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Anything to avoid working on the browser itself. Very sad to see the decline of Mozilla and Firefox.

I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.

discuss

ravenstine|4 years ago

If there was a serious financial effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it. The problem is these knockoffs that you know aren't going to keep up with development and will be relatively short-lived.

Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.

And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.

agilob|4 years ago

>effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it.

Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and Safari they can't lose the market.

Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt it with Servo.

https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...

Taywee|4 years ago

Which browser developers do you propose paused these donations in order to "avoid working on the browser itself"? In what way would that even accomplish that end, given that those donations weren't even going to browser development in the first place?

ethanhunt_|4 years ago

Yes, I am aware that these donations don't fund browser development, and that hucksters laundered the reputation of Firefox to take donations to advance their social causes instead of the browser.

daenney|4 years ago

Donations to the foundation don’t pay for Fx development. That’s under the Mozilla Corporation.

lnxg33k1|4 years ago

I was completely not aware of this didn't even imagine something like that, but apparently it's so https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships-a...

ca98am79|4 years ago

we are working on a fork for Handshake: https://github.com/imperviousinc/beacon-ios

join us!

woodruffw|4 years ago

What exactly are you forking here? Your README implies that it's for iOS, where every browser is just a skin over Apple's WebKit engine.

(More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks" of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)