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A look at Firefox forks

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Re: A look at Firefox forks

#211

Post by maccard »

matheist wrote: post #120
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…

> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted. I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their prioriti…

That doesn’t seem unreasonable for a drive by PR to an enormous project. I contributed go an open source rust project a few years back and my first PR took weeks of back and forth. My second and following ones were merged in days.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#212

Post by hyperbrainer »

bastawhiz wrote: post #76
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

isn't Zen exactly that? Arc, but firefox

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#213

Post by maccard »

glenstein wrote: post #109
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 continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea. Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $5…

I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary. Call it a million a year, and that’s enough to comfortably employ 4-5 programmers to work on something full time, with enough left over to cover the lulls in income. Make it 1.2 and there’s enough for an admin person to prioritise, liaise with Mozilla, and do the financials. That’s 150x less than Wikipedia.

I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve this, whether it’s 100k or 100M

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#214

Post by whytevuhuni »

jbaber wrote: post #205
deeter72 wrote: post #194

Not released yet, but honorable mention to ladybird: https://ladybird.org/

I am a bit confused by their moving from C++ to Swift instead of Rust. It sounds a bit Apple-first. I get that it ports to Linux okay, but will it be hard to make it work with Windows some day?

Rust makes more sense if you were to start from scratch, but the Ladybird devs said that their code is already heavily OOP, so it maps to Swift a lot better.

Also, variety is good, we have Servo in Rust (although I wish they'd make an actual browser around it too).

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#215

Post by homebrewer »

MrAlex94 wrote: post #126

> Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take it for a test drive. Are the others that much more descriptive in their features on their website? IMO…

FWIW, I too bounced after looking around the website and not seeing any concrete information about how it's different from upstream (long before reading this article). Maybe you could add a short bullet point list right on the home page, it shouldn't require much work?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#216

Post by adhamsalama »

immibis wrote: post #209
adhamsalama wrote: post #200

Stock Firefox + Siebery extension is all I need.

Even though Mozilla tracks you and sells your tracking data?

I do toggle off all the telemetry settings I can find. But you're talking as if there's a browser company that doesn't do that, or at least less than Mozilla, so can you suggest any of those?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#217

Post by homebrewer »

paldepind2 wrote: post #201
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has vertical tabs and tab groups now; those aren't specific to Zen

Correct me if I'm wrong, but neither vertical tabs nor tab groups are fully ready and shipped. From a quick search, it seems that you need to make edits in `about:config` to enable tab groups and use nightly to access vertical tabs.

Vertical tabs are available in the latest stable release. They're pretty basic compared to tree style tabs and sideberry, though.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#219

Post by gkbrk »

mmooss wrote: post #158
pjerem wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take so much users from Firefox but they are paid users then you basically have the money to do the expensive hard work.

It costs over $200M per year. That's a lot of paying users.

"Mozilla spends $200M on it per year" does not mean it costs $200M per year. Considering Mozilla overspends on everything else, it's not a stretch to think they might be overspending on this too.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#220

Post by eudhxhdhsb32 »

mediumsmart wrote: post #218

Gnu IceCat for me with Privacy Badger and libreJS. I would pay 10$ every month for Gnu IceCat, the ONLY firefox fork with no telemetry. the ONLY webkit based zero telemetry browser is Kagis Orion

> Gnu IceCat, the ONLY firefox fork with no telemetry.

Why would you think that? Plenty of other forks like LibreWolf and IronFox have removed all telemetry.

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