> Not much of a sample dude and if I were to bet, I'd say that if Mozilla dies, then Firefox will be completely dead as well, because the market dynamics have completely changed since 1998. The elephant in the room being that developing a browser takes a lot of resources and can no longer be done by a bunch of students on their free time.

You're likely right, of course. I should have clarified that I don't think that Firefox necessarily will be reborn if Mozilla fails, only that I hope it would be. But I'm afraid that we will find out before long...

> by a bunch of students on their free time.

I'm not an expert on the history of Mozilla, but my understanding is that it was never developed that way. It started with the Navigator code drop from Netscape, and the Mozilla organization was quickly formed around it with existing developers. It took a few years before they had "Firefox" out the door, but I don't think they did that for free in their spare time. Please correct me if I'm wrong. :)

But you're right that developing a browser that can compete with existing ones (in security, at least) is probably impractical without a decent number of full-time staff.

And that brings to mind an idea: a community-funded security team paid to keep up with security fixes, while the rest of the browser is maintained by community volunteers. Sure, it wouldn't get developed as quickly--but I, for one, would be happy to have less UI churn...

> That's a really condescending and damaging attitude. Most of us are in this industry to serve the needs of the "noobs", in order for them to be better at their own jobs. It's how society works you know.

I understand how you could interpret that as condescending, but that's not how I intended it. From my perspective, it's the "non-noobs" that are being condescended to by Mozilla as they continually shoo them away, effectively telling them, "This browser you've been using for 18 years--it is not the browser you're looking for..."

Witness the bug report in question here, in which a Mozilla developer says that Linux users can be expected to build Firefox themselves--he assumes that all Linux users are "Linux developers." What does he care if thousands of people suddenly have their browser fail to function? Mozilla can't be bothered to maintain the existing ALSA backend code.

Is that not their job, to maintain the codebase? What are they getting paid for? Why are they being paid to remove features? Why are they being paid to do things that their users don't want? Please don't lecture me about "maintainability" and human resources--I understand the burdens of legacy code, spaghetti code, etc. The answer is not to toss it into the bitbucket, pulling the rug out from under users. The answer is to refactor the code to improve maintainability, and replace the old code when the new code reaches parity. This is like, they've hit the CADT-panic button, and anytime they see old code, they go, "Eww, gross! Deprecated!"

It's like the ship is sinking, so they're starting to toss things overboard--including pieces of the hull. That will make the ship lighter, while at the same time letting more water in. Eventually it ceases to be a useful or salvageable as a ship, and the passengers jump ship, and then the crew has no passengers or ship. It's like the ship of Theseus: an interesting thought experiment, but it turns out that replacing the hull during a voyage causes ship loss. If they want to build S.S. Mozillium, they should park the S.S. Firefox in drydock first. At least that way the passengers wouldn't have to swim.