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A look at Firefox forks

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Re: A look at Firefox forks

#51

Post by xnx »

notRobot wrote: post #25
inglor wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many others. Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.

> for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome This is not true

Doesn't a fresh Chrome install add those shortcuts to Windows' desktop?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#52

Post by andix »

bad_user wrote: post #47
andix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.

> Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?

They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.

If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#53

Post by pessimizer »

If you're rich you should consider this a menu. Chrome is about to be split from Google which will be a soft reboot that could go badly or really well, but at the least will lead into an awkward period for them. Alternatively, they won't be split, which will create public anger and likely true accusations of quid pro quo, and possibly a tiny bluesky-sized stampede to alternatives.

Chrome will be told they can't pay Firefox for nothing anymore, and Firefox will reply with a not-uninstallable crypto casino or something (why are you complaining, you can turn it off by simply changing 6 unintelligible about:settings, hiding the banner with CSS, and blocking the telemetry and auto-updates at your router...)

Grab one of these, and run a TV commercial for a week or two. You'll get 20% market share in a couple months. Hire all of these fork developers, and let them keep running their own projects as forks of yours. Pick up people who get laid off from Firefox.

Zen and Floorp look interesting, and librewolf.overrides.cfg is new to me. Making Zen your main sell for marketing purposes, but also distributing LibreWolf for people who prefer a classic setup would make sense. Or if you speak Japanese, replace Zen with Floorp.

If you think you can do better than Mozilla, here's your chance! One day we'll be explaining to people that Apache Firefox is unmaintained buggy garbage, and that when old people say "Firefox" they mean Zen.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#54

Post by bad_user »

andix wrote: post #52
bad_user wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?

They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough. If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.

I don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I added that the interests of Google and Microsoft coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of Microsoft.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#55

Post by _bent »

tux3 wrote: post #10
xnx wrote: post #4

Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?

Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple as it sounds. Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically). At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor…

How is solving merge conflicts harder than developing an entire browser engine?

Plus Igalia, MS, Mozilla, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi etc could maintain a shared fork that kept stuff like Manifestv2 if they wanted.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#56

Post by xnx »

peppers-ghost wrote: post #6
xnx wrote: post #4

Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?

Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing. If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be in trouble.

Couldn't this be said about the Linux kernel?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#57

Post by bad_user »

rrgok wrote: post #41
herrherrmann wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a group/vendor you could trust to develop such a universal engine to rule them all, that could work out. But, alas, no big tech company could ever be trusted with such a task (they would try to push their agenda, e.g. by preventing ad blockers).

How is that any different from now? Look what happened recently with Mozilla and Firefox...

I think that people should look at what happened recently and realize that absolute nothing noteworthy happened.

And Firefox is still the only browser engine with support for uBlock Origin, on Android too.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#58

Post by xnx »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #12
xnx wrote: post #4

Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?

Linux users should just switch to Windows too.

Why would they do that?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#59

Post by pixxel »

saintfire wrote: post #23
Dwedit wrote: post #8

I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites. One person complained that their meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).

It does break many sites. Especially if you disable WebGL. You do get used to it but that's a tall task for most users. It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy. Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside. The time zone thing causes c…

> devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy

It’s a position, not a fetish.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#60

Post by pessimizer »

andix wrote: post #52
bad_user wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?

They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough. If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.

> They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.

It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.

IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.

I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.

My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.

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