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A look at Firefox forks

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Re: A look at Firefox forks

#141

Post by dv_dt »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #132

> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant.... According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement). Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer. I didn't know I was donating so much,…

A more insidious aspect of grocery shoppings is that companies can pay for better placement on the store shelves & floor.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#142

Post by joshuaturner »

dv_dt wrote: post #141
aucisson_masque wrote: post #132

> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant.... According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement). Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer. I didn't know I was donating so much,…

A more insidious aspect of grocery shoppings is that companies can pay for better placement on the store shelves & floor.

can donate* for better placement

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#143

Post by keyringlight »

layer8 wrote: post #119
Propelloni wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did Google in 2008 chose to built its own browser instead of helping to improve Firefox, which was around since 2002?

They wanted a browser they have full control over. And you can move much faster when you don’t have to negotiate every change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0 were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn’t that established yet. The main competition at the time was Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.

I'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some nice byproducts along the way of course.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#144

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #86
bastawhiz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy…

Totally agree. Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades. All the emphasis has been on skin-deep UI refreshes, gimmicks, ways to monetize the user, and ways for developers to control the user’s experience. I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things…

Bookmarks and tabs are a good example of how easily you could accidentally step on the core userbases' toes. There are absolutely stellar tab and bookmark addons that essentially completely change how those systems work. They are also vastly more complex (but in a way that serves powerusers).

If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.

The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.

Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#145

Post by jofzar »

tcfunk wrote: post #77

I've been using zen lately mostly for the combination of "essentials" + "workspace" tab management scheme. I love having a space for tabs while also having a spot to pin stuff like email and bluesky which doesn't necessarily fit into one category or other. Admittedly I haven't tried many other options, except sidebery which was good but not quite there for me.

These are arc features (which were copied/ported to zen) and are the main reason I use ARC atm on my Mac. On PC I use zen because arc sucks on PC. It's hard to lose these features imo.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#146

Post by cosmic_cheese »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #144
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades. All the emphasis has been on skin-deep UI refreshes, gimmicks, ways to monetize the user, and ways for developers to control the user’s experience. I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things…

Bookmarks and tabs are a good example of how easily you could accidentally step on the core userbases' toes. There are absolutely stellar tab and bookmark addons that essentially completely change how those systems work. They are also vastly more complex (but in a way that serves powerusers). If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to…

The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.

Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that several highly specialized forks are developed on top of. Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use the “vanilla” version of the browser, while everybody else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs very closely.

Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play. They’re very opinionated and not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s fine, because there’s literally every other browser if something more conducive to general audiences is what you’re looking for. Browsers don’t need to be one size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by trying to be that way.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#147

Post by lucb1e »

nathabonfim59 wrote: post #111

I've been using Zen since it's first public release and I must say, the development peace is simply incredible! It's rough around the edges sometimes, but the quality of life features are chef's kiss: to copy the current webpage, workspaces, even an easier profile manager (just like chrome's).

How does one "copy a webpage"? Do you mean taking a screenshot or the equivalent of Ctrl+AC?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#148

Post by tonyhart7 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #68
slindsey wrote: post #50

For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox. The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational struc…

I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts. Why do I think this? Three reasons: - It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text e…

then why not modzilla themselves offering their pro version

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#150

Post by mistercheph »

_bent wrote: post #55
tux3 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you ever met a team that maintained a fork of a legacy codebase with more than 6 figures of code?
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