It's not a particularly old company (a little over ten years I think?), so presumably they've had to learn a lot of those kinds of lessons at the start of their lifetime. But at this stage, I'd assume they've learned the lowest-hanging lessons, at least.

I'm fairly sure they don't; at least historically, the goal has been to improve the situation on the ground, not to move production elsewhere. (I think this was the post in which they explained that thinking, but I didn't reread it just now: https://www.fairphone.com/en/2025/10/15/lets-talk-about-fair...)

If e.g. someone's mainboard breaks, they can just give them a new phone and take in the old one, and then use the remaining parts to repair other employees' phones with working mainboards.

remoteStorage is still occasionally getting updates. https://solidproject.org is a somewhat newer, similar project backed by Tim Berners-Lee. (With its own baggage.)

I think of those projects as working relatively well for private data, but public data is kinda awkward. ATProto is the other way around: it has a lot of infra to make public data feasible, but private data is still pretty awkward.

It's a lot more popular though, so maybe has a bigger chance of solving those issues? Alternatively, Bluesky keeps its own extensions for that, and starts walling those bits off more and more as the VCs amp up the pressure. That said, I know very little about Bluesky, so this speculation might all be nonsense.

Yes Solid is another idea that's clearly the right thing, especially now. It might mlnit be easy to convince everyone they need it though, and the economics will be uphill given the trillions in entrenched, incumbent opposition.

Vivaldi, Librewolf, Palemoon and Zen Browser (the latter I'm not 100% sure about) have all committed to add no AI features, for some definition of AI.

AFAIK the model for tab group suggestions is about the same size? (And I think that model is/can be used for other features as well?)

As far as I can see all these Firefox options can be set through the UI as well.

That doesn't sound too preposterous; I wouldn't assume you'd be able to run a React Router project on Turbopack or Webpack either, and Next.js I think has a way more intricate dependence on the bundler to power a significant chunk of its features.

Whenever you think that everything old is new again and we're just retracing our steps from the past, you risk missing the lessons learned in the meantime.

And Igalia is notable for contributing to every major browser engine: https://www.igalia.com/2026/01/05/Doing-Our-Share-for-the-We...