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Comment by richdougherty | Hacker News Reader

Here are two ways that Mozilla could have a lot of impact:

- If it is indeed too challenging for Firefox to compete against Chrome with a separate browser, there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome. This would allow Mozilla to borrow the good bits of Chrome for relatively low effort, and focus development effort on the the things that Google might not value so much (e.g privacy). It would also be a hedge against a Google monopoly by having an open source competitor available.

- I'd love to see a solid open source clone of Android—including a full clone of Google Play Services. I think Mozilla could help a lot here, especially if they integrated their fork of the browser.

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"there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome."

Then that would mark the day when I no longer use Mozilla's software. There'd be no point.

The world doesn't need yet another Chromium-based browser. Firefox's continued development of Gecko and new development of Servo are among the main forces (alongside Safari, maybe) preventing Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer.

Isn't that what Chromium is? Or did you want Firefox to fork Chromium and be reliant on Google and keep pulling in all changes they pushed?

As for an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant. Mozilla already tried the mobile OS thing and failed. Not sure why you think they would suddenly have success. It's all about ecosystems in the mobile space and Mozilla doesn't have it nor will they ever.

> did you want Firefox to fork Chromium and be reliant on Google and keep pulling in all changes they pushed?

I guess I was thinking that Mozilla could both contribute to the core browser (Blink?) and maintain a fork similar to Chromium, but perhaps with more independent features.

This is obviously not ideal for the ecosystem, compared to having a separate browser engine. However it could be a useful approach if Firefox has trouble getting enough users to be relevant, because at least it would mean that Mozilla is influencing the web and its development.

> an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant

I don't think Mozilla needs to start an independent project. They could fund, promote and improve one of the existing open source forks of Android.

What you're describing is more or less what Opera ended up doing. The upshot is that they have no leverage at all in standards discussions and pretty limited control, if any, over changes to Chrome that might break whatever features they've built on top of it.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Windows_2

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions

So these links are all about technology (shared libraries, APIs) from Chrome that has made it into Firefox?

These seem like such simple obviously good ideas ... it's kind of baffling to me that I haven't heard them mentioned before.

https://microg.org is a clone of Play Services and it works very well. Of course it's not 100% full but it works as a client for notifications and location (and some other things), and I don't need all of the other Google garbage.

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