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What's worse, I think it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for another project to start from either a fork or from nothing and provide an alternative, a
by lvncelot 5y ago
What's worse, I think it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for another project to start from either a fork or from nothing and provide an alternative, as developing a browser (with its own rendering engine) is extremely complicated, comparable to an operating system.
- onion2k 5y agoThe rendering engine part is kind of the least problematic bit, because there are three primary options (Gecko, WebKit, and Blink) and they're all pretty up-to-date and open source. You could also pick up Goanna, KHTML or Servo if you didn't want to use any of the big three as they're open too, but there'd be work to do on them. There's no particularly good reason to start your own renderer from scratch.
- lvncelot 5y agoI'd agree that there's no good reason to start your own renderer from scratch, but I'd argue that there's a great benefit having a competing rendering engine (in this case, Gecko). If Firefox (and, by extension, Gecko) were to die, or fall into obscurity, there would be nothing stopping harmful proposals from being added to various web specifications[1], which is what I was getting at. [1] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
- eitland 5y agoI've been suggesting someone starts maintaining a set of patches to Firefox and building based on them. Start by fixing low-hanging frukt (the tab-strip api, make real customizability for the UI possible again) and build momentum from there. I'm ready to pay a bit for what is one of my most important tools, and I think we all should think about it that way. Just don't start growth hacking me or anything sleazy and I'm also your free billboard on HN and elsewhere.