Firefox is on the brink of being dropped by the US Government
3 years ago by morrowind to c/technology
Thank you for the excerpt. I initially interpreted the title as US government agencies will stop using Firefox, not US government agencies will stop requiring their web masters to test in Firefox.
I’d imagine that effectively means agencies would stop using Firefox, if they can’t use it on their own sites.
Google Sheets would disagree.
Fat chance they’re actually using Firefox in the first place. My money’s on Chrome or IE.
Government IT worker here: IE was dropped off almost all DoD computers years ago when MS officially ceased support of it. Edge, Firefox, and Chrome come standard with the baseline image at most sites I've supported.
I think this article is also pretty silly. We have scientists, engineers, accountants, logistics, etc. all using various web apps and sites. Rather than fuck around with installing a browser that may or may not be compatible with any of them, we had our image team blanket install Chrome and Firefox to avoid unnecessary tickets. Just because government websites may not require designers to be compatible with Firefox doesn't mean anything for all those federal jobs that don't only use government sites for work.
if you spoof your user-agent it won't help Firefox in metrics, since websites will think you're other browser.
Nono, the other way round. Visit it with chrome and spoof a firefox user agent, so it looks like you used firefox, while you can still use the website.
I visit weather.gov around once a day on both mobile and desktop Firefox.
I'll be over here making sure they still got a sliver of Mosaic in their logs.
I actually did that today before reading the article.
I took the liberty of reading the article but I'm gonna say the title is quite... tendentious. Makes it sound like it's yet another one of those FUD / nutjob clickbait that have been coming at the privacy community for a few days with sensationalist titles such as "The CIA will stop funding Signal" (never has been) or "FBI wants to sell Wikipedia" (never has been).
What is going on?
EDIT: Cosmic Cleric has provided the definition of "tendentious", which I have linked.
tendentious
ten·den·tious /tenˈdenSHəs/ adjective expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one. "a tendentious reading of history"
Thank you. I'm not too proud to say I didn't know this word. And, you saved me looking it up. When I was a kid, my dad got tired of defining words for me when I was reading a book, so he taught me to use a dictionary. From then on, I've read with a dictionary next to me.
Thank you. I’m not too proud to say I didn’t know this word.
You're welcome, and yeah I had no idea what that word meant either, its why I looked it up in the first place.
New word for me, too. Odd, considering how incredibly relevant it is nowadays!
Thanks for taking the time to explain it to others, which I should have done beforehand. Admittedly when I wrote that post I was thinking of the term "tenacious" which means something completely different, and that distracted me from noticing I was using a perhaps obscure word.
Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.
Someone call 911, I think I'm having some kind of medical issue with how this post looks.
We would be euphoria-laden in our willingness to expeditiously mobilize and engage medical assistance should it become categorically imperative.
Something can't become categorically imperative, a quiddidity such as an essentially categorical property is invariant with respect to time. It either is or it isn't. Per contra, aesculapian aid might become dispositionally required.
The fuck does tendentious mean and how do I even pronounce it?
We speak murican here friend
Your adroit incorporation of "adroit " reminds me of mine own erewhile efforts to incorporate "adroit" into my poetical experimentations, which I hope resulted in an execution considered adroit back in the time.
Grateful I am for your bringing of this memory of creation to me.
Much of it has to do with Firefox's decisions in the past 5-7 years that have made it very unfriendly to enterprise environments. The provisioning tools have gotten progressively more hostile to IT departments.
The US government is also finally moving to more modern systems for authentication and Mozilla has incorporated some particularly poor changes to how the stack is handled that are very unfriendly to IT environments that need to manage credentials for multiple authoritative sources. We had to switch to Chrome a couple years ago because our support cases with Mozilla would on many occasions come back with a response of 'we've made our decision and will not be considering changes'.
Unfortunately, as Firefox kicks itself out of the enterprise market; that's going to cascade to the personal market even further as well.
Serious question re the auth part:
Have you tried submitting PRs? Much of the complaints that I see about the development side of Firefox are grounded on the fac that "they won't have this cool thing that Chrome has", ignoring that those things are usually dangerous or are rejected for justified, studied reasons (see: WebUSB). Sounds just about the area where auth would have issues, and it'd be interesting to see what Firefox's actual response was.
