A lot of folks have asked me if I'm serious about relaunching Mozilla after their inevitable collapse.
What I can say with confidence is that if the brand assets become available, I would absolutely look into purchasing them, in the same manner Perifractic "resurrected" Commodore. I am no millionaire, so this would have to be a community-driven thing.
Imagine: everyday people like us banding together to resurrect our beloved browser. I'd absolutely do my part to spearhead that.
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yoasif
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Putting my name here to be considered for a job when this happens.
Y'all think I'm joking.
Draken BlackKnight
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Veronica Explains
in reply to Draken BlackKnight • • •Draken BlackKnight
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Unus Nemo
in reply to Draken BlackKnight • •@Draken BlackKnight @Veronica Explains
Mozilla was suppose to be the spiritual successor of Netscape, indeed it is a fork of the project. To make Netscape viable for today's internet experience you would basically need to do what Mozilla did over the years. There is no going back and dusting off that old code base. It would be easier to just do a complete rewrite.
phooky
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Philippe Jadin
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Veronica Explains
in reply to Philippe Jadin • • •Unus Nemo
in reply to Philippe Jadin • •@Philippe Jadin @Veronica Explains
I believe the thing you may have missed is there are already a dozen forks of Firefox, Mozilla's top project. Mozilla was the spiritual descendant (a fork) of Netscape. With so many forks of the popular browser no one really pays much attention to yet another fork. The other thing you missed is that developing and maintaining software is never free. It take many hours of peoples lives to accomplish that and some type of remuneration for those hours has to happen or the project becomes stale and obsolete.
Yes, anyone can down load the source to the browser. Fork and rebrand it. Then who is going to maintain the code base? It requires a lot more skill to maintain code than it does just do build software already setup to be built on an existing tool chain.
Only the most popular forks ever get even a moment in the sun. The
... show more@Philippe Jadin @Veronica Explains
I believe the thing you may have missed is there are already a dozen forks of Firefox, Mozilla's top project. Mozilla was the spiritual descendant (a fork) of Netscape. With so many forks of the popular browser no one really pays much attention to yet another fork. The other thing you missed is that developing and maintaining software is never free. It take many hours of peoples lives to accomplish that and some type of remuneration for those hours has to happen or the project becomes stale and obsolete.
Yes, anyone can down load the source to the browser. Fork and rebrand it. Then who is going to maintain the code base? It requires a lot more skill to maintain code than it does just do build software already setup to be built on an existing tool chain.
Only the most popular forks ever get even a moment in the sun. Then, they become niche alternatives. Every once in a while one might take off for a moment and gain some momentum. Good luck seeing that happen for free.
People do have to make a living. And a full time project needs full time developers. These are just unavoidable facts of software maintenance. Less than 10% of a successful software products lifespan is spent in development. The rest is maintenance.
Philippe Jadin
in reply to Unus Nemo • • •Stéphane Calonnec 🗿
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •David
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •I would love to help support if I can. If you are serious and open up a donations fund for this please let me know! Or post a follow up with a link!
Go Linux Mom!
Veronica Explains
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Imagine a reconstituted Mozilla as a cooperative owned by the community they serve.
That's the web we were promised. I'm an optimist and I believe it can happen.
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xinit ☕
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Unus Nemo likes this.
Unus Nemo
in reply to xinit ☕ • •@xinit ☕ @Veronica Explains
Yes, that is exactly what the Mozilla project began as. ...
Draken BlackKnight
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Guda Blues
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •kuulman
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Kari'boka
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •progo in NYC
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •This is not a "you can't do it" message, but there will be challenges.
MDN is a massive effort. Maintaining Firefox and its core, or rebuilding it, is practically a state-level project requiring salaries, benefits, a legal department, and the need to attract people who can do the work.
Maybe "rebuild it" is the solution though. LadyBird is not a massive non-profit, and it's been very successful so far on its plan to make a new competing browser core.
dbat
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Esther Payne
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •That would be awesome and so needed. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks we need an independent organisational hard fork. But picking up the pieces and putting it in the hands of the community could work as well.
chaos.social/@onepict/11554929…
Esther Payne
2025-11-14 17:46:08
Only Exception
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Elias
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •go for it!
I think there are enough people who would pay enough to keep that going. Having a decent browser is too important, we can't let it go to shit.
Lab148
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Foggy Frigid Peach
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •🐜
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Unus Nemo
in reply to 🐜 • •@🐜 @Veronica Explains
Yes, it is now called Firefox. Phoenix was the initial attempt to remove the browser from Netscape's all in one tools.
