Browsers today are massive projects to maintain. They're basically entire OSes and software suites at this point. The days of a browser that can be maintained by 2 guys and updated once every 16 months and still be decent are long gone.

That said, I can recognize that developing and maintaining a browser is a massive undertaking while also acknowledging a project taken a turn for the worse. A lot of software these days has weird priorities (most involving cramming more ads in).

Why isn't anyone willing to commit a few million dollars per year plus lots of human resources for not much in return forking it? FTFY

Open source is mostly an empty slogan in Firefox's case - it was a code dump from Netscape and it's never really been able to attract outside contributions. If you want a browser that was actually built as open source, Konqueror has been right there for decades, but users don't care about that.

I have contributed to both Firefox and chrome, and the amount of legacy code in Firefox makes it so arcane & recondite. They haven't even upgraded jsm, xpcom etc..

And if you apply your logic to chromium. It is being forked and there are many browser like Vivaldi, Brave, Edge etc.. Open Source is definitely not an empty slogan. If there is product A and B, people will choose A if A is better, easier to maintain and popular.

> If Mozilla is so awful at developing Firefox, why isn't anyone forking it?

Actually there are some forks (Waterfox, Librewolf, Torfox, etc.), but they are focused on removing anti-features rather than on developing.

Because nobody forks things that are bad?