Not in my knowledge. It would be hard to have the same amount of funding as they have now from Google.

especially when you pay your executives 7 figure salaries

That’s what a good executive costs these days. You could try to hire a CEO for $100,000/yr with the expected quality of applicants.

> That’s what a good executive costs these days.

maybe they should go get some then

People just expect browsers to be free. And there's no way that can be more than Google money.

That's because browsers should be free. They are infrastructure, just like bridges. And nobody wants a bridge troll sitting on the single bridge crossing the internet river, demanding money from everyone.

You pay for bridges with tax. Tax funded browser sounds good in theory, but I don't trust the people managing my tax money to run a tech project like Firefox. Most likely it gets handed to the lowest private sector bidder, with the stipulation that any privacy preserving — sorry, I meant criminal hiding — features be removed.

Bridges are not free

No but they are available at very reasonable prices in prime locations.

If anyone's interested I have a very pretty one listed in Brooklyn. See my Google search ad for details. :P

I mean, bridge tolls are absolutely a thing.

My area has roads w/o bridges that have a toll.

If things keep going as they are, my area will soon have a bridge, several bridges, and no roads.

But it will still have tolls.

What exactly is the problem? I understand a browser is a complex program but is the claim it is impossible to build a browser without continual dependence on advertising toxic dollars?

> a browser is a complex program

A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.

I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.

My Linux kernel is not riddled with ads?

Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.

> My Linux kernel is not riddled with ads?

And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?

Does your hypothetical kernel make it easy or difficult for you to install add-ons that block ads? Does the organization that build it have a conflict of interest regarding advertisting/surveillance interests such as Google/Meta/...?

Not sure what your point is. My comparison was not made to be stretched infinitely. Next question may be "does your kernel render web pages?", but I don't see where it is going.

But to give an answer: if you wanted to bake an ad-blocker in the Linux kernel that would prevent programs from showing ads in a transparent way (the ads just don't show and the programs still work and look fine), I think it would not be trivial at all.

But I don't see the point of going down that discussion.

Orion (by Kagi) is still new, but seems to be trying.

Orion is webkit-based though, not a whole independent browser like FFox.

To be fair, Firefox on iOS is also WebKit based thanks to Apples’s rules. Much of a muchness in this aspect.

I'm not criticizing Orion for that; I actually enjoy it quite a lot (and will do even more when they will have ironed out all the UI bugs).

Also I'm eager to see how it will behave on Linux when they will have finished their port; I hope we will finally have a really low-energy consumption browser then.