top | item 29106410

(no title)

hyproxia | 4 years ago

Money.

discuss

order

stapled_socks|4 years ago

> Money

That's incredibly vague. Can you explain? How are the many forks/variants of Chromium and WebKit not affected by this "money" factor in the same way

masklinn|4 years ago

Money in the terms of resources. Browsers are huge and complex codebases so maintaining one (even if "just" a fork) is quite expensive.

> How are the many forks/variants of Chromium and WebKit not affected by this "money" factor in the same way

They are, but the main Webkit/Chromium forks are either large companies (microsoft) or companies trying to make money off of their forks (Brave, Vivaldi).

This here is trying to do the exact opposite. Vivaldi has ~50 employees, Brave has 150 and tens of millions in investments. Even if not all of them work on the fork management, that's a lot more resources than a dozen peeps doing that in their spare time.

ajvs|4 years ago

Google, Microsoft, Apple and Brave, are some of the corporations who fund Chromium/WebKit-based browsers. The ones who fund Firefox (Gecko)-based browsers do not have nearly enough money to dedicate to their own fork.

revolvingocelot|4 years ago

Can you elaborate? Is Mozilla paying off people who try to start FF forks? Because I could use a bailout.

More seriously, is the suggestion that FF is too complex to properly fork without full time devs?

dralley|4 years ago

It's 20 million lines of security sensitive code. Of course it's difficult to properly fork.

The same is true of Chromium, btw.