Who knows, maybe they're cluing you that you shouldn't depending on Google...
True. Browsers are so damn complex these days!
Completely off-topic but I recall a lawyers TV show back in the day where the response to this joke was something like:
"About at the same time you stopped beating yours"
Which would have been interesting to see how that would have worked at the court. Can't remember the show alas, but it was probably The Practice (a late 90s show I think, predecessor to Boston Legal).
The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites.
Now I know what to blame for every single US government website being so poorly put together they they barely function, if they function at all.
The Free Software Foundation Europe has an awesome initiative called Public Money Public Code where they try to convince lawmakers to use as much open source software as possible when using public funds. I really hope they succeed.
Security through obscurity doesn’t, work the vulnerabilities are still there. Also if the vulnerabilities are visible they’re also easier to close.
Tell me you have never worked in IT security without telling me you never worked in IT security.
To give you an actual answer, instead of pure Internet snark, the concept you're proposing is called "security through obscurity" if you want to research it.
The TL:DR of it is it doesn't work. If it did, all software would be proprietary and things like viruses wouldn't exist. The source code for Windows isn't available, but Windows gets exploited constantly.
More eyeballs are from people wanting those flaws fixed that wanting to exploit them.
Proprietary source code has much fewer eyeballs, none of which you can verify belong to competent or trustworthy people.
If it's open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to exploit way easier patch
FTFY. Open source software is more secure than closed source, not less
Is this a serious question?
This is the exact same ridiculous argument that proprietary software corporations make. It never made any sense, security through obscurity will never work. Linux is open-source used on ~80% of all web servers, in your logic these servers would all be vulnerable. It just doesn't make any sense. Linux is also used in many embedded devices and Android is based on the Linux kernel. But Android (which is also entirely open source) has one of the best security models out there.
Vulnerabilities can and are usually found without code inspection. Fuzzing, reverse engineering, etc. At the same time, it is easier to find vulnerabilities having the code to check, but it is easier also for those who want to have them patched. That's why we have tons of CVEs in Windows, iOS etc., and they don't all come from the vendor... Depending on the ratio of eyeballs looking at something to fix and the ones looking at something to exploit, open source can be more secure compared to closed source.
Lol
And 100% of it is dog shit. I have seen custom products from Accenture, Deloitte, and E&Y, and they were passable prototypes at best.
Accenture doesn't make shit. They bring in expensive ass consultants with 25 years of experience (on paper), then they sell something basically off the shelf. What's left of the budget goes to a subcontractor, who now has to glue the already purchased pieces together with spit and gum, now on a very tight timeline before the funding runs out and your tiny company gets the blame
Haven't worked directly with the others, but the Accenture story was the same everywhere
That's the opposite of most UK government websites. I've always found them very well designed and easy to use. I think they're well regarded by web designers
But they limit the amount of kickbacks, America has the freedom of unlimited corruption. (j/k, but only kinda)
USWDS is new and is a response to exactly that problem. You'd be blaming people who have nothing to do with the status quo who were hired to fix the problems you've experienced.
Not to derail a good point but there are at least a few government entities with brain cells. Check out digital.gov and cloud.gov, the latter of which has created a responsive, accessible platform for government websites.
Bold of you to assume that people writing contracts or working them know about these standards at all.
every single US government website being so poorly put together
So, just like the rest of the internet? A technology, that popularly speaking, has only been around for 30-years?
And you expect an entity, as huge and diverse as the US government, on federal/state/local levels, to be on the same page?
I can safely make 2 predictions about you:
- You're young, and that's A-OK. My kids are GenZ, maybe Alpha? They're my last, best hope for this world. But you haven't had the benefit of watching all this evolve. I was writing BASIC on a VIC-20 as a child. 3K RAM!
- You're not in tech. So again, you haven't had the benefit of trying to make all this shit work. GenXers physically and programmatically built the world you live in, on top of the work of the Boomers. I've hung cable drops and coded, all messy.
This clusterfuck is both expected and natural. Or did your science teacher tell you evolution was orderly? Or perhaps intelligently designed?
