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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

If anything, these types of projects should come as some sort of external wrapper to help you compile or configure the software to give you the wanted behavior.

I don’t know a lot about how Arch’s AUR works but this seems like something that could be made an AUR package for example with special configuration while still using “base” Firefox to put it together, rather than profiling it as a new product.

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It depends on how they plan to diverge from upstream firefox. Given enough source code changes a fork might be justifiable.

I don’t think “hard forking” a browser of all things is manageable, even for largish companies, let alone a few developer team. Backporting all the security patches is a very expensive process.

Forgive my ignorance, but couldn't this be done as an extension? (Maybe even withing uBlock Origin itself, if they were to add an option?)

Or do extensions not have access to these settings?

This is exactly the sort of thing one might expect an extension to be able to to, but since the move to web-extensions many of these things aren't possible.

For example, you can't change user settings from an extension. Or install other extensions.

That is part of why FF is having user drops. There should be a way to easily set a bunch of preferences in bulk for privacy/security or whatever one wants.

However, the same is true for all other browsers as well as most are forked from Chromium and also use the web extensions API. What other browser provides more control via extensions? This seems like it's not a reason for users to drop.

> This seems like it's not a reason for users to drop.

It's means people have one less reason for sticking with firefox and means more people will stick with what comes with the OS / what google advertises everywhere / what works better with their favorite websites.

They don't. But honestly, it would be easy enough to have a script/program run to fix the settings while Firefox is not running.

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