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

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douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨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.

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