5 ms·

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.
      - Sebb767 5y ago
        And yet the all could have choose Firefox and you could say exactly the same.
        masklinn 5y ago
        Yes? I've no idea what you're implying. All the viable Chromium forks have large amounts of manpower and resources available. The choice between forking Chromium and Firefox is mainly one of business[0]: Chrome has a >70% global marketshare, adding Edge & co even ignoring Safari it's probably around 80. Since Google also keeps pushing their own stuff, that means forking Chromium gives you much better compatibility guarantees. [0] though the history of Chromium — and Webkit before that — forks also means there's probably a lot more knowledge floating around about maintaining such a fork, especially since Chromium itself was originally a fork (running concurrently with its source and regularly synch-ing from it, forking a dead codebase or hard-forking with no sync is a different concern)
        kunagi7 5y ago
        Chromium has proper separation of its components (Blink, V8, Desktop, iOS, Android UIs, etc). It's "easier" for a small full-time paid team to detach the default browser UI, implement their own thing and keep the other components up to date. Examples of this are the Electron Framework [0], Vivaldi, Brave, Opera, Yandex, Edge, etc. Firefox instead is a nightmare to fork. They used to have something called XulRunner[1] that allowed to create your own XUL application (things like Seamonkey, Thunderbird used it) thus making it fairly easy to fork Firefox. After the 41 release Mozilla removed it completely. XulRunner's components were intertwined with Firefox code. Mozilla deliberately killed the easiest way to work their product. Only light forks like Waterfox, LibreWolf are viable. Hard forks fail or struggle every single time Mozilla releases a new version (SeaMonkey, Waterfox Classic, Pale Moon, etc), lagging behind in features and performance. Even WebKit is easier to integrate with your own UI (Safari, Gnome Web [2], etc). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner [2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/
    - est31 5y ago
      Due to its market share, Chromium has better website compatibility these days than Firefox. See the statement by the Brave creator on this: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1165348116398104576 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1165348116398104576 Also, especially on mobile, Firefox is an extremely niche browser engine. The biggest browser forks in therms of global user count are actually not the likes of Edge, Brave, etc, but android Chromium forks popular in asia.
      - fabrice_d 5y ago
        The biggest chromium fork on mobile is actually FB "in app 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.

Money.

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.
    - Sebb767 5y ago
      And yet the all could have choose Firefox and you could say exactly the same.
      - masklinn 5y ago
        Yes? I've no idea what you're implying. All the viable Chromium forks have large amounts of manpower and resources available. The choice between forking Chromium and Firefox is mainly one of business[0]: Chrome has a >70% global marketshare, adding Edge & co even ignoring Safari it's probably around 80. Since Google also keeps pushing their own stuff, that means forking Chromium gives you much better compatibility guarantees. [0] though the history of Chromium — and Webkit before that — forks also means there's probably a lot more knowledge floating around about maintaining such a fork, especially since Chromium itself was originally a fork (running concurrently with its source and regularly synch-ing from it, forking a dead codebase or hard-forking with no sync is a different concern)
      - kunagi7 5y ago
        Chromium has proper separation of its components (Blink, V8, Desktop, iOS, Android UIs, etc). It's "easier" for a small full-time paid team to detach the default browser UI, implement their own thing and keep the other components up to date. Examples of this are the Electron Framework [0], Vivaldi, Brave, Opera, Yandex, Edge, etc. Firefox instead is a nightmare to fork. They used to have something called XulRunner[1] that allowed to create your own XUL application (things like Seamonkey, Thunderbird used it) thus making it fairly easy to fork Firefox. After the 41 release Mozilla removed it completely. XulRunner's components were intertwined with Firefox code. Mozilla deliberately killed the easiest way to work their product. Only light forks like Waterfox, LibreWolf are viable. Hard forks fail or struggle every single time Mozilla releases a new version (SeaMonkey, Waterfox Classic, Pale Moon, etc), lagging behind in features and performance. Even WebKit is easier to integrate with your own UI (Safari, Gnome Web [2], etc). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner [2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/
  - est31 5y ago
    Due to its market share, Chromium has better website compatibility these days than Firefox. See the statement by the Brave creator on this: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1165348116398104576 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1165348116398104576 Also, especially on mobile, Firefox is an extremely niche browser engine. The biggest browser forks in therms of global user count are actually not the likes of Edge, Brave, etc, but android Chromium forks popular in asia.
    - fabrice_d 5y ago
      The biggest chromium fork on mobile is actually FB "in app 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.