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Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

How long before there is a major commercially-backed fork of Firefox? As a huge Firefox fan, I'm incredibly dismayed at the priorities expressed in these layoffs, and I know it is gonna bleed through to browser performance and security sooner or later. I don't want to stick around and find out the hard way when it happens.

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Where's the money in that?

The same place that Mozilla finds it: by making deals with search providers.

Why would you fork Firefox instead of Chromium which has better website compatibility?

Ecosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let “chrome win”, privacy support baked in, etc. Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox?

The large number of Chromium forks vs the comparatively tiny number of Firefox forks shows that there is barely interest in forking Firefox. Especially when you look at which forks have users you'll see that it's almost exclusively Chromium forks.

Sure, ecosystem diversity and so on is great but the current forkers don't see a way to make money from that, otherwise they'd have done it.

And they make money from a Chromium based browser how?

> Ecosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let “chrome win”, privacy support baked in

Barely worth any money.

> Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox?

Free maintenance (worth a lot of money).

This still doesn’t answer the question. If building Firefox is unprofitable what about Chromium based browser is profitable? Cutting out its base layer development doesn’t change its business viability. Clearly the engine development is not the problem.

Maintaining your own browser engine costs a lot of money. Using the one someone else maintains costs a lot less. It's that simple, plus the network effect, compatibility ...

Okay you've eliminated your browser engine building cost by switching Firefox to Chromium. Now how do you make profit off of Chromium?

My point is that there was no profit model around Firefox so switching engines is negligible. The cost of building said engine is also going to be negligible to the profit returned from the browser. In Google's case this is true. In Mozilla's case they have no model and never had one to subsidize that cost (other than Google search money). Changing base engines turns Firefox into a hobby project managed by a FOSS rather than a serious competing project in the browser-verse.

Blink has worse behavior in my experience, they're just popular. You know, the ie6 effect.

Hmm. Most browsers use the webkit rendering engine internally. The problem is that browser engines are huge and require a lot of developers to maintain. I think the worst thing that could happen here is to have Firefox die, and we'd be that much closer to a webkit monoculture.

Chrome uses Bink.

Which is a forked descendant of WebKit, so GP is right or wrong depending on how you classify a fork.

By that logic we can call both KHTML \s

In reality Blink diverged significantly from WebKit and it doesn't make any sense to call Blink WebKit.

Even if Blink and Webkit are separate (and they are still clearly closer than Gecko), we're getting to a Blink monoculture except for the iOS holdout (which is still only ~5% of all traffic, but generally high value and you're prevented from telling them to use another browser).

It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).

> It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).

I'm not sure about that. WebKit is lagging slightly behind Blink (and Gecko to lesser degree), but I don't think it bothers Apple. Budget to develop WebKit is for Apple hardly a problem as well.

Having independent browser engine gives them quite a lot of strategic power given their exclusive market share. Look no further than how they managed to single-handedly kill PWAs few months ago since it does not fit into their strategic goals (all apps must go through app store).

They did not managed to kill anything, there are plenty of markets where iOS is not a presence we care about and keep doing mobile Web applications, business as usual.

Ok, maybe I should have said "relegated to niche applications" instead.

iOS is only relevant in 30% of the world, if we are talking about niches here.

I think it depends if a lot of pages start breaking. Right now it's not happening at scale, but I don't see them having any reason not to refork Blink if more "only tested on Chrome" sites start breaking on Safari.

I'd expect them to maintain all strategic decisions if they did refork, including disabling PWA features; there's nothing that says they have to enable PWAs just because they fork from Blink.

Where are you getting 5% of traffic as mobile Safari?

Because I was scanning around to get a lay of the browser engine landscape and there seems to be tons of Safari traffic out there.

I got that stat from caniuse.com. Obviously it will differ depending on your site

I just assumed they were putting that under webkit.

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