Should Mozilla Fork Firefox? | Hacker News Reader

Should Mozilla Fork Firefox?

computerworlduk.com

32 pointsdreemteem19 comments

Firefox doesn't have feature creep. Memory and CPU usage is down, startup times are down, and the awesome bar is not bloated (it's nicer then Chrome's and just as fast). They've promoted lightweight Personas over full themes[0], and the new JetPack project aims to reduce the complexity of extensions[1]. Firefox 4.0 will continue the trend of faster, more user-friendly Firefox releases[2]. What are these people talking about?

Also, there is already a "hothouse of new ideas" run "alongside the main branch of Firefox," it's called Mozilla Labs[3]. Personas has graduated from Labs into main Firefox already.

[0]. http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/

[1]. https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/

[2]. http://beltzner.ca/mike/2010/05/10/firefox-4-fast-powerful-a...

[3]. https://mozillalabs.com/projects/

Mozilla is also aware of all the standard criticism of the Firefox experience and more, and they have a number of projects working simultaneously to improve the browser, make it faster, and de-clutter the interface: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/

And just as important as the performance work (in my opinion) is the new theme work in Firefox 4:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups

Yes, anybody that has tried Firefox 3.7alpha beta can tell it is much faster, and this is even before Jaegermonkey is operational.

I could see them forking to manage threads and processes differently. Tabs are managed by thread in Firefox whereas by process in Chrome. I prefer the look & feel of Firefox, which is why I use it, but when Firefox crashes (usually because of a plug-in) the whole thing goes down, not just that page. Not a trivial change, but certainly worth trying out imho. It would likely win back market share too.

Tabs aren't threaded in Mozilla. All tabs are managed by a single thread, and are cooperatively multitasked. And it sucks, since for example, one webpage doing a frequent setTimeout can adversely affect others. They've talked about moving to the Chrome model, but they don't seem to have the resources to do so in a timely manner.

A lot of what their doing is catch up to Chrome. They sat around not really innovating in a way that's really meaningful to a normal user for a long time.

The next minor update, 3.6.4, will have out-of-process plugins.

Not what I meant. "The Mozilla platform will use separate processes to display the browser UI, web content, and plugins." [1] -- I don't like this idea myself as it creates odd inter-process communication. Each tab thread will need to contact the UI, web content, and plugin thread. To me, it makes more sense to have each tab be its own process.

Threads don't provide a real advantage here. The executable is loaded once as the OS is smart enough to share the binary, common libraries are loaded once (using mmap), both processes and threads need their own stacks. However, by splitting loads as they have, if any of those 3 main processes fail, everything dies.

1.) https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes

I joined Mozilla just a couple months ago (and honestly I personally was using Chrome a lot before that -- I'm not on the browser team). From what I've seen talking to people I feel like what the author promotes is what's already been happening.

The internal decision process for Firefox has been moving to the UI team, which has been identifying improvements they think are important or easy, and those improvements are getting priority. That's a clear user-centric decision process.

As for forking Firefox, it's not something being done explicitly and it's not a clear team, but people are playing around with ideas along those lines and the culture is very open to that process. Jetpack actually has some basis in a split like that (then being brought back to the mainline).

No fault to the author, these things are by no means obvious (and I myself can only claim to have a vague sense of what's going on)... but I feel more optimistic the more I know about how decisions and experimentation is done at Mozilla.

Sometimes Firefox people come off as very defensive... which I find a little off-putting, but I think it's also a matter of avoiding panic. It would be really stupid to make a long bet on some radical redesign of Firefox, but if you embrace a self-sense of impending irrelevance you can make some really stupid mistakes.

Chrome targeted IE, but it turns out that Firefox is the weaker browser in terms of user "loyalty." Even though Firefox is a better browser, many of IE's users are there because they don't know the difference and don't care, hence they are immune to the attraction of features and design. More of Firefox's users do know the difference, however.

It might be nice if there was one fewer rendering engine. Then again, if Microsoft keeps being its good old self, there may be some benefit from strength in numbers.

The competition between firefox and chrome is friendly competition. They're both opensource browsers that follow web standards so we aren't losing much by chrome gaining market share at the expense of firefox.

If it were losing ground to internet explorer that would have been another issue though. As a result I don't really see the need for a fork of firefox. All they need to do is just focus of making a great browser. We're all fighting on the same side.

Chrome is only free software if you build it from source (http://code.google.com/intl/de/chromium/terms.html). If you use their pre-built executable (as most people do), different terms apply (http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_text.html).

Also, the license isn't everything. It is also important which entity controls the official version of a software. It makes a huge difference whether the decision process is designed for transparency, or whether you can only audit the produced code commits afterwards.

So instead of forking Firefox, it might be a better idea to fork Chrome.

That way, we'd have an independent version that's regularily checked (and fixed) by persons outside of Google. And we could also provide a free binary to which Google's strange terms doesn't apply.

(It would be interesting to see how Google reacts on such a fork. Will they insist on their term and try to apply them to the sources, or will they keep Chrome being free software?)

>a better idea to fork Chrome. ...an independent version that's regularily checked (and fixed) by persons outside of Google.

We already have this. It's called SRWare Iron. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRWare_Iron

FYI, until recently if you compiled Firefox under Gentoo with +branding (now the message comes up with -bindist):

  You are enabling official branding. You may not redistribute this build
  to any users on your network or the internet. Doing so puts yourself into
  a legal problem with Mozilla Foundation
  You can disable it by emerging ${PN} _with_ the bindist USE-flag

I don't know what those legal problems are (as far as I can tell, it's just the Firefox logo), but I think that's interesting.

Well, I would like to see Chrome-like private browsing in Firefox. I don't like the whole shutdown the browser to go in to private mode thing. I often use private browsing mode in Chrome to log in to the same site with multiple accounts. For example, when my wife to log in to GMail while I'm still logged in. Hopefully this is on their radar. I also like how every text box in Chrome is resizable. Not sure if those things really warrant a fork.

I also in principle like Chrome's process per tab idea. But in practice, I've never actually found myself killing off an individual tab. Usually when I have browser problems, it's in Windows and it's an I/O issue that tends to make the whole OS unresponsive.

I'm a Mozilla user since before the Phoenix (later Firebird, later Firefox) came to existence, I began to use the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) since 2001, and I do remember how the small Phoenix team produced feature after feature in question of weeks compared to the much larger Mozilla Suite team, something that Mozilla lost after the 1.5 Firefox release, maybe this is the Microsoftification of the Mozilla Corporation, maybe this will come to happen to Chrome and the WebKit in the future, I just think Mozilla needs to divide development in subsystems with no set of desired features to be included in the next release, and them merge them when they are complete and stable, giving greater autonomy to developers of each subsystem, something like the Linux kernel and its various subsystems.

For the tl;dr folks: Mozilla is just too centralized these days.

They are moving to a more 'agile' style development. The Lorentz release (originally 3.6.2 now 3.6.4) is supposed to be the first release in which new features are just shipped without waiting for a major point release.

http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/3860226/Mozilla-Fi...

skip everything but the last three paragraphs.

Mozilla should fork chrome.

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