[HN Gopher] A look at Firefox forks
___________________________________________________________________
A look at Firefox forks
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 183 points
Date : 2025-03-14 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| Y_Y wrote:
| Fireforks
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Fireworks: Emphasis on colour, animation, bells, whistles and
| bangs.
|
| Liarfox: Even more corporate shitfuckery and deception.
|
| Firefux: Porn optimised browser.
|
| endless possibilities.....
| RVuRnvbM2e wrote:
| It is an indictment on the state of the web that regardless of
| Mozilla's missteps, Firefox remains the best choice for a secure,
| open-source web browser that isn't another chromium reskin.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I don't get the public "step down" that people are taking from
| using Firefox. How many users are actually switching? I doubt
| it's much. Many are audible about it, though.
|
| Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not
| doing much worse than chromium browsers
| neurobashing wrote:
| the point is not that firefox is "not doing much worse than
| chromium browsers". the point is that they were founded upon
| principles of not doing that
| mfro wrote:
| I switched. I have been on the fence for some time now, what
| with the pocket nagware and the various 'sponsored' features
| showing up in FF. Very easy for me to start using librewolf.
| It even seems to be faster.
| sshine wrote:
| I switched on mobile and on MacOS. I intend to switch on
| Linux soon.
|
| > _Yes browsers share your data, it 's a browser..._
|
| No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better
| software, I'd spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user
| software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with
| advertising.
|
| I don't mind crash reporting.
|
| I don't mind opt-in telemetry for QA.
|
| There is no justification for telemetry by default, not
| informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and
| selling your data as payment for use of software.
|
| Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue
| beats subscription money will always compromise their
| customers.
|
| I don't want that. And Firefox is now in the category of
| software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a
| fork steps up.
|
| In the meantime, I'm using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-
| WebKit alternative.
| chneu wrote:
| I switched after years of annoyances with mozilla.
| spudlyo wrote:
| I also switched from Firefox to LibreWolf, both on Linux and
| on macOS. I'll likely use the latest Chrome just for banking
| and other high security tasks, but for my normal browsing
| LibreWolf seems to work fine.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| You can't get an OSS team to fix vulns in a meaningful amount
| of time, let alone research them. Waterfox/Palemoon stay months
| behind the official branch and are always vulnerable.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Big corporations on the w3c board, and their control of the
| largest platforms, have contributed to the enshitification of
| the web by making web standards move just as fast as Windows
| APIs or Office formats. Making it much harder for open source
| volunteer driven projects to keep up.
|
| I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an
| open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or
| Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.
|
| And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain
| nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under
| the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations
| themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new
| standards that they launch on their platforms and become
| ubiquitous to end users.
| sshine wrote:
| Netscape / Firefox once broke the browser market.
|
| We need a hero.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Modern bad guys kill heroes in the womb.
|
| We need a safe harbor outside of the WWW for things that
| actually need nothing more than HTML 1.0. And be prepared
| to do without the wonderful services and contents that are
| "offered" by big corps "for free".
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Perhaps more an indictment of failed regulators who have
| allowed these mega corporations to entrench a single browser
| engine, steer web standards, and consolidate so many of the
| social destinations on the web.
| xnx wrote:
| 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?
| vasachi wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't compete with Google.
| inglor wrote:
| 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.
| notRobot wrote:
| > for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc)
| comes pre-bundled with Chrome
|
| This is not true
| xnx wrote:
| Doesn't a fresh Chrome install add those shortcuts to
| Windows' desktop?
| inglor wrote:
| Lol they just hide it very well - go to chrome://apps and
| check what's there :)
| andix wrote:
| Azure vs GCP
|
| Microsoft 365 (Office, Exchange) vs. Google Workspace (Gmail,
| Office Apps)
|
| Windows/Surface vs. ChromeOS/Chromebooks
|
| Bing vs Google Search
|
| ...?
| peppers-ghost wrote:
| 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.
| rrgok wrote:
| Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec?
| I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own
| spec, but what is the purpose of having N different
| implementation of the same spec with their own
| idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the
| major browser engines is open-source anyway.
|
| Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my
| point still stays..
| Kichererbsen wrote:
| If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent
| implementations to become standards. I think that would be
| a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the
| spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into
| web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis
| that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder
| for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda
| crucial for that.
| palata wrote:
| I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given
| that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there
| is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it.
|
| > At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser
| engines is open-source anyway.
|
| Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls
| it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But
| Google controls both. It means that Google can push for
| what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user.
