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The same can be said about Firefox, or any larger project. Yet people still do it and some people generate their own Linux distros using LFS. Just because it is

The same can be said about Firefox, or any larger project. Yet people still do it and some people generate their own Linux distros using LFS. Just because it isn't painstakingly easy to build like a Go app, doesn't mean that it isn't possible or isn't done. Searching Google will find a lot of people forking Chromium and adding their own changes.

tomxor 4y ago
LFS is not comparable, you can make your own opinionated choices and so it's feasible to have a small scale linux distro. The web is not like that, there's a massive non-optional spec you must implement for your browser to be minimally useful.. and even once you get there it takes a lot of people to merely maintain that level of completeness and compliance. The state of web browsers is more comparable to derivative distros like Debian based or red hat based etc. They don't hard fork, they track upstream with a bunch of changes continually rebased on top. > Searching Google will find a lot of people forking Chromium and adding their own changes. Those aren't hard forks, they are derivatives, you wont see those people continually extending it with new features from W3, fixing zero days and improving implementations... they are the "debian based" in my analogy.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  > The state of web browsers is more comparable to derivative distros like Debian based or red hat based etc. They don't hard fork, they track upstream with a bunch of changes continually rebased on top. Isn't that Brave is doing here? There is NetSurf and others but the spec is complex because of standards committees, not because of Chromium.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    Yes, brave is not a "hard fork" in the sense that it tracks upstream rather than diverged from it at some point in time. The difference is that they can try and add and remove bits on each rebase, but ultimately it's beholden to the long term choices of the chromium project. Substantially diverging while tracking upstream incurs too much work on each rebase; Abandoning upstream to accommodate substantial divergence also incurs too much work due to taking on independent maintenance that increases the more the projects diverge... so as I said no one with substantial resources and a good reason would attempt to hard fork chromium.

tomxor 4y ago

LFS is not comparable, you can make your own opinionated choices and so it's feasible to have a small scale linux distro. The web is not like that, there's a massive non-optional spec you must implement for your browser to be minimally useful.. and even once you get there it takes a lot of people to merely maintain that level of completeness and compliance. The state of web browsers is more comparable to derivative distros like Debian based or red hat based etc. They don't hard fork, they track upstream with a bunch of changes continually rebased on top. > Searching Google will find a lot of people forking Chromium and adding their own changes. Those aren't hard forks, they are derivatives, you wont see those people continually extending it with new features from W3, fixing zero days and improving implementations... they are the "debian based" in my analogy.

encryptluks2 4y ago
> The state of web browsers is more comparable to derivative distros like Debian based or red hat based etc. They don't hard fork, they track upstream with a bunch of changes continually rebased on top. Isn't that Brave is doing here? There is NetSurf and others but the spec is complex because of standards committees, not because of Chromium.
- tomxor 4y ago
  Yes, brave is not a "hard fork" in the sense that it tracks upstream rather than diverged from it at some point in time. The difference is that they can try and add and remove bits on each rebase, but ultimately it's beholden to the long term choices of the chromium project. Substantially diverging while tracking upstream incurs too much work on each rebase; Abandoning upstream to accommodate substantial divergence also incurs too much work due to taking on independent maintenance that increases the more the projects diverge... so as I said no one with substantial resources and a good reason would attempt to hard fork chromium.