup in recent years. New & redesigned features are fake tabs with special permissions instead of that unholy intertwining of web standards and local UI in C++. Storage is almost-proper sqlite3. Dynamic linking against system libraries old&new just works(tm). Even the vendored Rust packages more or less build fine, now even across multiple compiler versions. Plus, AMDs new-ish CPUs with ginormous L3 brought recompile (and thus, bisect) times to almost reasonable levels, so that is not as pressing of an issue any more. I would guesstimate only 25 years left at the current speed till Firefox can be considered maintainable again.
Multiple factors, e.g the perceived lack of an immediate need, and also Mozilla's control of the firefox codebase.
For instance, one improvement that a more user-respecting group might contribute is ripping out all the AI slop. But as pointed out in the article, Mozilla like the AI slop and wouldn't accept those changes.
If Mozilla was to disappear, orgs like those I mentioned would likely see a more urgent need to take over in order to break the chrom(ium) monoculture.
The state of mess the code is in?