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Well I don't think it is possible to beat chrome by becoming chrome. They need something that chrome doesn't have. They seem to be focusing on privacy, but I do

by thayne 5y ago

Well I don't think it is possible to beat chrome by becoming chrome. They need something that chrome doesn't have. They seem to be focusing on privacy, but I don't think that is compelling enough for the general population, though I'll grant you customizability probably isn't either. > but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing. But those configurations are not very discoverable, not well documented, are in constant flux, and if you set them incorrectly can really mess up your browser (I speak from experience). > I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build From my understanding, if I were to distribute my custom build I would also need to change all the firefox branding, since Mozilla has trademarks on it, which increases the effort even more.

lavabiopsy 5y ago
The problem with saying they need something Chrome doesn't have is that a lot of others seem to expect them to have feature parity with Chrome, both in the GUI, and in the backend rendering engine. I don't think it's economically feasible, it seems you can have one or the other but not both. Unless of course you're willing to outspend Google, which not even the very wealthy Microsoft wants to try to do (they dropped their own browsing engine and switched to Blink). To be clear what is on the table here: not keeping pace with Chrome means that some websites will just stop working in Firefox because some new web API is missing. So that's what you would be trading. I think the huge number of about:config options is actually a major problem for Firefox, there is no possible way to test all those options and ensure they stay working forever and have zero regressions. You won't like this, but a lot of them probably need to be removed. You would need to change the branding but I think some of the other Firefox modifications have systems in place to deal with that. If you ever need to do it, maybe it would be worth asking them.

by thayne 5y ago

lavabiopsy 5y ago

The problem with saying they need something Chrome doesn't have is that a lot of others seem to expect them to have feature parity with Chrome, both in the GUI, and in the backend rendering engine. I don't think it's economically feasible, it seems you can have one or the other but not both. Unless of course you're willing to outspend Google, which not even the very wealthy Microsoft wants to try to do (they dropped their own browsing engine and switched to Blink). To be clear what is on the table here: not keeping pace with Chrome means that some websites will just stop working in Firefox because some new web API is missing. So that's what you would be trading. I think the huge number of about:config options is actually a major problem for Firefox, there is no possible way to test all those options and ensure they stay working forever and have zero regressions. You won't like this, but a lot of them probably need to be removed. You would need to change the branding but I think some of the other Firefox modifications have systems in place to deal with that. If you ever need to do it, maybe it would be worth asking them.