🐜 likes this.
🐜
in reply to Unus Nemo • • •leobard
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •a cooperative is fine, but the members/owners should be the maintainers, not us users. I don't want to be involved in voting a board/steering the org structure.
I want to pay for Firefox for its features.
I want that Firefox / Mozilla start a business model to
motivate the majority of users to pay for development. I want to vote for features/dev priorities.
Stop #enshittification
Stop the ad/search engine based revenue dependency.
Start making the value Mozilla provides to its users visible.
leobard.net/blog/2022/05/18/i-…
Unus Nemo likes this.
Unus Nemo
in reply to Veronica Explains • •@Veronica Explains The World Wide Web began as an ARPA project to connect disparate systems together on a network to share information. The United States DoD began the project by funding several Universities in the project. The commercialization of the Web happened in order to remove the need for DoD funding after the backbone of the project was successful. If there was any true founding principal of the World Wide Web for public use it was that it would be the best marketing tool ever. I believe they succeeded in that. As far as allusions toward community, well that was another marketing strategy.
Now, do not get me wrong. I do not pay for a VPS and run my own Instance on the Fediverse because I do not appreciate community. I love the idea. Though, unfortunately forging communities on the internet has always really been more about marketing and making a profit off of the endeavor over creating a public service. This is why I am part of the fediverse. We are going in a
... show more@Veronica Explains The World Wide Web began as an ARPA project to connect disparate systems together on a network to share information. The United States DoD began the project by funding several Universities in the project. The commercialization of the Web happened in order to remove the need for DoD funding after the backbone of the project was successful. If there was any true founding principal of the World Wide Web for public use it was that it would be the best marketing tool ever. I believe they succeeded in that. As far as allusions toward community, well that was another marketing strategy.
Now, do not get me wrong. I do not pay for a VPS and run my own Instance on the Fediverse because I do not appreciate community. I love the idea. Though, unfortunately forging communities on the internet has always really been more about marketing and making a profit off of the endeavor over creating a public service. This is why I am part of the fediverse. We are going in a more social and humanistic direction and hopefully away from the marketing tyrants taking over the world (and of course they have always owned our internet).
四
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •What do they own that we need? Am I missing something? Not trolling here.
WebKit and Gecko are open source (more or less, I’m not up to date on MPL). There’s currently a fair number of browsers based on them, but the non corporate efforts are spread out.
A non-profit organization with the intent to fund free/open/private WebKit/gecko (fork if forced) as well as an official cross platform UI that works with both engines could be created.
I think that would be the tipping point for me to actually put money into something.
Obviously YMMV, and I can’t tell if I’m in a minority here or if many others would be interested.
Would you consider a stream to talk about it with chat?
Kari'boka
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Choobs
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Kevin Russell
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Hedders
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Sassinake! - ⊃∪∩⪽
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •or as pinboard.in bought del.icio.us. IMO moz://a was peak word-mark.
Welcome to Pinboard—Social bookmarking for introverts!
pinboard.inRandy Hughes-King
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •քʏʀǟȶɛɮɛǟʀɖ
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Christian Berger DECT 2763
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Tau
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •rob los ricos
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Ministerofimpediments
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Here are the likelier outcomes:
1: Does the zombie thing like Radio Shack for another decade.
2: Gets propped up as ‘competition’ for a larger company facing fines/lawsuit.
3: Gets bought by some AI company looking for a plug/play use case.
4: Bought and retired by a larger company.
Patrick H. Lauke
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •gunstick
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •gkrnours
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •ok but imagine.
Wozilla.
like wario but instead of being obssessed with money, gold, castle and minigame, run a decent browser.
Debian used to have a IceWeasel branding for firefox, I'm curious what happened to it
Unus Nemo
in reply to gkrnours • •@gkrnours @Veronica Explains
It is still around with a dozen other forks. Though today it is typically called GNU IceCat.
JWcph, Radicalized By Decency
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •‘The French people want to save us’: help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
Kim Willsher (The Guardian)Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •The only real asset (other than the user accounts, of course) the brand has is the code, and all the important code is already available.
For the people who want to see a return of "Netscape", the assets were sold to Sun (now owned by Oracle) and AOL (now owned by Yahoo, now owned by private equity), so good luck with that.
My advice to you would be to get involved with one of the many forks of the Firefox code.
mauvedeity
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Shadowbottle
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •