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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Governments have been creating web/native/mobile apps for some time, which is a trend that continues to accelerate. Firefox continues to limp along but seemingly can't even retain its most ardent fans, and there's no sign of this changing.

What if the EU were to fork Firefox (Openfox?) and fund its evolution of a privacy-first alternative? Among other benefits, this would:

• Help ensure that key digital infrastructure is not solely dependent on non-European entities.

• Balance the US's outsized role as a gatekeeper for web innovation.

• Support the EU's user privacy and data protection values and comply-by-default with EU regulations.

• Help bolster Europe's economic and tech independence.

What else?

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In concrete terms, what would this fork change compared to current Firefox? Just shouting "privacy-first alternative" is pretty vague. Also, good luck getting enough sustainable funding for that kind of project from the EU.

Most of EU funding for OSS project is spread out to lots of projects, with relatively small amounts - Gnome got $1M recently and celebrated as a "big" milestone. I'm not saying that this is bad, but that's not how you can fund a core browser team.

for one: not giving in to every google whim.

recent examples: address bar becomes search bar. referrer header always sent cross domain with full url. webextensions3. hundreds of apis that only benefit ad "viewability" detectors. removal of websocket permission (like you have for notification etc). etc

soon: adding Floc

> for one: not giving in to every google whim.

Yes, particularly they could enable an adblocker by default. Defaults matter and telling people that simply switching to [forked] Firefox to avoid ads would make for a compelling reason for normies to switch. And maybe they'd even stop hemorrhaging users to Brave, which already has this.

Pretty sure that their Google deal prevents them from shipping an ad-blocker enabled by default.

The EU (or any government) has a slightly schizophrenic approach to privacy.

"Privacy? Awesome! Wait! Wait! Not from us! Ban it! Ban it!"

I'd focus on the "balance of power" aspect. But that can be achieved by marketing Firefox, you don't have to fork it.

- Keep Firefox alive as an alternative to Chrome. It doesn't feel like Mozilla is achieving that.

This has been on my mind for a long time. It would be good for everyone to have a real alternative to Chrome and it would be good for Europe to be less dependent on the US, as you mentioned.

In time, it might be possible to fund this off donations, but a bit of EU funding would go a long way to getting this off the ground. Unfortunately, the workings of EU funding programmes are a mystery to me.

That's a pretty neat idea. I don't know if the people in power would get all of that, but I think you could sell them on balancing the US's influence.

Taking up ownership of a large codebase is incredibly challenging. You can't just throw a lot of people at it and hope it works out. It takes time to develop expertise. If the organization orchestrating a fork of Firefox ended up paying many of the existing Firefox developers to work on its fork then it might have a chance

State-based, forked software? Good grief!

No fork please. But do pay more contributors to work on the upstream codebase towards benefiting Firefox's downstream.

PS: don't forget eidas 2.0 has a loophole regarding SSL snooping, check EFF's article on eidas 2.0's article 45.

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