Is it? They say it’s using Gecko + Mozilla Android Components. Which would probably make it similar to FF in many ways, but not a fork. I didn’t look further into it though (as I want FF, especially Mozilla sync)

>IronFox

Judging by the commit logs, the main two maintainers are one anonymous guy (nothing linking his profile to a real person) and some Chinese guy (is he a Chinese national or not?)

Although these may be perfectly well-meaning people, we can't just trust them to maintain something so critical as a web browser.

I fully respect peoples' right to anonymity, but such projects need at least one core maintainer to be an identifiable person, imo. Just to establish trust and accountability in case anything does happen.

I hope this is not taken the wrong way and that you understand what I'm getting at here.

It’s a German company behind it, probably a one man show: https://docs.weblibre.eu/Legal/Imprint

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.

Exactly what I was thinking: a modern privacy first proposal may be better suited with starting from chromium, even if it hurts feelings

Also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

Even if it's not on topic, that post is quite interesting.

You may be missing the point of this browser.