And anyone else wanting to complain, I'll remind you, this is how the government vs. the free market works.
Government works by rules that are not broken or bent. And this pisses some people off. Private enterprise works by what works and what doesn't. It's fast and fluid, and not designed to take "the people" in mind. And this pisses some people off.
Some tasks are appropriate for the government, some for the public sector. We're still working this shit out. (website_under_construction.gif)
I can safely make 2 predictions about you:
You might wanna check the reception on your crystal ball, Nostradamus, cuz you're wrong on all counts. I'm 38 and have worked in general IT as well as network engineering.
What a weirdly arrogant, condescending response. I also started on basic on a vic20, had a dad who worked in IT for the government, and have done all of that except the physical wiring on any noteworthy scale. This is utterly unhelpful.
This thread is filled with people who don't make a connection between shitty government websites and the roads that are filled with pot holes, several train derailments every day, a tax collection agency that doesn't have enough staff to do audits on wealthy people, and schools that ban books that have rainbows in them but teach books by Prager U.
We could have better government websites - but not if we elect "starve the beast" politicians.
Wait until Google implements manifest V3 and "kills" adblockers. Firefox will become cool again for the normies.
They will get rekt by Vestager faster than they can say "profits"
People are so used to seeing ads they probably wont bother, i have friends who work in IT who just acceppt that half of the sites they visit are full of annoying flashy and intrusive ads.
Yeah but if you tell them about ad blockers and show them how to install them, and they see how much better the experience is afterwards, then they'll bother.
They said their friends work in "IT". They have most definitely heard about adblockers and know how to use them, if this claim is legit. As a person who works in the tech field, I don't know any coworkers who would not use adblockers. I find it kind of crazy to believe there are any IT professionals that don't use adblockers, but I guess some must exist. Maybe they feel like adblocking is stealing or immoral somehow.
Even Opera is now Chrome....
Opera, chrome, but with CCP data theft and monitoring
Not to even mention the fact a Chinese company owns Opera. Why is it even being considered?
Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.
Governments agencies usually obtain software through contracts with vendors. Microsoft is one of those vendors so I'm not surprised to hear about this.
Also, Firefox is the pretty much the browser of freedom and independence so I'm surprised it's not illegal or "against family values" at this point. 😔
Some of you need to stop spoofing browsing agents. We need to show people that Firefox is used. This telemetry can help Firefox support and become a big competitor to Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.
Typical Firefox UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0
Chrome: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
See browsers started calling themselves "Mozilla" to say "Hey I can do what Firefox can!" (or back then still navigator, doesn't matter. So then sites started checking for "Gecko" (which is Mozilla's browser engine), and browsers (in this case Konqueror, I think) started adding "Hey, I'm like Gecko" to it. Then... it just goes on and on.
The only things not Mozilla in that Firefox UA are X11, Linux, and x86_64. It never stepped so low as to call itself "Mozilla (like Mosaic)".
Iirc there’s a “per site” spoofer that people could use instead, for those sites that require specific browsers. I don’t actually know what it’s called, and my cursory Google search didn’t bring up much of anything, but I do believe I’ve seen them before.
The FF extension is just called "User-Agent Switcher" I believe?
And yes, you can set it blacklist mode or whitelist mode (in other words, "use the extension on every domain but:" vs. "Only use the extension with these domains:").
I'll only switch away from FF if a site is completely broken. I'll try it before resorting to chromium
Solution: fuck snapshit.
I have NEVER seen a site that won't work with firefox. What is everyone even talking about?
All you people too young to remember the late 1990s, enjoy the internet as we used to know it before adblockers, because it sounds like you're going to be out of options a lot of times soon.
I plan to use Firefox as long as I can, but I hate that I already have to have a backup browser for some sites, including the back end of the website where I used to work. And that will only get worse.
Yup, just like the days where sites would just display a "this site is designed for internet explorer 6" and nothing else unless you were using IE.
I will tell you something that most people won't: you don't have to use those websites.
It doesn't matter how important you think they are, you can take a stand by not using them if they don't respect you.
