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A look at Firefox forks

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Re: A look at Firefox forks

#261

Post by mjevans »

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).

Librewolf Lite / Light REALLY should be a release too. Less aggressive, more friendly to people who are moving towards a more secure experience. E.G. let session managers work properly, allow that 10 year old password database in the browser to be used during the 30 year transition* (I exaggerate, but until there's a bulk import tool to MIGRATE) to a stronger password manager. Generally don't enable the tiny fingerprint gains (~1/20th of world population, but they can already fingerprint that from the IP you're using and/or ping ANYWAY, so just leave the damned time zone on!) which have a huge trade off in annoyance for the end user.

Yes, I want a 'de enshitified' version of Firefox. Not a browser for someone trying to write impactful news stories who needs to follow a strong opsec.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#262

Post by Mossy9 »

eviks wrote: post #189

Not a single fork with the basic convenience of changing keybinds?

Zen has quite a nice array of keybinds available in their basic settings menu. Just had a conflict of ctrl+shift+l opening some dev tools window instead of BitWarden, and the browser hotkey was easy to change. Speaking of keyboards, Tridactyl (https://docs.zen-browser.app/faq#how-can-i-sync-my-data-acro...) works out of the box in Zen as well

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#263

Post by immibis »

mmooss wrote: post #87
waltbosz wrote: post #29

This recent Mozilla stuff has got me wondering if one could fork Firefox, strip out the AI/adware code, then sell the binaries. How much would people pay (who would pay for a web browser)? Just Firefox, minus the crap. Would it generate enough revenue to cover the maintenance costs? Etc, etc.

If you take enough users from Firefox, who will do the expensive, hard work of updating and maintaining a browser engine?

That bridge will be crossed when we get to it. Thunderbird improved substantially after Mozilla stopped maintaining it. Thunderbird was held back by Mozilla.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#264

Post by immibis »

anonym29 wrote: post #231
immibis wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first-party source is Mozilla themselves skirting around saying, but very heavily implying they are now selling unspecified data about me to unspecified actors, in a legally binding way, then walking it back with a pinky promise that is not legally binding, so doesn't actually mean anything. Have you read the first-party sources?

The narrative you gave above is by definition not a first party source. Here's a first party source explaining your misunderstanding of the situation: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms... And here's another credible source explaining Mozilla's mistake in making this decision based on language that was only present in a draft version of the CCPA, as opposed to the final version, but which al…

Why do you trust everything the allegedly bad guys say? By reading it and thinking critically as you said we all should, I can easily see that they are following the pattern that many bad guys follow: write some legalese allowing them to do bad stuff, then write some non-binding non-legalese saying they won't. Then only point at the latter to silence complaints. And then, the next step in the pattern is to actually do the bad stuff, while continuing to point at the non-binding non-legalese.

Whereas you seem to be taking what they said at face value, which is not critical thinking.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#265

Post by maccard »

glenstein wrote: post #248
maccard wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary. Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. So it sounds like you're saying an additional 1 million is a difference between 3% market share and 30% market share. We seem to be on the same page about what plausibly could come in from revenue…

> Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million.

Lots of peoples "supposed" problem is giving money to Mozilla, not Firefox. If the goal is to give people a way to support FF development, then this does achieve that. But FF doesn't need _that_ (which I think you and I both agree on).

> but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting

Agreed. I think if it was 1M, it wouldn't have any impact, but and if it was 100M then people would complain that it's not being used on $INSERT_THING_THEY_WANT_HERE.

> It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.

What Firefox is doing isn't growing their market share, so hitching another $1/10/100M isn't going to do anything to that without a strategy to actually make it happen. I think, honestly, there's a decent chance for a new project to survive in here. It could even be a Firefox fork, but it needs to be free of the baggage and strategy of Mozilla, and Firefox IMO - just as Edge has somehow made a resurgance as a chromium browser. I think Ladybird could work out too, if they can find a way to break through.

Spoken as a die hard FF user for almost 20 years!

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#266

Post by eviks »

Mossy9 wrote: post #262
eviks wrote: post #189

Not a single fork with the basic convenience of changing keybinds?

Zen has quite a nice array of keybinds available in their basic settings menu. Just had a conflict of ctrl+shift+l opening some dev tools window instead of BitWarden, and the browser hotkey was easy to change. Speaking of keyboards, Tridactyl ( https://docs.zen-browser.app/faq#how-can-i-sync-my-data-acro... ) works out of the box in Zen as well

Better than the default, but not a nice one - the basics of tab navigation (previous/next) are missing, and you can't assign multiple shortcuts to a command.

And extensions don't cover it since they fail outside of a webpage context, so if you have a key to change tabs, you can't just (reliably) use it - it will break your changing sequence once you switch to a protected Settings tab

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#267

Post by zamalek »

PufPufPuf wrote: post #188

Zen looks like Arc Browser, but Firefox-based and open-source. Exactly what I'm looking for! The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy. But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-w…

Honestly, Zen should be upstreamed. It would be a great way to introduce FOMO.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#268

Post by RKFADU_UOFCCLEL »

> Mozilla's actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late

Just wait until they discover that the web doesn't allow arbitrary browsers anymore, due to a certain "security" company doing deep inspection and blocking anything that isn't Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#269

Post by matheusmoreira »

RKFADU_UOFCCLEL wrote: post #268

> Mozilla's actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late Just wait until they discover that the web doesn't allow arbitrary browsers anymore, due to a certain "security" company doing deep inspection and blocking anything that isn't Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Only a matter of time. Remote attestation is one of the most subversive technologies ever invented and they have already tried to make it a web standard, it's only a matter of time before they try again and succeed.

We have all this free and open source software and it doesn't matter because they'll refuse us service if we use it. Only corporation owned computers will pass attestation. If you own your machine you will be turned away from every web site.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#270

Post by IAmLiterallyAB »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #243
hilbert42 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled coun…

> The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible. Here at ardour.org, we use this: > either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. (technical…

Firefox is under the MPL, not the GPL
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