> A modern browser engine is millions of lines of highly optimised code long, and that corresponds to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment
Currently Firefox is 12,000,000 LOC, so each line of code costs $25 per year? o_O If so, I am in the wrong business, given my main project is 300,000 lines of my own code.
Now, I totally believe the costs are astronomical to run a web browser team and all the servers required for such a feat. But surely it can't cost nearly this much. Especially with volunteers working on it as a labor of love as with many other major open-source projects, such as Linux.
In my ideal world, access to technology has become so essential that I think it's not unreasonable to consider public funding for things like an operating system and web browser. I do realize this is the worst site possible to suggest such a thing, of course ;) There's countless problems with that idea as well. We'd need a government that didn't spy on its own citizens, and wasn't far more wasteful than the private sector. But a man can dream.
But at this point, I'd be happy with a $1m Kickstarter to develop a fully-featured Webkit-based browser UI that is absolutely by the users, for the users. Taking only their input in mind (no crazy designers that "know better than the users"), no compromises on corporate interests (DRM), and never implementing any form of advertising nor doing any backroom deals with companies that want to mine your data like Google and Yahoo.
Mozilla do a lot of work besides Firefox. They have Thunderbird, Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, Bugzilla, etc etc.
Brooks' estimates suggest that cost of development increases with the square of the length of the code.
Likewise, a single developer should expect to achieve around 10 lines of code per day on an established codebase. This is about $45 per line of code at SV rates.
Mozilla has over a thousand employees on its various projects, and this income is necessary to keep them in work.
You wouldn't get $1M out of that Kickstarter. You could literally just change the default search engine and compile Firefox yourself.
I don't really mind the default search engine all that much, personally. Not gonna lie, I use Google anyway for web search because it's the best at what it does.
I do think it creates a conflict of interest when you're a privacy organization and by far your biggest customer is a company that makes all its money in the advertising business, but like you said, it's easy to turn off.
I'm a lot more creeped out by the newtab tiles. Again, I know you can turn it off, and I know it's not transmitting my search history off of my PC. I don't think that makes it okay, though. I don't want code on my PC that's designed to analyze my behavior to push products on me.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I'd be willing to pay some money for a light, configurable, sensible browser like Firefox 4 but with modern HTML5/CSS3/etc support. It'd have to run on FreeBSD and be open source, of course.
> Mozilla has over a thousand employees on its various projects, and this income is necessary to keep them in work.
Here's a thought experiment - what it Mozilla spun-out a "Firefox foundation" that only worked on Firefox? How many employees & how much funding would that require? I suspect it could get by without the ads and could infact, be kick-started.
Granted, this would not mesh with Mozilla's manifesto, and the other projects would die without the ad-powered money-printer that Firefox is.
Mozilla clearly likes having all those projects, and is willing to make compromises to achieve that. Maybe you think the non-firefox work they do is valuable enough that you're ok with them auctioning off the default search engine setting (for example) to fund it.
Myself, I'll stick to Konqueror. You don't need a Mozilla-sized organization or Mozilla-scale funding to make a great (IMO better than firefox in many respects) open-source browser.
Currently Firefox is 12,000,000 LOC, so each line of code costs $25 per year? o_O If so, I am in the wrong business, given my main project is 300,000 lines of my own code.
Now, I totally believe the costs are astronomical to run a web browser team and all the servers required for such a feat. But surely it can't cost nearly this much. Especially with volunteers working on it as a labor of love as with many other major open-source projects, such as Linux.
In my ideal world, access to technology has become so essential that I think it's not unreasonable to consider public funding for things like an operating system and web browser. I do realize this is the worst site possible to suggest such a thing, of course ;) There's countless problems with that idea as well. We'd need a government that didn't spy on its own citizens, and wasn't far more wasteful than the private sector. But a man can dream.
But at this point, I'd be happy with a $1m Kickstarter to develop a fully-featured Webkit-based browser UI that is absolutely by the users, for the users. Taking only their input in mind (no crazy designers that "know better than the users"), no compromises on corporate interests (DRM), and never implementing any form of advertising nor doing any backroom deals with companies that want to mine your data like Google and Yahoo.