Why forks? -- There are a lot of decisions made by the upstream that are... let's put it mildly, "opinionated" (but really, just idiotic). But you cannot argue

Why forks? -- There are a lot of decisions made by the upstream that are... let's put it mildly, "opinionated" (but really, just idiotic). But you cannot argue with majority or whoever leads the project. So, many times you don't do it as a way to kill time. You do it because none of what you have works. If I had time and enough knowledge of any of the existing browsers codebases, I'd definitely try to create my own version. Here are things that are desperately needed and some even have been removed from browsers for no reason that I would like to have back. 1. Keyboard-driven interface. 2. Decent access to the browser's internal state for testing purposes. When it comes to (1), there used to be a common pattern where pressing Alt would underscore letters in labels necessary to press in order to select that element. This is long gone now (and, frankly, wasn't that great, but it was something...) To clarify: it's not gone because the feature was removed, it's gone because a lot of controls simply don't have any labels, which breaks the system. Today, most browser elements have no way of activating them with the keyboard. Just a big middle finger from browser vendors. When it comes to (2), the only thing we have is Selenium (and sometimes some extra stuff on top of that). But, Selenium has no access to anything that happens in the networking side of things (that's in the Web browser, which is all about networking... right?) So you cannot know if the page is loading anything, what it's loading, what's the status of things being loaded. It's ridiculous that people write tests with this handicap. With Selenium you also don't have access to code execution. So, you cannot see if the function was called, a variable was set etc. It's ridiculous how poor your access to the state of the program running in the browser is. You used to be able to side-load some JavaScript into the browser and get access to browser's chrome, but that was removed because it was a "security concern" (but really, power-user features being removed is just a plan for cutting down functionality that affects the least users, has nothing to do with security). Do I expect Firefox or any other browser to implement any of that any time soon or ever? -- Well, let's limit that to my lifetime, and the answer is a resounding "no". Hence forking.