A look at Firefox forks

I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts.

Why do I think this? Three reasons:

- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.

- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.

- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.

> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox

This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.

I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea.

Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.

As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.

I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.

I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.

I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.

FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.

Web browser is something I would pay subscription in a heartbeat, and I mean it, it is my actual OS now

The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big % of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and then to justify their job as the company crashes down from bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried to do.

Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).

Please someone make a Firefox that makes profile portability readable and with sensible defaults.

It does break many sites. Especially if you disable WebGL. You do get used to it but that's a tall task for most users.

It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy.

Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside.

The time zone thing causes confusion with office 365, as well. It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch me off guard once.

I can confirm that. I switched to using LibreWolf as a work-dedicated browser parallel to Firefox Developer Edition.

In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer) - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)

I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.

I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.

I've run into this (it's in Librewolf, but is more obnoxious in Mull/IronFox on Android where I actually use this), where the privacy protections prevent the Jackbox games like Drawful from sending the contents of a drawing to Jackbox's servers. Both browsers don't fail - they just upload a rainbow pattern every time.

I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for the big blue "E" in the bad old days.

Amazon equivalent in Poland - Allegro was notoriously blocking me in Librewolf; I was served puzzle captcha or blocked from browsing at all due to "suspicious activity" 98% of the time.

Librewolf is pretty aggressive. That would be ok if it was just defaults that you could disable if you wish but I couldn't find out how. Too opinionated.

It does that. Users have the simple option of disabling it in settings with one checkbox.

These projects to my knowledge do not release patches by themselves but as you said, rely on Mozilla's work - they take Firefox, strip it out of few features - namely one's that raised concerns, toss in additional stuff from other projects and include own branding. So perhaps these are more "customized derivatives" or "spin-offs"?

Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary. Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.

Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.

OK, this is it. The perfect firefox fork. The last thing I need is the ability to self host a ff sync server so my bookmarks are synced with my phone.

There was a reference implementation called Amaya.[1] It died, because the set of web standards is vast and sprawling, and without a business model implementing them has been seen historically as overly expensive.

In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web, which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always has been) bigger than one engine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)

If there was a group/vendor you could trust to develop such a universal engine to rule them all, that could work out. But, alas, no big tech company could ever be trusted with such a task (they would try to push their agenda, e.g. by preventing ad blockers).

The issue is that if someone found a major issue in Blink, would it even be feasible to get every Chrome, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi user to switch to Firefox while the issue is fixed?

The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives. OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than 20% of all users.

Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that case.

Because reference implementations are often less efficient.

If the standard exists as an abstract interface then future implementors can make different tradeoffs.

Probably not. However, I do believe Fedora and Debian configure and patch out the most egregious Mozilla-isms that infect Firefox already.

Sponsored ads and donations are different revenue models. Mozilla has always been collecting donations and nobody had a problem with it.