| E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does
| not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been
| shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google
| _not to care_ about something for it to impact Chromium
| /AOSP.
|
| That's the whole point of competition: you want _the users_
| to have _choice_ , so that it pushes the companies towards
| building a better product. Monopolies never serve the
| users.
|
| Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not
| happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to
| two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
| mrweasel wrote:
| What if the developers of the dominate engine becomes
| complacent and decides that it's "good enough" and we get
| stuck in another IE6 situation where development stops for
| years and years?
|
| Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are
| effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy
| with their direction you'll need to fork it.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Exactly, the situation with Chrome is the exact same sort
| of benevolent dictator problem we had with Internet
| Explorer, except this time dressed up with an open source
| license.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Look at how llvm forced gcc to improve their error messages
| (among other things).
|
| Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in
| your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine
| this applies to the web just as well -- a web browser
| implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the
| same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.
| xnx wrote:
| Couldn't this be said about the Linux kernel?
| tux3 wrote:
| 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 after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge
| conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being
| able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream
| Chrome.
|
| Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong
| direction does not always get you to your destination quicker.
| Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
| _bent wrote:
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The problem is that the difficult not only increases with
| time unbounded, but is on a steep curve. Eventually the
| manpower and resource required to keep up with upstream
| will eventually match and outstrip that required to develop
| and maintain a new engine.
| regularjack wrote:
| Having all the eggs in the same basket is not a good thing.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Linux users should just switch to Windows too.
| xnx wrote:
| Why would they do that?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Exactly my point! They wouldn't, and shouldn't.
| timbit42 wrote:
| They left off the sarcasm tag.
| bad_user wrote:
| Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any
| better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as
| Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense,
| Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's.
|
| Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is
| Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even
| though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be
| forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but
| doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies
| can't afford.
|
| To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied
| in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their
| ground and proposed Asm.js:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js -- out of all this effort
| came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least
| smells like a good standard.
|
| Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto
| standards -- Dart, and AMP:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
|
| Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you
| might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as
| well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest
| (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and
| Windows.
|
| Yet another example that should speak for itself -- the
| deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers
| work: https://ublockorigin.com/
|
| And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports
| extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium
| fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's
| discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
| andix wrote:
| 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.
| bad_user wrote:
| > Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome
|
| Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so
| why would they?
| andix wrote:
| 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.
| bad_user wrote:
| 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.
| andix wrote:
| I think Microsoft just doesn't care about ad-blockers.
| They probably don't have a strong position on it. If they
| work it's fine for them, if they don't its also fine.
|
| They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a
| lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web
| applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications
| are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily
| web browsing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| andix wrote:
| It's hard to tell if they neglected the original Edge or
| if they just couldn't keep up with Chrome.
|
| IE was a completely different story, it was full of
| proprietary Microsoft technology (ActiveX) and a lot of
| Enterprise applications used it heavily.
|
| Microsoft didn't care about browsers maybe 15 years ago,
| but this changed a lot. A lot of Microsoft software is
| just available in the browser, they migrated a lot of
| things to web technology. That's also the reason they
| switched their browser to Chromium, they needed to ship
| something that actually works.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level
| they're already working together.
|
| Even without (conspiratorial) intent this seems to be
| happening unintentionally- Andreas is ex-Apple, after
| all, and that's why he switched development away from his
| own language to Swift. I wonder if it's analogous to
| Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza inevitably eventually ending
| up at Microsoft.
|
| That said,
|
| > 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.
|
| Sounds like too good a no-brainer to actually happen, at
| least under current leadership. Few of these "dream
| mergers" ever actually happen. Another example, Apple
| buying DuckDuckGo as a counter against the Google search
| monopoly, has never come close to happening after years
| of speculation.
| yndoendo wrote:
| I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same
| statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all
| the numerous open source solutions.
|
| Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code
| branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium
| is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers.
| They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla
| / Firefox is proving them wrong.
|
| Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition?
| I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a
| stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when
| everyone things and does the exact same thing.
|
| China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and
| why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be
| looked down upon.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Why did Google in 2008 chose to built its own browser instead
| of helping to improve Firefox, which was around since 2002?
