Interesting. Just one hour ago, I was removing the Amazon & co links that Firefox imposes to users on the home page.
I was recommending Firefox to my friend to avoid a weather app's ads. Turns out he got ads on Firefox too. Removing them is easy in the settings but not for the general public.
The question though is : where will the funds of WebLibre come ? Implementing a browser is hard. If Firefox continues to drift, who will pay for the development of the engine ?
The .eu in the domain lets me think this is a european project, but I wasn't able to find a "about us" page.
Note that UG (haftungsbeschränkt) is a mandatorily for-profit type of company. It is required to retain one quarter of earnings until it reaches 25000€ - the minimum capitalization for a GmbH - and then it may apply to convert to a GmbH.
There's maybe a couple dozen forks of FireFox or other Chromium-based browsers out there. Probably more, but certainly enough that this headline made me give a slight eyeroll, thinking "another one, huh? OK, so what's actually different here?"
Who pays for it? Many are FOSS projects, specially where privacy is concerned. Plain old FireFox still tracks telemetry, which is more than some people like. People hate being tracked and having their every thought examined for its advertising potential to the point that people build privacy-focused browsers for free as a public good.
Sometimes donations work as well, like how the Tor project works. But Tor is running servers, so their financial needs are much heavier.
I was recommending Firefox to my friend to avoid a weather app's ads. Turns out he got ads on Firefox too. Removing them is easy in the settings but not for the general public.
The question though is : where will the funds of WebLibre come ? Implementing a browser is hard. If Firefox continues to drift, who will pay for the development of the engine ?
The .eu in the domain lets me think this is a european project, but I wasn't able to find a "about us" page.