Do you know the reasoning behind the common saying "the united states doesn't engage with terrorists"? Politics aside, it's because engaging with your enemy legitimizes or empowers them. By refusing to negotiate or engage with terrorists, the policy aims to avoid granting them recognition or validation for their methods.
You can take the same stance; when a website stops working with non-chromium browsers you stop using it. You IMMEDIATELY stop using it, even better if you pay them money, you should IMMEDIATELY cancel citing that they're stealing your intellectual freedom. If the US government does the same and you're required to use a chromium browser to fill out your taxes for example, do it on paper, give them a message that you'd rather not use technology than have guns pointed at you
Sure, until there are almost no websites left you can go to.
Many sites I visit are not because I like the design of the site, but that I like the content that the users it has attracted have uploaded. Sure, there's YouTube alternatives, but they're not a replacement for the scale of YouTube. There's still a few subreddits I read because they don't have a good lemmy alternative.
Sure, until there are almost no websites left you can go to.
It worked in the '90s with internet explorer, it can work again now.
You just have to care enough to push back, to leave suggestion comments saying their website doesn't work with your browser, and that web browsing is an Internet standard. That's how it was done last time.
Sadly, it happened to IE as it was a nightmare to work with and web-devs started pushing back. Chrome is, by most accounts, the best browser to work with as a web-dev so it seems unlikely that there will be the same push back against it.
There will always be ways around it. Every time a barrier is put up, there are people who try to figure out how to break through it. For fun.
My first desk job was in 96 and even then I needed 3 browsers to get the different government websites to work properly. I don't know if there was a time before needing a backup browser.
Remember when websites could open infinite windows, and prevent you from backout out or closing windows?
Even if things get really bad, they wont get that bad. Also dont forget flash meant the ads were media rich, security hole ridden, cpu spinning, awful monsters as well.
So changing the user agent to chrome to fool websites that work shittier on non chromium stuff will ruin this metric?
No, what this means is sites might start adopting features like PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox and one where you just might not be able to access the service, at all, unless your browser has support.
(Passkeys are a replacement for passwords - essentially the idea is to take the technology commonly used for second factor authentication and use it as your "first factor" instead)
PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox
So... Chrome and Safari? Because the rest of browsers are just rebranded Chrome.
I'm not particularly a fan of passkeys, because I'm fairly happy with my password manager, but personal opinions apart, just because Google and Apple decided to implement a feature, that doesn't make it an standard.
This is why Chrome having the web engine monopoly is such a big problem. They can implement whatever they want and because it will also be adopted by Edge, Opera and others, it seems to automatically be considered a web standard and websites will start using it even when the other major independent browser (Firefox) hasn't implemented it.
a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox
Funny cause it works fine in my browser with a bitwarden plugin. I don't need and actually REALLY don't want my browser handling my passwords... or passkeys... or whatever the fuck authenticates me.
Isn’t that what password managers are for? People don’t store credentials in browsers, not sure why they’d start for passkeys when password managers are rolling out support.
People don’t store credentials in browsers
Yes they do - every browser asks users if they want to remember the password they just entered. Many people say yes, I do too for most cases - it is very convinient.
Did you know that you can see those passwords in plain text in the browser settings?
Use a password manager
Trust issues aside, do you use the same browser for every task on every device? What do you use to generate your passwords?
Genuinely asking, this is wild to me. This would be like allowing location or desktop notifs from a website.
Edit: downvotes are weird. Fuck me for asking a question I guess? Would be more useful if y'all explained yourselves (and thanks to the one dude who apparently does use only one browser - cool that this works for you)
I'm using passkeys in Firefox everyday just fine.
No, what I mean is "metric" as in data about users per browser.
I use Firefox exclusively. It is fast, responsive, and works on all the sites that I visit. So I don't really understand why the share of users are so low. What sites are ya'll visiting that doesn't work on FF?
Nobody said a website didn't work on Firefox. Tough Microcock Teams doesn't work, I didn't find any other sites not supporting Firefox.
The market share is so low because of the same reason Linux's share is low: people use what most people use. When they get a new computer, they either don't know much and stick to Edge (which is Chromium) or install Chrome because that's what they are familiar with, and the reason they're familiar with it is because most people used that, so they also tried that. If they use other browsers, they just don't care enough to switch, no matter if it's much better or how easy switching is.