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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).
| saintfire wrote:
| 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 confusion with office 365, as well.
| It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch
| me off guard once.
| pixxel wrote:
| > devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy
|
| It's a position, not a fetish.
| mixermachine wrote:
| You are free to enable WebGl in the settings and install a
| Plugin that allows for blocking/allowing WebGl.
|
| The default should be privacy if you install a browser that
| focuses on privacy.
| mfro wrote:
| It does that. Users have the simple option of disabling it in
| settings with one checkbox.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Where is this 'one checkbox'?
| mfro wrote:
| There is a search bar in the settings page. Search
| 'fingerprint', uncheck 'Enable ResistFingerprinting'
| 0hijinks wrote:
| I found on 136.0.0-ish that some settings persist despite
| checking/unchecking that box and restarting LibreWolf,
| but YMMV. I also manually inspect 'about:config' and
| search there for relevant settings (like 'fingerprint').
| For fingerprinting, browser breakage is unlikely so
| toggling these hidden flags is easy.
| lxn wrote:
| I can confirm that. I switched to using LibreWolf as a work-
| dedicated browser parallel to Firefox Developer Edition.
|
| In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no
| automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites
| don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn
| it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an
| extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer)
| - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the
| strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I
| switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on
| via config flag)
|
| I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to
| debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser,
| but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of
| time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
|
| I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch
| entirely from Firefox because I want my history available
| across devices.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I used to have terrible time with forgetting my keys, or
| letting the cleaner in when I wasn't home. Then I just
| stopped locking the door and never looked back. It's so
| convenient and saves me precious time. What can I say, it
| just works!
| bmacho wrote:
| Unironically tho when were the last time you see people
| trying random doors if they are unlocked. There is
| absolutely no need to lock your door if you are not vocal
| about it.
| piperswe wrote:
| That kind of thinking (neglecting a broken lock on the
| back door, because I figured chances were low that
| someone would take advantage) got my apartment "broken"
| in to a few years ago.
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| This is heavily dependent on your neighborhood,
| obviously. I've never seen people trying random doors
| because I'm always asleep when they do it.
| accelbred wrote:
| Unchecking resistFingerprinting in the settings disables
| these. You can also use the new firefox FPP settings to
| enable most if RFP stuff but opt out of specific stuff like
| dark mode, timezone, etc. You can even add per-site
| exceptions.
|
| For example, my config is at
| https://codeberg.org/accelbread/config-
| flake/src/branch/mast...
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| Are you not using librewold-overrides.cfg to disable/enable
| features that you want/need? All of the things you mentioned
| are just flags you can set in the file to turn them on or
| off. https://librewolf.net/docs/settings/
| pndy wrote:
| Amazon equivalent in Poland - Allegro was notoriously blocking
| me in Librewolf; I was served puzzle captcha or blocked from
| browsing at all due to "suspicious activity" 98% of the time.
| don-code wrote:
| I've run into this (it's in Librewolf, but is more obnoxious in
| Mull/IronFox on Android where I actually use this), where the
| privacy protections prevent the Jackbox games like Drawful from
| sending the contents of a drawing to Jackbox's servers. Both
| browsers don't fail - they just upload a rainbow pattern every
| time.
|
| I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep
| Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that
| just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for
| the big blue "E" in the bad old days.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Can definitely attest to this. Librewolf is my daily and I
| run it pretty aggressively (uBO options/lists, strict
| blocking DNS, etc) and sometimes I'm left scratching my head
| where things break. Recently had an aha-moment that felt
| triumphant when disabling the limit cross-origin referers, as
| silly as it sounds. Alas, I guess I prefer it this way.
| colordrops wrote:
| Librewolf is pretty aggressive. That would be ok if it was just
| defaults that you could disable if you wish but I couldn't find
| out how. Too opinionated.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| The biggest issue with forks, which is pointed out in the
| article, is Mozilla still does the heavy lifting. None of the
| forks have the resources (and probably interest) to fully fork
| Firefox and make it their own codebase to maintain.
|
| Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they
| can keep up to date well into the future.
| pndy wrote:
| These projects to my knowledge do not release patches by
| themselves but as you said, rely on Mozilla's work - they take
| Firefox, strip it out of few features - namely one's that
| raised concerns, toss in additional stuff from other projects
| and include own branding. So perhaps these are more "customized
| derivatives" or "spin-offs"?
|
| Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary.
| Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with
| features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.
|
| Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own
| code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.
| rrgok wrote:
| The browser engine landscape presents an interesting paradox: we
| have an open specification, yet multiple implementations with
| their own quirks and incompatibilities. This seems to undermine
| the very purpose of standardization.
|
| Consider our current situation:
|
| - The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies
| that develop the engines
|
| - Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source
|
| - Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining
| compatibility
|
| What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains,
| we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I
| understand the historical and theoretical arguments for
| implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering
| innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits
| still outweigh the costs in 2025.
