Comment on Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

JoMiran@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is a broad misunderstanding I keep seeing here on Lemmy.

  These forks rely heavily on Firefox core engineering and development, which, if Firefox dies off, they will no longer have access to, thus relegating them to history as well.

  These are not hard forks. These are forks that maintain release parity with Firefox itself, absorbing the grand majority of all engineering efforts into Firefox into their own projects, meaning they are strongly tied to Firefox’s success or demise. And “strongly” is an understatement. We’re talking 95 to 99% of Firefox engineering efforts are consumed by these forks.

  So somewhere from 1 to 5% of the engineering effort these forks rely on to continue to stay relevant, secure, performant, and up to modern web standards is provided by their contributors.

  Keeping Firefox up-to-date with web standards and security is an engineering nightmare. I mean, just look at Safari.

  Having forks is awesome, but putting blinders on and sticking your head in the sand, believing that these forks are independent browser developments is absurd.

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  • JoMiran@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I understand the relationship between Firefox and the forks. What I meant by my comment is that I suspect that a lot of their loss in users might be because of people going to the forks rather than the main product.

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  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I totally agree and thought about going back to plain Firefox multiple times, but I would like to argue that if you can do it better than Mozilla at basically 0 budget, that is kind of on Mozilla.

    Take Librewolf and Ironfox. They have clearly shown that there is an audience for hardened/privacy first Firefox. Mozilla can capture this audience very easily: Offer it yourself.

    I really don’t feel like researching all the settings I need to change to arrive at a Librewolf-ish level of privacy. I also think Librewolf could still do better. And I think Mozilla should do it better than them.

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    • j5y7@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Could everything these forks do be done as an extension?

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  • tomiant@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I don’t think that’s what they implied, but you’re right. And it sucks.

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  • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Firefox has to die because Mozilla is a shitty org. All they care about it money. The money from Creepy Goose is just too much. The devs should move on to Servo, Ladybird, or a Firefox fork. The users will follow.

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  • chloroken@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Downstream. WaterFox et. al. are downstream of Firefox. “Soft” and “hard” forks are not a thing.

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    • 4am@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      A hard fork means that a project forks and then doesn’t take upstream patches any longer. That absolutely happens all the time. Not for the Firefox downstreams, which are all soft forks, but those concepts are a thing.

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      • chloroken@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Fork. It is called a fork.

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• DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The problem is that they take their sweet time incorporating security updates.

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  • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Floorp is pretty on-the-ball from what I’ve seen!

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