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Firefox has a lot of issues, but maybe we don't have any other option.
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.
I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they've received show that there is real demand for an alternative.
But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.
There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.
I'm probably wrong, but isn't the Mozilla License non-permissive? It's likely more complicated than that. Non-permissive*
Agreed, it's licensed under the MPL, a "weak copyleft" license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.
While I definitely think it's better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don't feel it's strong enough to stop it being co-opted.
GPL is not good enough, a new browser meant to thwart Google should have a strict anti-corporate anti-commercial license, even if it doesn't fall under the umbrella of open source.
If you don't believe me, please consult proprietary vendor android distributions.
Good luck with that
Maybe you should make everyone sign a EULA and pay royalties
Ladybird is the best we have. At the end of the day the big part that matters is source code and the 4 freedoms
To nobody in the real world, the 4 freedoms could matter any less if they tried. That is not to say it's not important to have certain things be standardized and open source, but if you skew your perspective that much, you cannot find actual solutions: You aren't even recognizing the actual problem.