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Just give me a deeply customizable Firefox fork. Lots of people complaining about superficial issues that would be easily solvable if only Firefox offered powe

Just give me a deeply customizable Firefox fork. Lots of people complaining about superficial issues that would be easily solvable if only Firefox offered power users what they want (preferably with a better design than XUL). "Normal" people don't give a crap what browser they're using, most don't even know what a browser is. Mozilla is killing Firefox by neglecting the few who care about it. It's these dozens of small things that add up and make Firefox not stand out. I keep hearing the Firefox codebase (or Gecko, or Servo) isn't very modular and makes it hard to pursue such a project, and I don't doubt it. But aren't there enough of "us" out there to make a concerted effort? Could anyone with enough knowledge of the codebase say more than just "it's hard", maybe offer an outline of what would need to be done?

lucideer 5y ago
The issue with this is that the more deeply customisable a fork would be the further it would stray from upstream (and by extension the more dev resources it would require to maintain). > I keep hearing the Firefox codebase isn't very modular and makes it hard to pursue such a project, and I don't doubt it. But aren't there enough of "us" out there to make a concerted effort? There's been plenty of people making such an effort, but yeah it does appear to be "hard". If you're interested in following previous work, some relevant links: - Overview of Myk Melez's efforts in this space https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ - https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ (official but Android-only) - https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt It may also be worthwhile reading about CEF which has become something of a defacto standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework

lucideer 5y ago

The issue with this is that the more deeply customisable a fork would be the further it would stray from upstream (and by extension the more dev resources it would require to maintain). > I keep hearing the Firefox codebase isn't very modular and makes it hard to pursue such a project, and I don't doubt it. But aren't there enough of "us" out there to make a concerted effort? There's been plenty of people making such an effort, but yeah it does appear to be "hard". If you're interested in following previous work, some relevant links: - Overview of Myk Melez's efforts in this space https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ - https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ (official but Android-only) - https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt It may also be worthwhile reading about CEF which has become something of a defacto standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework