9 ms·

Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers

by yosito 5y ago

Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers who are not happy with the leadership of Mozilla. What's preventing other forks from taking off?

throw63738 5y ago
Look at the code
- stapled_socks 5y ago
  Ok thanks I'll read Chrome's and Firefox source code over the weekend.
hyproxia 5y ago
Money.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  Can you elaborate? Is Mozilla paying off people who try to start FF forks? Because I could use a bailout. More seriously, is the suggestion that FF is too complex to properly fork without full time devs?
  - dralley 5y ago
    It's 20 million lines of security sensitive code. Of course it's difficult to properly fork. The same is true of Chromium, btw.
    - Sebb767 5y ago
      And yet we see quite a lot of Chromium forks - Brave, Vivaldi and Edge come to mind. For Firefox, the number seems to be a lot lower.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        Yeah, because of the usual open source problem: funding. Brave is funded by venture capital and crypto-crap, Vivaldi by advertising deals and Edge by the infinite coffers of Micro$oft. Firefox forks tend to dislike associating with any of the above.
      - funcDropShadow 5y ago
        Edge, for example, is a fork maintained by Microsoft. It is a strategic project for a multi-billion company. That is not comparable to a fork of your average open-source project.
        Sebb767 5y ago
        But it's absolutely comparable to a fork of Firefox. This does not solve the GPs question, why do so many people fork Chrome instead of Firefox.
        dralley 5y ago
        >But it's absolutely comparable to a fork of Firefox. It's still not comparable for a fairly simple reason: the list of companies in the world that are as big as Microsoft consists of Google, and Apple, both of whom already have their own browsers. As for why Microsoft chose Chromium, it's probably a combination of marketshare, the fact that it is a bit more cleanly architected as a result of having a decade less history than Gecko does, and the fact that they have ambitions of making a stripped down version of Electron part of the standard Windows userspace.
        rubyist5eva 5y ago
        It was definitely a strategic business move. Chrome is eating everyone's lunch with marketshare. Options: 1. Fork Firefox, people install Chrome anyway 2. Fork Chromium, some people realize that it's essentially the same as Chrome and don't install Chrome and just use Edge
      - masklinn 5y ago
        > Brave Company trying to make money off of its fork. > Vivaldi Company trying to ??? > Edge Microsoft, who found that maintaining a chrome fork would be less expensive than playing catch-up with their own in-house browser.
    - revolvingocelot 5y ago
      Chromium is the one with all the forks, right? I don't think "it's a browser, stupid" is the only reason. ...although reading some of the other comments elsewhere, it is a pretty good one. Chromium-based browsers do tend to have some form of corporate support.
      - dralley 5y ago
        OP said this: >> is the suggestion that FF is too complex to properly fork without full time devs? How many Chrome forks don't have "full time devs"? A lot of them (Vivaldi, Opera) aren't even open source! The only one I can think of is ungoogled Chromium which is basically equivalent to this Firefox one in that the actual changes being made are miniscule.
        revolvingocelot 5y ago
        I'm not OP, but you, in GGP, said: >>>It's 20 million lines of security sensitive code. Of course it's difficult to properly fork. Did you forget to switch accounts? Which is it? Easy or hard?
        dralley 5y ago
        >Did you forget to switch accounts? No, but nice accusation. > Which is it? Easy or hard? Could you spell out what the contradiction is, here? I said it's hard to fork both browsers, and then pointed out that the only real "community" ones are miniscule patchsets which pretty much exclusively delete code - that even then, the list is only one or two forks long for each browser - and the rest all have multiple full-time professional devs behind them.
        revolvingocelot 5y ago
        The "contradiction", coincidentally the very same reason I wondered if you switched accounts, is your implication that the reasoning for the way things are is blindingly obvious, except for the exceptions obviously, but those are blindingly obvious too. Apologies, I didn't realize the rationale behind your posting; that straightforward explanatory paragraph clearly couldn't have been deployed without all the posturing, first.
- stapled_socks 5y ago
  > Money That's incredibly vague. Can you explain? How are the many forks/variants of Chromium and WebKit not affected by this "money" factor in the same way
  - ajvs 5y ago
    Google, Microsoft, Apple and Brave, are some of the corporations who fund Chromium/WebKit-based browsers. The ones who fund Firefox (Gecko)-based browsers do not have nearly enough money to dedicate to their own fork.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    Money in the terms of resources. Browsers are huge and complex codebases so maintaining one (even if "just" a fork) is quite expensive. > How are the many forks/variants of Chromium and WebKit not affected by this "money" factor in the same way They are, but the main Webkit/Chromium forks are either large companies (microsoft) or companies trying to make money off of their forks (Brave, Vivaldi). This here is trying to do the exact opposite. Vivaldi has ~50 employees, Brave has 150 and tens of millions in investments. Even if not all of them work on the fork management, that's a lot more resources than a dozen peeps doing that in their spare time.
mcwhy 5y ago
even GNU has really hard time keeping up their IceCat releases
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
numbsafari 5y ago
One reason is that there's a ton of social pressure not to fork, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106440 Another is that doing so, and sustaining the effort, is a non-trivial amount of work. Throwing up a web page and a single release is one thing. Keeping up with the release cadence of an org like Mozilla, and the demands and expectations of a browser user base is something entirely different. Also, "Libre" is a terrible moniker.
