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Comment by digdigdag | Hacker News Reader

I think it's time there was a legitimate, organized fork of Firefox. None of this Iceweasel nonsense, but a proper, mature, organized initiative to diverge from Mozilla's codebase. They've made it very clear with the addition of Pocket, suggested sites, and now this addon that their calling has been diluted in pursuit of sustaining their own existence.

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So what's the plan to sustain the existence of the fork?

Browsers are very complex and expensive to keep cutting edge.

Maybe we need a stable browser without surprises. Less cutting edge. Maybe.

Like Konqueror? It isn't going that well. The web is evolving fast, and for good reasons.

Could you please expand those 'good reasons'? I honestly don't see them. I see a world in 2017 where my instant messenger lacks functions I had in ICQ in 2000 (p2p file sharing, for example); I see video conferencing struggle to work which I had in 2007 (p2p skype); I see my browser spying on me and coming with baked in backdoors.

The only one of those that is about the web is the sites spying on you. And JS has been evolving better sandboxes, not worse.

Erm... no. The trouble with video calls is that it's webrtc these days and melting CPUs with their inefficiency. The messenger apps are built on electron, and a unicorns with rainbows IRC client can eat 4GB of memory (yes, I'm talking about Slack). Everything is forced through HTTP. Those were only examples though.

Actually a big part of the problem is hinted in your examples: feature creep from native programs into the browser.

I think it would be an interesting, more private, and safer online world if browsers only displayed HTML and a minimum of JS rather than being entire operating systems, and anything like media playing and high interactivity occurred in native programs.

Don't stable and cutting-edge go hand-in-hand for browsers as the most "compatible" browsers must properly implement the latest web standards?

It is impossible to fork Firefox and survive. If you destroy Mozilla all the users will migrate to Chrome. There is no successful financial model for browser development. Browser development is a financial black hole and requires alternative revenue streams for developers to put food on the table.

A real fork might be impossible, but a soft fork that just disables features like this should be possible.

Indeed, this is how IceCat works: by taking the Firefox ESR release and sed'ing out things like EME and telemetry.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git/tree/makeicec...

"It is impossible to fork Firefox and survive"

Pale Moon did this a while ago and is still around, although in need of donations as many other volunteer-driven projects. https://www.palemoon.org/

Pale Moon would sink in a week if Mozilla closes, it does not have the resources to implement or influence new standards.

And Mozilla has?!

Certainly more so than Pale Moon.

That wasn't a Mozilla vs Pale Moon contest, anyway if Mozilla would close Pale Moon would likely inherit at least part of its developers and user base. Surviving economically however would be a totally different beast.

What's wrong with Pocket?

The fact it ought to be an extension that pocket users could add by visiting addons.mozilla.org but instead it was rolled into the core browser.

People assume Pocket offered Mozilla a lot of money, as there's really no other reason Pocket shouldn't be an extension.

People are naturally nervous when browsers start deploying third-party code in exchange for cash. Especially when auto-update mechanisms are used.

Some would see that as an important line to cross - will they be able to resist the much larger sums they'll be offered to "help users see more relevant ads" and "help users keep safe from viruses"?

Mozilla owns Pocket, though. It's more of a bookmarking UI/service than a 3rd party add-on. Sort of like Safari's Reading List feature.

That's how I've always seen it anyway. I didn't know there was controversy around it, but I can understand how people would be sensitive to seeing another company's logo in the URL bar.

Mozilla bought pocket early this year. The pocket integration was before that in mid-2015.

It makes a fine browser extension. It ABSOLUTELY does not make good embedded code.

There is no good reason for it to be "core functionality" in a browser, other than the fact that Moz://a got a fistfull of dollars and foisted it upon us.

EDIT: For example, what would be a good use of core functionality, is if Moz://a included IPFS resolution and native support. That is a protocol level support, and thus would need native support rather than plugins. Plugins do indeed work, but require significant workarounds. For example, native could be ipfs://hash whereas the plugins need to specify http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/hash

I respect that everyone does not want it in their browser, but you could also say that about developer tools, screenshots, even bookmarks are not "core browsing". By this point Pocket is just another feature, fully owned and developed by Mozilla.

And you don't see a problem with having no money for actually developing the browser?

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