|
| I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining
| multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web
| ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an
| earlier era.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| 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).
| rrgok wrote:
| How is that any different from now? Look what happened
| recently with Mozilla and Firefox...
| bad_user wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Because reference implementations are often less efficient.
|
| If the standard exists as an abstract interface then future
| implementors can make different tradeoffs.
| robin_reala wrote:
| There was a reference implementation called Amaya.[1] It died,
| because the set of web standards is vast and sprawling, and
| without a business model implementing them has been seen
| historically as overly expensive.
|
| In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other
| suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing
| implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is
| that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under
| the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then
| effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web,
| which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always
| has been) bigger than one engine.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)
| mrweasel wrote:
| The issue is that if someone found a major issue in Blink,
| would it even be feasible to get every Chrome, Brave, Edge and
| Vivaldi user to switch to Firefox while the issue is fixed?
|
| The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL.
| Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk
| of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives.
| OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue
| away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially
| days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is
| 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than
| 20% of all users.
|
| Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple
| engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough
| people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if
| the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no
| guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink
| as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser
| development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give
| web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the
| wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having
| WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that
| case.
| waltbosz wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Arguably that's what Librewolf, Waterfox, and Palemoon are
| doing, except via donations.
|
| Considering how quickly Netscape died once IE appeared, I think
| the market is so small that sites will never test against them
| and they'll never get a seat on a standards board.
| mmooss wrote:
| If you take enough users from Firefox, who will do the
| expensive, hard work of updating and maintaining a browser
| engine?
| pjerem wrote:
| 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.
| tmtvl wrote:
| There's an article about insecurities in Firefox
| (<https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-
| chromium.ht...>), which is a few years old now, but it made me
| curious as to whether it actually is better to run a Firefox
| fork, like Librewolf; Firefox itself; or a Chromium fork like
| Ungoogled Chromium.
|
| Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about
| the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues
| have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security
| risks versus the privacy risks.
| smjburton wrote:
| If Mozilla needs additional funding, I'd much rather contribute
| to the project with an "opt-out" subscription plan (say for
| $20/year) to help support the project without giving away
| personal data. The author correctly points out that these forks
| are dependent on Firefox's continued upstream development;
| however, having this option would provide people with the choice
| to support the project without giving up personal data, and
| Firefox and its forks could continue to be sustainably developed.
| slindsey wrote:
| 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
| structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you
| can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that
| they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
| fresh_geezer wrote:
| I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and
| start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea,
| then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the
| main entity developing the browser.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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 editors, making it being paid more
| justifiable in peoples' minds.
|
| - Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts,
| which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably
| realizes.
|
| - Much of Firefox's original claim to fame came from its highly
| flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in
| favor of chasing mass appeal.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| 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
| settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being.
|
| Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me
| by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply
| can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have
| provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last
| two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very
| different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox
| 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox
| 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could
| convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the
| browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly
| evolved _at all_.
|
| I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky
| shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like
| tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download
| manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but
| they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going
| to be a totally safe business decision.
| osener wrote:
| Zen browser is exactly this. It has a growing ecosystem of
| "Zen mods" and has a great Arc-like out-of-box experience.
|
| https://zen-browser.app/
| eikenberry wrote:
| Does Zen plan on taking payments at some point? Key part
| of the idea is paid development.
| keerthiko wrote:
| they have a ko-fi and a patreon, with about a 1000
| "subscribers" across both at <unknown> amounts at the
| moment. it's not exactly enough to promise indefinite
| support, but tbh i don't really much reason to have that
| faith from products i've paid for but are closed-source
| either.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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 like per-page user CSS years before
| userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.
|
| It was paid however, and at least in that point in time
| there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now
| it's a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally
| tinker on and hasn't been actively maintained in some time.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > . Even core features like bookmarks have barely
| improved in decades.
|
| I agree. In the same time firefox' bookmarks are still
| better than what chrome or edge offer.
| unavoidable wrote:
| 100%. I would say, even on the UI/UX side - Microsoft(!)
| has done a way better job on Edge (even though it's
| Chromium), with lots of new features on tab grouping,
| split screen browsing, note taking, syncing, and app
| integrations. Love it or hate it, at least they are doing
| some new features.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| > skin-deep UI refresh
|
| Colorways anyone? How about tabs that now look like
| buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?
|
| I would pay for an exploer-like sidebar with folders and
| containers as the top-level folders. Almost have that now
| with "tree tabs" extension and containers, but the
| interface is kludgy.
