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How long before there is a major commercially-backed fork of Firefox? As a huge Firefox fan, I'm incredibly dismayed at the priorities expressed in these layoff

How long before there is a major commercially-backed fork of Firefox? As a huge Firefox fan, I'm incredibly dismayed at the priorities expressed in these layoffs, and I know it is gonna bleed through to browser performance and security sooner or later. I don't want to stick around and find out the hard way when it happens.

kchoudhu 6y ago
Where's the money in that?
- darksaints 6y ago
  The same place that Mozilla finds it: by making deals with search providers.
  - est31 6y ago
    Why would you fork Firefox instead of Chromium which has better website compatibility?
    - yepthatsreality 6y ago
      Ecosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let “chrome win”, privacy support baked in, etc. Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox?
      - est31 6y ago
        The large number of Chromium forks vs the comparatively tiny number of Firefox forks shows that there is barely interest in forking Firefox. Especially when you look at which forks have users you'll see that it's almost exclusively Chromium forks. Sure, ecosystem diversity and so on is great but the current forkers don't see a way to make money from that, otherwise they'd have done it.
        yepthatsreality 6y ago
        And they make money from a Chromium based browser how?
      - solarkraft 6y ago
        > Ecosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let “chrome win”, privacy support baked in Barely worth any money. > Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox? Free maintenance (worth a lot of money).
        yepthatsreality 6y ago
        This still doesn’t answer the question. If building Firefox is unprofitable what about Chromium based browser is profitable? Cutting out its base layer development doesn’t change its business viability. Clearly the engine development is not the problem.
        solarkraft 6y ago
        Maintaining your own browser engine costs a lot of money. Using the one someone else maintains costs a lot less. It's that simple, plus the network effect, compatibility ...
        yepthatsreality 6y ago
        Okay you've eliminated your browser engine building cost by switching Firefox to Chromium. Now how do you make profit off of Chromium? My point is that there was no profit model around Firefox so switching engines is negligible. The cost of building said engine is also going to be negligible to the profit returned from the browser. In Google's case this is true. In Mozilla's case they have no model and never had one to subsidize that cost (other than Google search money). Changing base engines turns Firefox into a hobby project managed by a FOSS rather than a serious competing project in the browser-verse.
    - monadic2 6y ago
      Blink has worse behavior in my experience, they're just popular. You know, the ie6 effect.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
Hmm. Most browsers use the webkit rendering engine internally. The problem is that browser engines are huge and require a lot of developers to maintain. I think the worst thing that could happen here is to have Firefox die, and we'd be that much closer to a webkit monoculture.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Chrome uses Bink.
  - Snitch-Thursday 6y ago
    Which is a forked descendant of WebKit, so GP is right or wrong depending on how you classify a fork.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - The_Colonel 6y ago
      By that logic we can call both KHTML \s In reality Blink diverged significantly from WebKit and it doesn't make any sense to call Blink WebKit.
      - esrauch 6y ago
        Even if Blink and Webkit are separate (and they are still clearly closer than Gecko), we're getting to a Blink monoculture except for the iOS holdout (which is still only ~5% of all traffic, but generally high value and you're prevented from telling them to use another browser). It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).
        The_Colonel 6y ago
        > It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes). I'm not sure about that. WebKit is lagging slightly behind Blink (and Gecko to lesser degree), but I don't think it bothers Apple. Budget to develop WebKit is for Apple hardly a problem as well. Having independent browser engine gives them quite a lot of strategic power given their exclusive market share. Look no further than how they managed to single-handedly kill PWAs few months ago since it does not fit into their strategic goals (all apps must go through app store).

kchoudhu 6y ago

Where's the money in that?

darksaints 6y ago
The same place that Mozilla finds it: by making deals with search providers.
- est31 6y ago
  Why would you fork Firefox instead of Chromium which has better website compatibility?
  - yepthatsreality 6y ago
    Ecosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let “chrome win”, privacy support baked in, etc. Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox?
    - est31 6y ago
      The large number of Chromium forks vs the comparatively tiny number of Firefox forks shows that there is barely interest in forking Firefox. Especially when you look at which forks have users you'll see that it's almost exclusively Chromium forks. Sure, ecosystem diversity and so on is great but the current forkers don't see a way to make money from that, otherwise they'd have done it.
      - yepthatsreality 6y ago
        And they make money from a Chromium based browser how?
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      > Ecosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let “chrome win”, privacy support baked in Barely worth any money. > Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox? Free maintenance (worth a lot of money).
      - yepthatsreality 6y ago
        This still doesn’t answer the question. If building Firefox is unprofitable what about Chromium based browser is profitable? Cutting out its base layer development doesn’t change its business viability. Clearly the engine development is not the problem.
        solarkraft 6y ago
        Maintaining your own browser engine costs a lot of money. Using the one someone else maintains costs a lot less. It's that simple, plus the network effect, compatibility ...
        yepthatsreality 6y ago
        Okay you've eliminated your browser engine building cost by switching Firefox to Chromium. Now how do you make profit off of Chromium? My point is that there was no profit model around Firefox so switching engines is negligible. The cost of building said engine is also going to be negligible to the profit returned from the browser. In Google's case this is true. In Mozilla's case they have no model and never had one to subsidize that cost (other than Google search money). Changing base engines turns Firefox into a hobby project managed by a FOSS rather than a serious competing project in the browser-verse.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Blink has worse behavior in my experience, they're just popular. You know, the ie6 effect.

tachyonbeam 6y ago

Hmm. Most browsers use the webkit rendering engine internally. The problem is that browser engines are huge and require a lot of developers to maintain. I think the worst thing that could happen here is to have Firefox die, and we'd be that much closer to a webkit monoculture.

pjmlp 6y ago
Chrome uses Bink.
- Snitch-Thursday 6y ago
  Which is a forked descendant of WebKit, so GP is right or wrong depending on how you classify a fork.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    By that logic we can call both KHTML \s In reality Blink diverged significantly from WebKit and it doesn't make any sense to call Blink WebKit.
    - esrauch 6y ago
      Even if Blink and Webkit are separate (and they are still clearly closer than Gecko), we're getting to a Blink monoculture except for the iOS holdout (which is still only ~5% of all traffic, but generally high value and you're prevented from telling them to use another browser). It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).
      - The_Colonel 6y ago
        > It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes). I'm not sure about that. WebKit is lagging slightly behind Blink (and Gecko to lesser degree), but I don't think it bothers Apple. Budget to develop WebKit is for Apple hardly a problem as well. Having independent browser engine gives them quite a lot of strategic power given their exclusive market share. Look no further than how they managed to single-handedly kill PWAs few months ago since it does not fit into their strategic goals (all apps must go through app store).