Pre-installs are also a reason, as I've said before about Edge. So if a well-known computer manufacturer put Linux on most of their laptops and a new computer user would buy one of them, they would just use Firefox cuz that's what pre-installed on most distros, and if more new users buy it who don't know about Chrome, Firefox market share becomes even bigger.
Most people just don't care enough to switch if their current setup works. Let it be Linux, Mac, Firefox or any less-used product.
Early chrome introduced a lot of features that attracted the tech crowd in the late 00s and early 10s like html5 video (replacing the need for flash plugins) as well as multithreaded tasks for better use of those newfangled multicore cpus people were buying.
Around the same time firefox was experiencing a memory leak and took too long to open(I switched over to linux at the time and didnt have the issue but it was a big complaint online).
Early on firefox was also slower to add a lot of the newer html5 stuff that was popping up around the web while chrome was more or less built from the ground up with it in mind which also lost it some enthusiast mindshare.
Along the same time google started a heavy chrome push. Of course the default browser on android was based on chrome, and google search results pushed people to download chrome, and youtube's html5 video ran better on chrome(firefox initially didnt have all the codecs they used due to licensing). Google used its web dominance to advertise, and push, and advertise, and push.
Eventually firefox got to a point where they mostly caught up but by this point chrome had gained a solid footing and lead and here is where dirtier. Firefox was constantly behind on webstandard and synthetic benchmarks but many of the things firefox was behind in on these benchmarks were things that google had just introduced. Also with the new google dominance came lazy developers who would instead of building a site for web standards and test on multiple devices, build their site to run on chrome and bugs on other webrenderers be damned. With other major competitors like opera and Edge switching to blink it meant that the devs were mostly covered.
So this gave the appearance that firefox was still technically behind even after having closed the gap. And by the time chrome started having its own PR issues and memory leak problems the fluid tech landscape has changed.
Firefox lost market share in an era when tech and software were still fluid. New social media could rise up any day myspace could get killed by newcomer facebook. There can be multiple video sites who will win? IOS, Blackberry, Palm, Winmo, Nokia, and Android were going head to head in the smartphone space. Internet explorer, firefox, netscape, opera, chrome and safari all had different engines.
Nothing came to knock facebook out and the social media that rose up after was just different, youtube is essentially a monopoly in that space, IOS and Android are all that's left of the smartphone war, and firefox still exists but chromium's engine Blink powers most alternative browsers and firefox's usershare is tiny now. Safari only has a marketshare because it's default on macs and the only game in town on IOS. Chrome will have to really really really mess up in order to actually shed significant mainstream user marketshare.
I tried doing my annual vehicle registration online on FF yesterday and the dmv site kept throwing an error and bringing me back to step 1 when I submit my payment information. Tried turning off all my extensions and still wouldn’t budge. Finally tried it in Chrome and it worked instantly. You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.
Government websites don't care at all about support, most of them were made 15-20 years ago and haven't been updated at all
You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.
lol, I would never ever think that. government sites are just the worst fucking feverish web nightmare that exists, at least here where I live.
it's like they deliberately choose people for this kind of work whom never seen computers in their life before and think Internet is just an energy drink you buy at the gas station.
dude i work with one that just recently added support for non-internet explorer... major. government. entity. places that are the reason for the required legacy i.e. code in edge.
this government shit is based on 'lowest bidder' mentality.
I have had some luck using a user agent switcher in these cases. Might be worth a shot.
Did you read the article? This is about how the government's web developers could stop writing websites that support Firefox. You might have to switch to Chromium to use government websites.
Web dev here. Unless they explicitly block other browsers or somehow adopt bleeding-edge tech that other browsers have and Firefox doesn’t (has Firefox ever not been the first to support new standards?) I don’t know how this would even be a problem.
How convenient for them and the Corp lining their pockets.
When I worked for the USDA in 2010 we had several web applications that depended on Internet Explorer 6.
I worked in an office in 2009 with a Windows 95 PC (a Packard Bell that barely ran the OS).
I got them to upgrade it in 2012.
