I didn't realize the facebook execs Mozilla acqui-hired last year have been promoted! I was assuming they were still just heading the ads division of Mozilla, but oh boy, I fucking wish.
Now the former Senior VP of Marketing of facebook (2008-2022, the finest years of facebook) is the CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER of the entire Mozilla.
And the former VP of Ads in Facebook (2012-2022), is now the Senior VP of Product of Mozilla.
Let me repeat this:
The guy who used to lead the facebook team that was literally "advertising to teenagers based on their emotional state" is now the guy who decides the direction of Firefox as a product. But hey, let's keep giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt uh? I'm sure these people-who-should-be-on-trial-in-the-hague are going to do great things for the community!
edit: Bradwood has been promoted to Chief Business Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, not Chief Financial Officer, my bad
edit2: as @FormularSumo@social.vivaldi.net pointed out, even if Graham Mudd's title is "SVP of Product", the bio in his page talks about him as the SVP of Product for the Mozilla Ads division specifically. So it may be the case that he hasn't been promoted and he's just on top of the ad division. That being said, Mozilla doesn't have a Chief Product Officer anymore, and that makes Mudd the most senior product person in the entire Mozilla organization, outranking the VP that seems to be org-wide.
Gross, guess I should finally switch over to Ironfox or Waterfox or Librewolf or whatever…
You mean all the forks that rely entirely on the Firefox engineering team to exist?
*relied
The forks already exist now, so the cat’s kinda out of the bag. Sure, they may benefit from updates from Mozilla, but it’s not like they’re just going to up and disappear or stop working all of the sudden.
No, they still rely on the Firefox engineering team to keep updating Firefox and to keep adding necessary additions for web standards, security updates, performance fixes, and so on and so forth.
All of these forks will fall behind web standards changes and effectively just become the Firefox flavor of Internet Explorer over time. It won’t happen overnight. You’re right about that, but it will most definitely happen over the course of a few years. Effectively handing full control over to Google and Chrome
All of these forks rely on Firefox to provide the hard bits in order to keep up with Chrome, or at least attempt to keep up with Chrome.
Building a browser is pretty damn hard, and honestly, it’s a miracle that even the Firefox engineering team has managed to do what they do, given they only have, at best, a quarter of the resources that Google puts towards their browser.
It could happen, but devs could also just keep forks up to date on their own too. As Firefox gets shittier, better alternatives will become more popular and there’ll be more people willing to fund them.