71–80 of 310 posts
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> As far as this monopoly is concerned, all these forks are still Firefox. Not in the website statistics I guess, unless the forks present themselves as Firefox, which I doubt.
To defend against browser fingerprinting you absolutely want them to present themselves as Firefox.
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Edge, for example, is a fork maintained by Microsoft. It is a strategic project for a multi-billion company. That is not comparable to a fork of your average open-source project.
But it's absolutely comparable to a fork of Firefox. This does not solve the GPs question, why do so many people fork Chrome instead of Firefox.
Options:
1. Fork Firefox, people install Chrome anyway 2. Fork Chromium, some people realize that it's essentially the same as Chrome and don't install Chrome and just use Edge
Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers who are not happy with the leadership of Mozilla. What's preventing other forks from taking off?
>Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? [...] What's preventing other forks from taking off Some of the replies to your question state "money" but there are also more fundamental reasons of choosing Chromium over Gecko: technical functionality and performance (especially on mobile) . You'd think an ex-Firefox programmer and Mozilla co-founder such as Brendan Eich would have chosen Gecko for Brave but he…
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Its not free or open software, so using it is a step back.
Depends which way you're facing, really.
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Hopefully it's a lot different. If you proxy Firefox you'll see that even with everything turned off that you possibly can through the UI, Firefox phones home many times, especially during launch and exit.
It would be nice to back that up a bit more. I'm genuinely curious. For what it's worth, some of the startup checks are to see whether the user is on a public wifi with a captive portal, and talk to a Mozilla service rather than Google. Other checks are for upgrades, or Firefox Sync, if enabled.
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One reason is that there's a ton of social pressure not to fork, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106440 Another is that doing so, and sustaining the effort, is a non-trivial amount of work. Throwing up a web page and a single release is one thing. Keeping up with the release cadence of an org like Mozilla, and the demands and expectations of a browser user base is something entirely different. Als…
Out of curiosity, why do you think "libre" is a terrible moniker?
But that's a symptom of a different pair of issues, namely: (1) it's ambiguous what language the word is in, and (2) neither of those languages are really tech field lingua francas (English, Russian, maybe Hindi, probably in that order).
This brings up the questions: How can i disable as much telemetry as possible when using the standard Firefox? What am i missing if i go to , search for "telemetry" and set everything to false ? Are there drawbacks to blocking the hostname incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org in Pi-hole?
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OP said this: >> is the suggestion that FF is too complex to properly fork without full time devs? How many Chrome forks don't have "full time devs"? A lot of them (Vivaldi, Opera) aren't even open source! The only one I can think of is ungoogled Chromium which is basically equivalent to this Firefox one in that the actual changes being made are miniscule.
I'm not OP, but you, in GGP, said: >>>It's 20 million lines of security sensitive code. Of course it's difficult to properly fork. Did you forget to switch accounts? Which is it? Easy or hard?
No, but nice accusation.
> Which is it? Easy or hard?
Could you spell out what the contradiction is, here? I said it's hard to fork both browsers, and then pointed out that the only real "community" ones are miniscule patchsets which pretty much exclusively delete code - that even then, the list is only one or two forks long for each browser - and the rest all have multiple full-time professional devs behind them.
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One reason is that there's a ton of social pressure not to fork, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106440 Another is that doing so, and sustaining the effort, is a non-trivial amount of work. Throwing up a web page and a single release is one thing. Keeping up with the release cadence of an org like Mozilla, and the demands and expectations of a browser user base is something entirely different. Als…
Out of curiosity, why do you think "libre" is a terrible moniker?
For me, as a fan of open source, Libre-something means something focused on being open source, than being a good product. And in my humble opinion, open source governance is generally not good at making big sweeping, or even just focused changes when needed, so the "Libre" moniker to me has an aftertaste of "good enough, but could be much better" compared to commercial offerings or products that have paid volunteers and stronger governance.
Something called Libre usually means it will never get nor accept any paid sponsorship, and sometimes it's what is needed to turn a decent open source product into a killer product.
None of these things are rooted in hard facts, that's the "feeling" the libre word gives me. To be honest, the only popular libre products I know of are LibreOffice (just good enough IMO) and LibreSSL, which was born after the OpenSSL fiasco, yet is still living in the shadow of OpenSSL. The "Open" word has similar shortcomings, but is less strict that the definition of libre and thus carries fewer negative connotations in my view.