@djsumdog @waltercool @prettygood

> Under the shadow of whatever marketing budget they have left,

They
> they're probably under some legacy mode enterprise life support

Oh, no, not at all. Just dumped their consumer business. You don't stay on this list if you don't have money: https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2024/11/ .

> seems he left for Microsoft

Microsoft has this long history of putting people in places to kill something and then hiring them after the earth is scorched. Maybe Lenny never left: maybe he was already working for Microsoft. How long was he at RedHat and some time after systemd started crashing servers he said "Oh, I just use it on my laptop, I've never operated a server before"?

So there's the dose of :tinfoil:.

> There are still developers, paid for by Mozilla, who continue work on Firefox. Who are they? Where are they going to go?

Why would they go anywhere? Google's the company cutting the checks anyway. They are no longer tied to conventional business objectives: the company just has to exist and put out a browser that can reasonably be described as a competitor to Chrome, and they will continue to receive checks.

> Will there be 12 forks and a lot of shitty browsers for a while by people trying to keep up but barely can wrap their heads around that massive Gecko codebase,

I wouldn't trust anyone that was particularly attached to Gecko. The rendering engine used to work really hard to make sure that text was legible and it did an excellent job and webkit/Chrome never managed to get even close to pre-Servo Firefox, but they have discarded that and all the text looks like shit; there's not much to love about the code and there's no longer anything to love about the result.

There are already 12 forks, though; I mean, I'm running Seamonkey.

I think it is fine if browsers as currently imagined go away. I have this entire computer and anno domini $current_year browsers feel like playing the rail-shooter level of an otherwise fun game.