- iandinwoodie 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, why do you think "libre" is a terrible moniker?
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    Because nobody knows how to pronounce it, for one. Is it /libre/ (Standard Spanish) or /libʁə/ (Standard French) or /libχ/ (Northern French, esp. Parisian) or /la͡ɪbɚ/ (RP import) or /la͡ɪbɛɹ/ (GA import) or /libɹe/ (GA Spanish import)? But that's a symptom of a different pair of issues, namely: (1) it's ambiguous what language the word is in, and (2) neither of those languages are really tech field lingua francas (English, Russian, maybe Hindi, probably in that order).
    - thomquaid 5y ago
      Libre comes from Latin, via Norman and New Orleans French, to American English. It seems to me quite well chosen, as tech lingua franca.
      - torstenvl 5y ago
        American English does not have this word. It uses it only as parts of other phrases imported from French or Spanish, with Spanish being the more predominant (more people have seen Nacho Libre than partake in vers libre). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/libre https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/libre
  - 5y ago
mfer 5y ago
Maintaining a successful project takes A LOT of work. For something this size it’s not a side projects amount of work. How do the people working on it get money to cover their bills? If they don’t have this they will work on something that does that. A financial model is usually the blocker. Consider this, a lot of the people who work on Linux or many other projects are corporate backed. The companies pay the developers.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  And the clients pay the companies. When we ll start buying browsers they ll stop tracking us
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    Unlikely. I can't name even 1 major paid for product that doesn't have telemetry and other forms of tracking.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Perhaps, but they will still optimize to maximize sales then, i.e. do what sells to as many people as possible, not what is good for you (an advanced user in particular). In fact I'm Okay with Firefox but would rather pay for a good alternative to Facebook where I would be a customer rather than a commodity.
  - folkrav 5y ago
    I'd be willing to bet whichever paid browser popped up would both still keep the telemetry _and_ fuck us with subscription based, you-won't-ever-own-your-browser payment scheme.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Is it becoming a truism that (in this space) the profit motive will inevitably lead to user abuse? Maybe we need more 501c3 and benefit corps providing basic stuff like an internet browser?
  - 5y ago
mgbmtl 5y ago
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns about technical issues, and those can be really difficult to compromise on (a lot of people suggested forks when XUL was removed.. but today probably very few people would want XUL back). To have a successful fork, you need devs with either a business model behind it, or enough motivation to maintain it as a hobby. For a while, it worked for Iceweasel, but it was just branding. Firefox is complex, requires a lot resources to build, distribute binaries, etc. I'm not affiliated to Mozilla, but I do help maintain another open source project, where, in my opinion, power-users and consultants drove the project in a direction that made the product more difficult to use, and therefore gave it a bad reputation and limited growth. I can say that because I have access to some of the telemetry, and also because I talk to a lot of random users as part of my work.
- Communitivity 5y ago
  I don't mind telemetry, if it is opt-in. It should never be opt-out, but usually is.
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    Almost nobody goes out of their way to enable telemetry because they want to help some project. Very few power users do (and they don't represent the majority in most cases) and I'd say zero regular users would care.
  - solox3 5y ago
    "No one opts in" aside, any opt-in metrics you do collect tend to be skewed towards how the people who opt in, use the product. Anyone serious about making product decisions using opt-in metrics should be aware of this bias.
    - 5y ago
jasode 5y ago
>Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? [...] What's preventing other forks from taking off Some of the replies to your question state "money" but there are also more fundamental reasons of choosing Chromium over Gecko: technical functionality and performance (especially on mobile). You'd think an ex-Firefox programmer and Mozilla co-founder such as Brendan Eich would have chosen Gecko for Brave but he didn't. He explains in a previous comment why he switched from Gecko to Chromium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 So the "hidden" reason people are not comfortable saying (except maybe Brendan Eich) is that Gecko isn't as good as Chromium as a foundation for forking. That's why you get a bunch of companies independently choosing Chromium instead of Gecko such as : - Github Electron based on Chromium - Qt QtWebEngine uses Chromium - Opera Vivaldi switches from Presto to Chromium - Microsoft Edge switches from Trident to Chromium - Brave switches from Gecko to Chromium Some speculate Gecko's MPL license instead of Chromium's BSD might also be a factor.
- severine 5y ago
  I'm a longtime Firefox user and advocate, but this feels mostly right.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  I neither want nor need DRM to work. I'd rather have the ability of ad-blocking and similar extensions to work on a deeper level, instead of crippling them, like on chromium-based browsers. What about mono-culture and the risk there of? edit: Availability of working DRM is what it all boils down to.
  - dmos62 5y ago
    I haven't kept up to date. Is Chromium hostile towards ad blocking?
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      It started with this, but applies to other extensions also: [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
vfclists 5y ago
Some years ago Mozilla decided that rather than creating a browser toolkit that browser developers could build browsers a round, they would go the whole hog and combine the engine with the user interface aspects. Even their own developers objected to the policy, but they went ahead anyway.

