Yeah, but since it doesn't have an entire dev team committed to it, the fork dies and/or you're using an out of date browser with all sorts of security vulnerabilities and incompatibilities. Some attempts with actual resources behind them:
Cyberfox - dead
PCXFirefox - latest merge was FF 53. Using outdated plugins (e.g. Sumatra PDF from 2014!)
Waterfox - dead
Pale Moon - Still alive. Removes a host of features (e.g. Accessibility and Parental Controls) in the name of performance, yet performs horribly in benchmarks. Slow to adopt new features.
Besides, who's going to use these? A tiny fraction of the population consisting of people reading this thread and threads like it? Who cares?
So yeah, you _could_ "just" fork FF, but it won't get you anywhere. And why the hell am I doing this? I have much better things to do with my time than maintain my own damn web browser. I am constantly amazed at comments like this which are so obtuse as to be comical.
Since when? It's last commit was 5 days ago:
I never would have guessed. Browsing this thread and writing this comment in my sparkling brand new Waterfox 56.
> Pale Moon - Still alive [...] Slow to adopt new features Slow or reluctant by design. A fork from way back before FF started dismantling its UI. Many new 'features' will never be adopted by Pale Moon.
Snark is fine, but please base it on fact.
My point is that, if you (not a dev team) don't like something you (again, not a dev team) can build it from source to do exactly what you want. Firefox is OSS, most of the popular extensions are OSS. That's the whole point of the thing.
Mozilla has done a pretty good job of championing open standards, open source, user freedom, and all the stuff that people complain about on HN as if they weren't squarely first world problems. You outsource the upkeep of this incredibly complicated software to them and for the most part they do a great job. The level of vitriol about all of this just illustrates the whole "from-zero-to-death-threat" thing that has happened with everything in modern life.
I'm saying that they give you something awesome. They mainly do a pretty good job of championing some of the things that you care about. They made a mistake and they seem to understand everyone's displeasure with it. The end...or get off your ass and do something about it rather than just complaining about how the people giving you the awesome free thing hurt your fee-fee's.