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LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

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111–120 of 310 posts

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#111
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I neither want nor need DRM to work. I'd rather have the ability of ad-blocking and similar extensions to work on a deeper level, instead of crippling them, like on chromium-based browsers. What about mono-culture and the risk there of? edit: Availability of working DRM is what it all boils down to.

I haven't kept up to date. Is Chromium hostile towards ad blocking?

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#112
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that Firefox is "surveillance malware"? Precisely what surveillance are you referring to? Telemetry isn't surveillance. Recommended content (e.g. on the default New Tab page) doesn't involve surveillance.

>Are you implying that Firefox is "surveillance malware"? >Telemetry isn't surveillance. (honest question) Why is this necessary then: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

Why do you assume it's necessary? FWIW, I'd rate quite a bit of what it does as "not necessary".

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#113
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is what I want to look at. The real resource impact of starting the browser, looking at a website and closing the browser. Using an in-browser tool to measure that would be like asking a robber how much they stole.

Most people don't close and open their browser between page visits, so time spend opening/closing the browser is a magnitude of importance less than time spent loading the page. I'd rather have a browser that takes 10secs to start and 0.1secs to render a page than 2sec to start and 1sec for each page render. Additionally, timing externally like this ends up indirectly measuring unrelated metrics like the speed of you…

I think DNS speed will not impact the "user" and "sys" values of time. Only the "real" value. I think user+sys give the amount of CPU time used, not impacted by wait time.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#114
post #66
post #2

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…

If you read that tweet, it mainly says that they made the choice based on DRM licensing. Well, plus a vague "it lost on many dimensions in a head to head comparison enumerating gaps vs. Chrome". Which I can't argue, because there are no specifics to disagree with.

That said, I work on Gecko and it is indeed an old crufty codebase with numerous issues. From what I've seen of Blink, it seems surprisingly similar (overall; the specific problem areas are different). And Gecko has a surprising willingness to rewrite or revamp core aspects of the codebase -- by some metrics, it appears to be more nimble than Blink (eg, site isolation to separate processes was a massive project for both codebases, and it looks like although Gecko started and finished later, the elapsed time is a couple years less.)

On the other hand, Eich was pretty well in touch with the Gecko codebase, so his opinion should carry some weight. (Somewhat counterbalanced by his seeming enthusiasm for burning some bridges behind him, but that gets into very speculative territory.)

I tend to agree that Gecko isn't as good as Chromium as a foundation for forking, though. I think working with the Mozilla development community is actually quite a bit better than working with Chromium's, but Gecko is pretty unapologetically focused on Mozilla's product needs and Mozilla doesn't have the resources to properly support external embedders or forks.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#115
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I neither want nor need DRM to work. I'd rather have the ability of ad-blocking and similar extensions to work on a deeper level, instead of crippling them, like on chromium-based browsers. What about mono-culture and the risk there of? edit: Availability of working DRM is what it all boils down to.

I haven't kept up to date. Is Chromium hostile towards ad blocking?

It started with this, but applies to other extensions also:

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#116
post #43
post #2

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?

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…

Yet Firefox went in a weird direction. Telemetry decisions, huh.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#117
post #2

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?

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…

I've not come across someone in tech who doesn't pronounce Libre in French (leebr). Libre is necessary, because English is deficient when talking about freedom, since it doesn't distinguish something being free of charge (free as in doesn't cost money) and something being free in the broad sense (as in freedom).

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#118
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you implying that Firefox is "surveillance malware"? >Telemetry isn't surveillance. (honest question) Why is this necessary then: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

Why do you assume it's necessary? FWIW, I'd rate quite a bit of what it does as "not necessary".

On another thread, I was told: "Firefox is feeding your data to Google. You need to disable it in the user.js file"

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#119
post #27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Mozilla is harming Firefox much more with their decisions. Adding ads to address bar and sending metadata to unknown third parties alienated lots of users, I can’t blame them for looking for alternatives - or making one.

I'm not thrilled with every decision Mozilla has ever made but I think people have gotten so used to the unlimited resources that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are able to pour into their unprofitable ecosystem moats that they've lost sight of what running a self sustaining business in this space would even look like.

> they've lost sight of what running a self sustaining business in this space would even look like

Get your facts right.

Mozilla Corporate receives 400mil a year from Google, for google search to be the default search engine. The engineering costs of Mozilla in 2020 were about 300mil. [0]

So in actual fact you could maintain the not-for-profit status, fire all the corporate staff and still sit on a trove of cash every year.

The google money will not dry out because it is the only CYA situation that Google has against an anti-trust case on Chrome.

There is absolutely no reason Mozilla could not maintain the not-for-profit status and tick along, like other foundations such as Linux, Gnome, Apache, etc.

[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3600206/mozilla-report...

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#120
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a successful project takes A LOT of work. For something this size it’s not a side projects amount of work. How do the people working on it get money to cover their bills? If they don’t have this they will work on something that does that. A financial model is usually the blocker. Consider this, a lot of the people who work on Linux or many other projects are corporate backed. The companies pay the develop…

Is it becoming a truism that (in this space) the profit motive will inevitably lead to user abuse? Maybe we need more 501c3 and benefit corps providing basic stuff like an internet browser?

cough Mozilla is dead in the water cough
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