by yosito 5y ago

throw63738 5y ago

Look at the code

stapled_socks 5y ago
Ok thanks I'll read Chrome's and Firefox source code over the weekend.

hyproxia 5y ago

Money.

revolvingocelot 5y ago
Can you elaborate? Is Mozilla paying off people who try to start FF forks? Because I could use a bailout. More seriously, is the suggestion that FF is too complex to properly fork without full time devs?
- dralley 5y ago
  It's 20 million lines of security sensitive code. Of course it's difficult to properly fork. The same is true of Chromium, btw.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    And yet we see quite a lot of Chromium forks - Brave, Vivaldi and Edge come to mind. For Firefox, the number seems to be a lot lower.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      Yeah, because of the usual open source problem: funding. Brave is funded by venture capital and crypto-crap, Vivaldi by advertising deals and Edge by the infinite coffers of Micro$oft. Firefox forks tend to dislike associating with any of the above.
    - funcDropShadow 5y ago
      Edge, for example, is a fork maintained by Microsoft. It is a strategic project for a multi-billion company. That is not comparable to a fork of your average open-source project.
      - Sebb767 5y ago
        But it's absolutely comparable to a fork of Firefox. This does not solve the GPs question, why do so many people fork Chrome instead of Firefox.
        dralley 5y ago
        >But it's absolutely comparable to a fork of Firefox. It's still not comparable for a fairly simple reason: the list of companies in the world that are as big as Microsoft consists of Google, and Apple, both of whom already have their own browsers. As for why Microsoft chose Chromium, it's probably a combination of marketshare, the fact that it is a bit more cleanly architected as a result of having a decade less history than Gecko does, and the fact that they have ambitions of making a stripped down version of Electron part of the standard Windows userspace.
        rubyist5eva 5y ago
        It was definitely a strategic business move. Chrome is eating everyone's lunch with marketshare. Options: 1. Fork Firefox, people install Chrome anyway 2. Fork Chromium, some people realize that it's essentially the same as Chrome and don't install Chrome and just use Edge
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > Brave Company trying to make money off of its fork. > Vivaldi Company trying to ??? > Edge Microsoft, who found that maintaining a chrome fork would be less expensive than playing catch-up with their own in-house browser.
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    Chromium is the one with all the forks, right? I don't think "it's a browser, stupid" is the only reason. ...although reading some of the other comments elsewhere, it is a pretty good one. Chromium-based browsers do tend to have some form of corporate support.
    - dralley 5y ago
      OP said this: >> is the suggestion that FF is too complex to properly fork without full time devs? How many Chrome forks don't have "full time devs"? A lot of them (Vivaldi, Opera) aren't even open source! The only one I can think of is ungoogled Chromium which is basically equivalent to this Firefox one in that the actual changes being made are miniscule.
      - revolvingocelot 5y ago
        I'm not OP, but you, in GGP, said: >>>It's 20 million lines of security sensitive code. Of course it's difficult to properly fork. Did you forget to switch accounts? Which is it? Easy or hard?
        dralley 5y ago
        >Did you forget to switch accounts? No, but nice accusation. > Which is it? Easy or hard? Could you spell out what the contradiction is, here? I said it's hard to fork both browsers, and then pointed out that the only real "community" ones are miniscule patchsets which pretty much exclusively delete code - that even then, the list is only one or two forks long for each browser - and the rest all have multiple full-time professional devs behind them.
