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KeyJ

@aeva I fully get and support your statement, and if a decent(!) Firefox-based browser emerges, I'll be happy to switch. Until then, I'll have to make do with a (comparatively heavily modified) Chromium fork.

In fact, that's maybe one of the reasons why Firefox is such a distant second to the Chromium family: It seems to be harder to fork and extend, for whatever technical or legal reasons. I can imagine that some of the Chromium forks out there would rather be Firefox forks if they could.

10 comments
aeva

@KeyJ god fucking damn it man you broke my combo, I got all the way to 127 boosts without a single dog shit opinion in my mentions

Simon Eilting

@KeyJ @aeva what on earth makes you think that forking your browser is something that is on the minds of 80% of internet users?

KeyJ

@eseilt @aeva I'm not talking about the majority of users who just use Chrome/Edge/Safari because it's kinda pushed onto them and they don't care.

My feeling (and it's really just that!) is that if it was as simple to derive a custom browser off Firefox as it obviously is for Chromium, some (if not most) of the Chromium derivatives would be Firefox derivatives instead.
It wouldn't magically bring Firefox (+derivatives) to 50% market share of course, but the gap would be a little narrower.

Preston Is Not My Real Name

@KeyJ @eseilt @aeva

Wouldn't that entail all of the downsides of using Gecko (tiny market share, poor support from websites) without the relatively good brand recognition of Mozilla? There's lot of FF derivatives out there - LibreWolf, IceCat, PaleMoon - but they're mostly kinda...worse? I think the Chromium clones are doing it because it's well-supported by websites, idk if it's actually easier.

KeyJ

@prestontumber @eseilt @aeva My argument (which, I repeat, is just based on a hunch) is that if we had a good share of Firefox clones from day one, Firefox/Gecko might still be more relevant than it is today, alleviating the "poor support from websites" part.

The Firefox forks you mentioned are, by the way, a good start, but AFAIK they deviate much less from upstream Firefox (in UI/UX or functionality) than some of the Chromium forks do.

Emme Ci 🍉

@KeyJ @aeva Firefox is a very usable browser based on gecko, the Firefox engine.

novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

@KeyJ @aeva in what way is Firefox not decent compared to Chrome?

KeyJ

@anarchopunk_girl @aeva Compared to Chrome, it's indeed decent, I guess. I use neither, so I can't really comment on that.

However, there are certain Chromium forks with UI enhancements that really make a difference.
(I won't drop any specific names in this thread; that would be inappropriate.)

novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

@KeyJ @aeva I use LibreWolf, because Vivaldi, Opera GX, Brave, etc, all just inject their own spyware or stupid shit, and they all still contribute to Chrome's monopoly and therefore Google's de facto stranglehold on the web. Their UIs might better tho, that's true.

Job Bautista

@KeyJ I'm not sure why @aeva thought of your post as "dogshit". You're right here. First, Mozilla code is licensed under the MPL, compared to the more permissive 3-clause BSD license of Chromium. So this makes the latter a more attractive option legally, because there's just less legal headaches to worry about.

Second, Mozilla has never successfully managed to get their Gecko engine to be embeddable unlike Blink. They've tried for many years (remember XULrunner?). I'm not really 100% sure why, maybe Mozilla is so damn lazy in writing documentation (this is one of XUL's problems after all), or maybe they overextended (they also worked on FirefoxOS), idk. But I can say for sure that to this day we are still living with the consequences of this failed experiment by Mozilla, as someone who used to actively contribute to one of Mozilla's forks (Goanna, whose latest and final iteration hard-forked from 52.9.0).

If "libxul" makes you cry in despair you will know what I'm talking about. I tried everything I can to decouple the third-party media code from this awful monolithic library (which became a thing because Mozilla thought it would be easy to embed Gecko if everything is put inside a single huge library) in non-Windows, but it's just giving me linker issues after linker issues. I don't fucking know why. Maybe it's their equally as godawful Python-based build system in fault. Maybe it's the linker. Or maybe I'm just the one at fault here. I don't know and I don't want to know at this point.

Working with Mozilla code is just a horrible experience. I don't regret working with Pale Moon and the whole UXP umbrella, mind you (they're great people and people should contribute to them instead of Mozilla!), but there's just a point where you have to say "screw it" and just stop fixing some goddamn incompetent organization's mistakes from years, no even decades ago.

@KeyJ I'm not sure why @aeva thought of your post as "dogshit". You're right here. First, Mozilla code is licensed under the MPL, compared to the more permissive 3-clause BSD license of Chromium. So this makes the latter a more attractive option legally, because there's just less legal headaches to worry about.

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