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> We plan to continue supporting Manifest V2 extensions in Opera independently of what will happen to other browsers. Once Google rips the MV2 code out of Chro

> We plan to continue supporting Manifest V2 extensions in Opera independently of what will happen to other browsers. Once Google rips the MV2 code out of Chromium entirely next year, are Opera's developers really going to have the resources necessary to maintain such a hard fork?

whatyesaid 2y ago
Maybe if Opera, Arc, and Brave people joined forces... Without a combined effort they lack the power of Chrome store and developer docs. Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine. The MV2 extensions don't need much work to leap over for Firefox
- _mlbt 2y ago
  This is why it’s so critical that we don’t consolidate onto monocultures. It is crucial that Firefox and WebKit continue to be viable alternatives to Chromium.
- bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
  My impression is that it's much easier to embed chromium than Firefox’s engine
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Is this something that Mozilla is focusing on at all? That would seem like an important step towards actually protecting the heterogeneity of the web (or what's left of it).
- wruza 2y ago
  Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine I wish that was the outcome. I could finally try firefox with a ui that fits my workflow.
stavros 2y ago
How open source is a browser if entire other companies can't maintain a fork?
- josephcsible 2y ago
  Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it. That's a definition, but I think that stavros was proposing that, much like Microsoft's "open" formats for Office, if a codebase is so complex that no-one else, not even with the resources of a full company, can maintain it, then at best its open sourceness is pro forma.
    - murderfs 2y ago
      By that logic, Linux isn't open source. Plenty of companies have abandoned products because maintaining a downstream fork of the kernel is too hard. Companies not being willing to invest resources into maintaining a fork doesn't mean it's not open source.
      - Spivak 2y ago
        But companies do maintain what are essentially forks of the kernel, both Redhat and Canonical carry their own patches and have ship different kernel variants. It's not politically a fork but it's the same sort of thing.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        So whether something is open source depends on whether others bother maintaining it? Even if that doesn’t change that an individual cannot?
Jach 2y ago
I'd hazard a guess that the answer is yes, but we'll see. The thing about Opera (and MS with Edge) is that they've already bitten the give-up bullet once by moving to a Chromium-base in the first place, rather than continue with their own separate browsers, so it seems likely to me that if the challenge of maintaining a significant difference is too great they'll bite the bullet again. Somewhat related, I read this about OpenBSD today: https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd... "Robert Nagy in our group maintains 1280 patches to make chrome work on OpenBSD. Google ignores them and will not upstream them. Some of these changes are security related, and they ignore them. Other changes are to cope with security work we've done on our own, for example: JIT changes from Stephen@google for mandatory IBT which google hasn't upstreamed yet, impacts due to PROT_EXEC-only mappings, etc." As far as I can tell, most of these patches (https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium/patches/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium...) are just checks for whether the code is on openbsd or not. Still, even in 2019 (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b57hDs8yE4g https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b5...) the author made the expected complaint trying to upstream them about how "it is getting really hard to follow all the code moving and new features". Keeping v2 compatibility will predictably get harder and harder over time.

whatyesaid 2y ago

Maybe if Opera, Arc, and Brave people joined forces... Without a combined effort they lack the power of Chrome store and developer docs. Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine. The MV2 extensions don't need much work to leap over for Firefox

_mlbt 2y ago
This is why it’s so critical that we don’t consolidate onto monocultures. It is crucial that Firefox and WebKit continue to be viable alternatives to Chromium.
bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
My impression is that it's much easier to embed chromium than Firefox’s engine
- lxgr 2y ago
  Is this something that Mozilla is focusing on at all? That would seem like an important step towards actually protecting the heterogeneity of the web (or what's left of it).
wruza 2y ago
Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine I wish that was the outcome. I could finally try firefox with a ui that fits my workflow.

stavros 2y ago

How open source is a browser if entire other companies can't maintain a fork?

josephcsible 2y ago
Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it.
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it. That's a definition, but I think that stavros was proposing that, much like Microsoft's "open" formats for Office, if a codebase is so complex that no-one else, not even with the resources of a full company, can maintain it, then at best its open sourceness is pro forma.
  - murderfs 2y ago
    By that logic, Linux isn't open source. Plenty of companies have abandoned products because maintaining a downstream fork of the kernel is too hard. Companies not being willing to invest resources into maintaining a fork doesn't mean it's not open source.
    - Spivak 2y ago
      But companies do maintain what are essentially forks of the kernel, both Redhat and Canonical carry their own patches and have ship different kernel variants. It's not politically a fork but it's the same sort of thing.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        So whether something is open source depends on whether others bother maintaining it? Even if that doesn’t change that an individual cannot?

Jach 2y ago

I'd hazard a guess that the answer is yes, but we'll see. The thing about Opera (and MS with Edge) is that they've already bitten the give-up bullet once by moving to a Chromium-base in the first place, rather than continue with their own separate browsers, so it seems likely to me that if the challenge of maintaining a significant difference is too great they'll bite the bullet again. Somewhat related, I read this about OpenBSD today: https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd... "Robert Nagy in our group maintains 1280 patches to make chrome work on OpenBSD. Google ignores them and will not upstream them. Some of these changes are security related, and they ignore them. Other changes are to cope with security work we've done on our own, for example: JIT changes from Stephen@google for mandatory IBT which google hasn't upstreamed yet, impacts due to PROT_EXEC-only mappings, etc." As far as I can tell, most of these patches (https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium/patches/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium...) are just checks for whether the code is on openbsd or not. Still, even in 2019 (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b57hDs8yE4g https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b5...) the author made the expected complaint trying to upstream them about how "it is getting really hard to follow all the code moving and new features". Keeping v2 compatibility will predictably get harder and harder over time.