        revolvingocelot 5y ago
        The "contradiction", coincidentally the very same reason I wondered if you switched accounts, is your implication that the reasoning for the way things are is blindingly obvious, except for the exceptions obviously, but those are blindingly obvious too. Apologies, I didn't realize the rationale behind your posting; that straightforward explanatory paragraph clearly couldn't have been deployed without all the posturing, first.
stapled_socks 5y ago
> Money That's incredibly vague. Can you explain? How are the many forks/variants of Chromium and WebKit not affected by this "money" factor in the same way
- ajvs 5y ago
  Google, Microsoft, Apple and Brave, are some of the corporations who fund Chromium/WebKit-based browsers. The ones who fund Firefox (Gecko)-based browsers do not have nearly enough money to dedicate to their own fork.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Money in the terms of resources. Browsers are huge and complex codebases so maintaining one (even if "just" a fork) is quite expensive. > How are the many forks/variants of Chromium and WebKit not affected by this "money" factor in the same way They are, but the main Webkit/Chromium forks are either large companies (microsoft) or companies trying to make money off of their forks (Brave, Vivaldi). This here is trying to do the exact opposite. Vivaldi has ~50 employees, Brave has 150 and tens of millions in investments. Even if not all of them work on the fork management, that's a lot more resources than a dozen peeps doing that in their spare time.

mcwhy 5y ago

even GNU has really hard time keeping up their IceCat releases

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

numbsafari 5y ago

One reason is that there's a ton of social pressure not to fork, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106440 Another is that doing so, and sustaining the effort, is a non-trivial amount of work. Throwing up a web page and a single release is one thing. Keeping up with the release cadence of an org like Mozilla, and the demands and expectations of a browser user base is something entirely different. Also, "Libre" is a terrible moniker.

iandinwoodie 5y ago
Out of curiosity, why do you think "libre" is a terrible moniker?
- torstenvl 5y ago
  Because nobody knows how to pronounce it, for one. Is it /libre/ (Standard Spanish) or /libʁə/ (Standard French) or /libχ/ (Northern French, esp. Parisian) or /la͡ɪbɚ/ (RP import) or /la͡ɪbɛɹ/ (GA import) or /libɹe/ (GA Spanish import)? But that's a symptom of a different pair of issues, namely: (1) it's ambiguous what language the word is in, and (2) neither of those languages are really tech field lingua francas (English, Russian, maybe Hindi, probably in that order).
  - thomquaid 5y ago
    Libre comes from Latin, via Norman and New Orleans French, to American English. It seems to me quite well chosen, as tech lingua franca.
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      American English does not have this word. It uses it only as parts of other phrases imported from French or Spanish, with Spanish being the more predominant (more people have seen Nacho Libre than partake in vers libre). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/libre https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/libre
- 5y ago

mfer 5y ago

Maintaining a successful project takes A LOT of work. For something this size it’s not a side projects amount of work. How do the people working on it get money to cover their bills? If they don’t have this they will work on something that does that. A financial model is usually the blocker. Consider this, a lot of the people who work on Linux or many other projects are corporate backed. The companies pay the developers.