I suppose I should have said replace it. :p
The government IT shops part feels like a real issue. If the government gets it's self in a tech debt to two of the largest IT orgs because they didn't want to invest the time to get Firefox enterprise installed and configured on at least their own machines I'll be pissed. Like why are we spending so much but getting so little from our IT?
They will care about their adblocker no longer working
Do many real life users even know about ad blockers?
I once saw stats from a 2015 study that said 40% of people on the internet used ad blockers. Who knows how that's changed since then, but as somebody else said, the majority of people who don't probably don't even know that you can block ads, otherwise they'd probably be using it.
That's usually not because they don't care but because they don't know that ads can be blocked on the phone as well
I use ublock origin on firefox on android, wasnt that hard.
Because they haven't been affected by Manifest v3 yet. As soon as they realise just what Manifest v3's all about...They'll give a fuck.
Those two crowds intermingle, you realize that, right? They're your family and friends, and they talk to each other.
I've never even heard of it...
The short of it is that Google wants to prevent ad blockers from working in Chromium based browsers.
I don't remember if this is also planned for v3 or unrelated, but there was also talks of essentially DRM-ing the internet to block non-Chromium browsers.
People don't care about anything until that thing hits them.
2% is huge. Many companies still have their website support ie6, and the US gov wants to abandon 2% of their users???
Edge really isn't an awful browser. At least not in the same league as IE
TIL Samsung makes a browser.
Yeah, comes on Samsung phones and tablets.
Eventually, the list of things Samsung doesn't make is going to be shorter.
It’s just my intuition, but I get the feeling the data on Firefox market share is skewed
That's terrible. How can Firefox usage rates be declining? It seems like every day there's some new scammy feature being rolled out in all the other browsers.
Most people have no idea that there are differences between browsers, or how the internet even works for that matter, and as such, generally use either Chrome or whatever the default installed browser is.
More people than should still think 'smartphones' are all called 'iphones'
They are talking about .gov websites. Any website operated by the US government should, at least according to their own standards, develop for and test for users using Firefox. If this is followed in practice the article doesn't really cover.
Do school or library computers count as government devices?
Technically, yes, but in this context government devices means systems used by federal employees which have access to PII or classified information.
Mozilla hasn't been putting any effort into making firefox a proper competitor despite their 400M+/year from Google.
They haven't pushed the envelope in any way, haven't invested in a Rust browser engine, haven't moved away from XUL, haven't fixed their oldest bugs, haven't made Gecko more easily embeddable, haven't added added better documentation to Gecko, haven't improved speed or memory use, haven't invested heavily in their android version (it's slow af on older devices), only just now are starting to enable extensions in firefox on android, ...
Their biggest changes are buying up a few useless startups (Pocket, some analytics company?), multiprocess firefox, manifest, containers, looking more chrome-like, firing 400 developers or something during COVID and paying their CEO 5M (?).
All they do is exist. The only reason people switch is because other browsers fuck up. IMO, that's not a strategy to get more users, but a strategy to collect the Google cheque.
Their ceo pay keeps going up. Even as their market share declines. And they're still entirely dependent on Google for revenue, who at this pint is basically donating to them to avoid more anti trust issues. It's a precarious system.
https://gs.statcounter.com/ until G tries to force ads on all the Chrome
So everyone using FF just had to start visiting more .gov websites (using the correct user agent) ?
In Soviet Russia, browser drops government!
Edit: FireFox fire + outfox you!
Firefox already doesn't work well with government sites, so this doesn't really change anything.
It would be more accurate to state that any given site chooses not to work well with any given browser.
Your phrasing makes it seem as-if this choice is in the browser developer's hands. It is not.
fork
what if google chrome decided to close the fork by changing the license to something restructive, i mean the fork can goes on for a little while but we are still depending on the resources of a Big $$ corporation....
firefox is the only way for a free web....
Then they'd be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn't be able to lock down the code that's already been released under the more permissive BSD license.
Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It's huge, which makes me think it's the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.
EDIT: turns out it's Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.
Don't forget, on the off chance they accept symbols at all many of them also dictate which symbols you can use.
but when you point out the problems with mozilla in any of their subs/echochambers their usebase is by far worse than any other.
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Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting .gov sites.
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