The problem is that they take their sweet time incorporating security updates.
Comment on Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 23 hours ago
The Firefox forks are just so damned good. Zen, Librewolf, and Waterfox are just great.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 19 hours ago
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 minutes ago
Floorp is pretty on-the-ball from what I’ve seen!
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 22 hours 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.
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 21 hours 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.
UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 22 hours 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.
j5y7@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
Could everything these forks do be done as an extension?
tomiant@piefed.social 22 hours ago
I don’t think that’s what they implied, but you’re right. And it sucks.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 14 hours 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.
chloroken@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
Downstream. WaterFox et. al. are downstream of Firefox. “Soft” and “hard” forks are not a thing.
4am@lemmy.zip 19 hours 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.
chloroken@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
Fork. It is called a fork.