Something like Firefox is so complex that I could not fork it and make my own. I mean, I could, but the amount of changes I could put in would be trivial unless I'm getting paid full time. Even if I was paid full time, realistically, one person paid full time, no matter how good, just can't make an impact in the browser today.

I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to dedicate to that. I could do a few lines here and there if I really got dedicated, but like most people, I have a life. I have kids and such. My retirement account won't fund my midlife crisis to quit my job and work on a web browser, so I depend on something to build a good browser. And that is assuming I even would work on a web browser if I could afford to do whatever I want full time. There are a ton of other activities in my community that need volunteer help, some of which I'm helping a little bit, but I could do more for.

I, like many here, have wished that we could donate a small amount to Firefox every month to fun development, however it turns out that the Mozilla Foundation does not fund development of Firefox and so any money would go not to Firefox but to other causes of which I may or may not support but are not a web browser which is what I want to support.

▲

wlesieutre 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Other people do fork Firefox though, like Zen browser

https://zen-browser.app/

https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop

▲

autoexec 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of existing forks are just Firefox with a couple features added or removed. It's very different from a fork that continues being independently developed as a separate project.

▲

p-e-w 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are a lot of good community forks of Chromium also.

And no, a fork of Chromium isn’t “the same as Chrome”.

▲

nik282000 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Chromium forks are not the same as Chrome but it does help Alphabet keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology. And eithr way, monocultures are bad, a surprise vulnerability could nuke 70% of users overnight, which could be partiularly bad with features like WebSerial and WebUSB.

▲

unloader6118 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What does "keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology" even meant?

Does "make Firefox compatible with more web site" make chrome stronger?

A thought experiment: if Firefox can use all chrome extension, does this make chrome stronger? I guess yes, right? What makes a website different from extension?

[ I am trying to show the "chrome ecology" argument is ridiculous, not saying we show stop supporting website ]

	▲	wlesieutre 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's like IE6 was - whatever Google/Chrome wants to do effectively becomes mandatory because nearly everyone is using it. Firefox has to follow along because of all the web developers who only test things in Chrome and expect all browsers to work exactly like Chrome does. If anything about your browser is different, a website doesn't work, and if you complain the response will be "We don't support Firefox, you should use Chrome or Edge instead."

▲

glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Finally someone talking sense. I understand forking if it's, say, a simple android app to view images, because the owner sold out and ads got put into a bunch of things that used to be a foss code base (coughSimpleMobileToolscough), but the actual task of forking and maintaining 30-40 million lines of code and weekly security updates is unrealistic. That intensive process effectively became Google's moat.

I actually think this is an interesting case for AI not being evil, because I think it's at least plausible that it could close the gaps between big dogs and little guys, though in the long run it might just prove to be another form of acceleration.