|
| This plus a privacy guarantee would be worth paying for.
| valunord wrote:
| I would rather see Orion on Firefox.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I think in todays world, when everything is a subscription,
| payment for a browser doesn't look so far-fetched.
| TylerE wrote:
| Getting people to pay for something that has always been
| free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a
| browser is. They just think it's part of the OS.
| bmacho wrote:
| People pay for youtube and random youtubers now. They are
| fine paying for things.
| lolinder wrote:
| Enough people pay for Nebula and Kagi and Fastmail to
| make them profitable, even though YouTube and Google and
| Gmail are free. You don't need to get everyone in the
| world who uses the free service to be willing to pay,
| just enough of them to fund your project.
|
| There's actually an advantage to the paid business model
| vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million
| people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal
| to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you
| can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them
| into fans rather than just users, while also saving time
| on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).
|
| (I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned
| services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox
| fork like OP suggests.)
| n42 wrote:
| it's true. I never in a million years could have imagined
| that I would be paying for a search engine. now you can
| pry Kagi out of my cold dead hands.
| gausswho wrote:
| Please someone make a Firefox that makes profile portability
| readable and with sensible defaults.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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 $500 million a year
| and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then
| infrastructure that supports the development which is under
| like administration and operations is another double digit
| percent.
|
| As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for
| software development, there's basically no precedent for
| raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I
| can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10
| million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising
| for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia,
| which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is
| slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets.
| But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of
| existing compact between themselves and users that I think has
| given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption
| rather than software, I think has a different relationship with
| its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is
| as an example to Firefox.
|
| I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they
| would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot
| of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better
| off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain
| focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts
| with a reality where they already invest more resources in that
| then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to
| undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on
| the browser.
|
| I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for
| practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite
| limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to
| imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser
| at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at
| present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but
| I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user
| donations would have any impact on market share or would even
| substantially change the amount of resources available to
| invest in the browser.
| kiicia wrote:
| Web browser is something I would pay subscription in a
| heartbeat, and I mean it, it is my actual OS now
| matheist wrote:
| > _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 priorities.
|
| They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in
| accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| b0dhimind wrote:
| I'd still take the crypto casino Firefox over Chrome :-D JK.
| But yeah my main issue is performance. I honestly like the AI
| features, dunno why people so triggered over that. Don't think
| it affects performance at all. The privacy invasion I need to
| look into more, maybe only inasfar as it affects performance as
| well.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > The Floorp project is a much newer entrant. It is developed by
| a community of Japanese students called Ablaze. Development is
| hosted on GitHub, and the project solicits donations via GitHub
| donations. According to its donations page, donors who contribute
| at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page--
| but the ads, which are displayed as shortcuts with a "sponsored"
| label, can be turned off in the settings. I've been unable to
| find any information about the project governance or legal
| structure of Ablaze.
|
| So a group of contributors, presumably upset about Mozilla making
| "user-hostile" changes like displaying ads in the new tab page,
| create a fork of Firefox, and then solicit donations for their
| fork using the _exact same_ revenue model?
| sedatk wrote:
| Sponsored ads and donations are different revenue models.
| Mozilla has always been collecting donations and nobody had a
| problem with it.
| tcfunk wrote:
| 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.
| atulvi wrote:
| OK, this is it. The perfect firefox fork. The last thing I need
| is the ability to self host a ff sync server so my bookmarks
| are synced with my phone.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Lucky us, you can do this today, because, of course, it is
| Mozilla, so it is open source: https://github.com/mozilla-
| services/syncstorage-rs
| impalallama wrote:
| Zen seems interesting but their website crashes when I try and
| visit which is a bit of deal breaker when it comes to a web
| browser
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| IMO no real need for anything but Firefox Beta and Nightly now. A
| bit faster, faster features. Finally, native vertical tabs. Fully
| functioning Ublock origin. Browsing life is good.
| chasil wrote:
| Are the rhel RPM distributions of Firefox considered forks at
| all?
|
| They are maintained for a _very_ long time.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Probably not. However, I do believe Fedora and Debian configure
| and patch out the most egregious Mozilla-isms that infect
| Firefox already.
| nathabonfim59 wrote:
| 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:
|
| <Ctrl + Shift + C> to copy the current webpage, workspaces, even
| an easier profile manager (just like chrome's).
| amelius wrote:
| If we can't even trust Firefox anymore, how can we trust these
| other browsers?
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