secondaryacct 5y ago
And the clients pay the companies. When we ll start buying browsers they ll stop tracking us
- kgwxd 5y ago
  Unlikely. I can't name even 1 major paid for product that doesn't have telemetry and other forms of tracking.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Perhaps, but they will still optimize to maximize sales then, i.e. do what sells to as many people as possible, not what is good for you (an advanced user in particular). In fact I'm Okay with Firefox but would rather pay for a good alternative to Facebook where I would be a customer rather than a commodity.
- folkrav 5y ago
  I'd be willing to bet whichever paid browser popped up would both still keep the telemetry _and_ fuck us with subscription based, you-won't-ever-own-your-browser payment scheme.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
Is it becoming a truism that (in this space) the profit motive will inevitably lead to user abuse? Maybe we need more 501c3 and benefit corps providing basic stuff like an internet browser?
- 5y ago

mgbmtl 5y ago

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns about technical issues, and those can be really difficult to compromise on (a lot of people suggested forks when XUL was removed.. but today probably very few people would want XUL back). To have a successful fork, you need devs with either a business model behind it, or enough motivation to maintain it as a hobby. For a while, it worked for Iceweasel, but it was just branding. Firefox is complex, requires a lot resources to build, distribute binaries, etc. I'm not affiliated to Mozilla, but I do help maintain another open source project, where, in my opinion, power-users and consultants drove the project in a direction that made the product more difficult to use, and therefore gave it a bad reputation and limited growth. I can say that because I have access to some of the telemetry, and also because I talk to a lot of random users as part of my work.

Communitivity 5y ago
I don't mind telemetry, if it is opt-in. It should never be opt-out, but usually is.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Almost nobody goes out of their way to enable telemetry because they want to help some project. Very few power users do (and they don't represent the majority in most cases) and I'd say zero regular users would care.
- solox3 5y ago
  "No one opts in" aside, any opt-in metrics you do collect tend to be skewed towards how the people who opt in, use the product. Anyone serious about making product decisions using opt-in metrics should be aware of this bias.
  - 5y ago

jasode 5y ago

>Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? [...] What's preventing other forks from taking off Some of the replies to your question state "money" but there are also more fundamental reasons of choosing Chromium over Gecko: technical functionality and performance (especially on mobile). You'd think an ex-Firefox programmer and Mozilla co-founder such as Brendan Eich would have chosen Gecko for Brave but he didn't. He explains in a previous comment why he switched from Gecko to Chromium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 So the "hidden" reason people are not comfortable saying (except maybe Brendan Eich) is that Gecko isn't as good as Chromium as a foundation for forking. That's why you get a bunch of companies independently choosing Chromium instead of Gecko such as : - Github Electron based on Chromium - Qt QtWebEngine uses Chromium - Opera Vivaldi switches from Presto to Chromium - Microsoft Edge switches from Trident to Chromium - Brave switches from Gecko to Chromium Some speculate Gecko's MPL license instead of Chromium's BSD might also be a factor.

severine 5y ago
I'm a longtime Firefox user and advocate, but this feels mostly right.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
I neither want nor need DRM to work. I'd rather have the ability of ad-blocking and similar extensions to work on a deeper level, instead of crippling them, like on chromium-based browsers. What about mono-culture and the risk there of? edit: Availability of working DRM is what it all boils down to.
- dmos62 5y ago
  I haven't kept up to date. Is Chromium hostile towards ad blocking?
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    It started with this, but applies to other extensions also: [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

vfclists 5y ago

Some years ago Mozilla decided that rather than creating a browser toolkit that browser developers could build browsers a round, they would go the whole hog and combine the engine with the user interface aspects. Even their own developers objected to the policy, but they went ahead anyway.