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"No, we are absolutely not prepared to [fork Firefox]"

codeberg.org

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Re: "No, we are absolutely not prepared to [fork Firefox]"

#11

Post by graypegg »

nabogh wrote: post #4

Dumb question but why /do/ browsers move quick? Surely we are nearing feature complete. Is it just the complexity of the task? I'm sure there are lots of awful bugs.

Browsers sort of went from a network document viewer with forms, to a whole application platform. It's sort of like grafting on changes to Acrobat Reader so it becomes a PDF viewer with WinForms + DirectX.

The fact that we expect basic text-and-image websites to display along side full online 3D games using GPU acceleration and might even interface with a few web assembly modules... is sort of insane. It's all just an application platform now.

I think that just means that browser complexity grows with the complexity of software globally.

Re: "No, we are absolutely not prepared to [fork Firefox]"

#12

Post by Gualdrapo »

lblume wrote: post #6

Well, we absolutely should be. The entire point of the open source community is to be able to react to this kind of organizational failure and disalignment with original values. Where exactly do the problems lie? Resource allocation? Trust/security issues?

Not a (consumate, formal trained) developer so please don't take my word on this, but for what I've read the big issue development wise about forking Firefox is that its codebase is kind of a mess, in like dissociating the Gecko engine and the UI would imply a tedious, herculean effort, and this is the main reason there are few Firefox "forks" (librewolf, etc.) with little modifications respect to Firefox, whereas there are tons of forks of Chromium.

Now, I understand making a Firefox fork that doesn't include this new changes in upstream doesn't imply major changes in its code, but still it seems like if you want people to use your fork requires more than that, or maybe you'll end up with a scenario like Debian vs Biebian and Hannah Montana Linux.

Re: "No, we are absolutely not prepared to [fork Firefox]"

#13

Post by ahofmann »

palata wrote: post #7
nabogh wrote: post #4

Dumb question but why /do/ browsers move quick? Surely we are nearing feature complete. Is it just the complexity of the task? I'm sure there are lots of awful bugs.

Because the scope keeps growing as well. People have been pushing desktop apps to the browser for years. I wish the browser was limited to showing websites, and that technology for desktop apps evolved. But that's not how it goes for some reason. Some kind of imperialism in platforms? Systemd wants to take it all, browsers want to take it all, ...

When Google announced, that they've build a browser and a new JavaScript engine, it was clear that this would be the angle of attack against Microsoft. Back then, Microsoft had like 95% market share. There was now way around writing windows programs. So Google put millions of work hours into the idea of building a new platform for apps, the "web Browser".

Re: "No, we are absolutely not prepared to [fork Firefox]"

#14

Post by eth0up »

nabogh wrote: post #4

Dumb question but why /do/ browsers move quick? Surely we are nearing feature complete. Is it just the complexity of the task? I'm sure there are lots of awful bugs.

Definitely not a dumb question. It's a really good question that I rhetorically ask myself every time I start one. And I'm glad there have been some good answers to your question here. Though for me, it will never be answered , because I helplessly detest the subject.
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