Buildig a Firefox Fork

I spent lots of time elbow-deep in the guts of Gecko and all things XUL and XPCOM once upon a time as a former Mozillian. This blog post is a good, entry-level peek at some of the sources of friction independent contributors will run into even if trying to hack directly on Firefox itself.

There are several groups trying to do similar enough work. To wit:

- Thunderbird is still using XUL and XPCOM to the best of my knowledge and has been looking to move away, but it pervades a huge part of the application

- As Sam describes in the post, there are companies with a serious interest in working on Firefox-derived Firefox alternatives

- GNU has the IceCat and LibreJS projects, which have been fraught with build/reproducibility problems of their own, to say nothing of the scope of trying to maintain a fork of a complex project like Firefox on a shoestring "budget" (of what my best guess is $0 and 2–3(?) people who could be considered part-time, where most others are drive-bys, and none are domain experts)

- Zotero is a citation and note-taking PIM app that you probably wouldn't know was built on XULRunner/Gecko, but it is

... and there are probably many others that either don't immediately come to mind, or I'm not aware of them.

An observation: there are enough stakeholders at this time that it would make sense to loosely band together and focus on reducing the costs of building on top of Gecko (without incurring even more costs associated with ongoing development with some other platform). I have some ideas of my own about what this could/should look like, taking into account actual, worldly constraints to give a glimpse of something that could be considered a realistic, workable proposal, but it's a bit too niche to just drop a detailed rundown into a comment here.