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Comment by nubinetwork | Hacker News Reader

> I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox.

Its getting harder and harder, at some point they'll deprecate their last sane ESR, and we'll all get stuck with all their junk.

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There are forks which will keep the sanity alive, but I worry about how long Firefox will survive if everyone moves to them, and I have doubts about how well those forks will be maintained after Firefox is gone.

On the bright side, there will finally be a compelling reason to move to an alternative protocol like Gemini.

If 99.9999% is on WWW, nobody will move to Gemini. There is no business to build on Gemini, no publicly accessible, culturally broad community exists on it and none will exist. You'll only find programmers on Gemini. No authors, philosophers, non-IT engineers/makers with their projects. WWW has organically grown. Gemini has to be equally or more capable and more user and business friendly to have a significant contributor base.

Sounds peaceful.

But seriously, web is asymptotically approaching zero usefulness precisely because of all those "capabilities". In those circumstances, can't you see a million nerds muttering "we'll build our own interweb! with blackjack and hookers!" And one of them might even get lucky, and get a tipping point. Gemini's just an example.

I don't think web's ever going away for corporate stuff, but I can imagine the cultural party moving next door, to a less capable protocol.

It's like Reddit and Lemmy. The majority of users did not switch to Lemmy but the ones that did seem to engage more and share cooler stuff. They are there on purpose, not because it's the default platform.

This is the most insane cope. The old web was good because a naive user could find the coolest thing imaginable. The naive user isn't digging into a forum, finding a reference to a niche forum from the other forum, figuring out how to install or access it, and then actively engaging in it. People don't know passwords can have spaces now.

This is exactly and precisely why open source exists, for both the "never upgrade frozen version" case, and the extension into "fork it and make your own" case

Something like Firefox is so complex that I could not fork it and make my own. I mean, I could, but the amount of changes I could put in would be trivial unless I'm getting paid full time. Even if I was paid full time, realistically, one person paid full time, no matter how good, just can't make an impact in the browser today.

I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to dedicate to that. I could do a few lines here and there if I really got dedicated, but like most people, I have a life. I have kids and such. My retirement account won't fund my midlife crisis to quit my job and work on a web browser, so I depend on something to build a good browser. And that is assuming I even would work on a web browser if I could afford to do whatever I want full time. There are a ton of other activities in my community that need volunteer help, some of which I'm helping a little bit, but I could do more for.

I, like many here, have wished that we could donate a small amount to Firefox every month to fun development, however it turns out that the Mozilla Foundation does not fund development of Firefox and so any money would go not to Firefox but to other causes of which I may or may not support but are not a web browser which is what I want to support.

Other people do fork Firefox though, like Zen browser

https://zen-browser.app/

https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop

There are a lot of good community forks of Chromium also.

And no, a fork of Chromium isn’t “the same as Chrome”.

Chromium forks are not the same as Chrome but it does help Alphabet keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology. And eithr way, monocultures are bad, a surprise vulnerability could nuke 70% of users overnight, which could be partiularly bad with features like WebSerial and WebUSB.

What does "keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology" even meant?

Does "make Firefox compatible with more web site" make chrome stronger?

A thought experiment: if Firefox can use all chrome extension, does this make chrome stronger? I guess yes, right? What makes a website different from extension?

[ I am trying to show the "chrome ecology" argument is ridiculous, not saying we show stop supporting website ]

It's like IE6 was - whatever Google/Chrome wants to do effectively becomes mandatory because nearly everyone is using it.

Firefox has to follow along because of all the web developers who only test things in Chrome and expect all browsers to work exactly like Chrome does. If anything about your browser is different, a website doesn't work, and if you complain the response will be "We don't support Firefox, you should use Chrome or Edge instead."

A lot of existing forks are just Firefox with a couple features added or removed. It's very different from a fork that continues being independently developed as a separate project.

All the existing "forks" that continue past adding/removing that one feature are regularly merging firefox back. That is they are not a fork there are a derivative that never forked. All the forks that remain a fork that I've seen die within a few months.

Finally someone talking sense. I understand forking if it's, say, a simple android app to view images, because the owner sold out and ads got put into a bunch of things that used to be a foss code base (coughSimpleMobileToolscough), but the actual task of forking and maintaining 30-40 million lines of code and weekly security updates is unrealistic. That intensive process effectively became Google's moat.

I actually think this is an interesting case for AI not being evil, because I think it's at least plausible that it could close the gaps between big dogs and little guys, though in the long run it might just prove to be another form of acceleration.

Even given an unlimited token budget for AI and some form of paycheck to do this I don't think I could maintain a fork of firefox along. There is far too many things that need to be done for one person to pull it off.

The moment it comes to that level of complexity is well past the moment it matters for browser diversity anymore. There is no shortage of open source browser codebases or random forks using them, there is a shortage of development paid in some form other than selling out the users.

For a browser, that's not really possible without a significant team of over-the-average and paid developers. There are a lot of complexities in a browser. It has to have its own GPU driver, JIT compiler, optimized scheduler to pull page components, another scheduler to run JS, a cross-platform rendering abstraction, hacks for 30+ years of WWW. All of that should be fast. Because everything else is extremely slow and wasteful on Web.

People who can handle this complexity are extremely mobile in the industry. They can always find employment in a much better paying place than Mozilla. And a competitive browser has to have such developers on generous payroll.

One of the issues with Firefox is its codebase. Some parts of it are slowly rotting and it has its own fair share of 20-year-old bugs. Mozilla is slowly failing to keep up with the ever changing landscape and dealing with the age of their codebase. There is a reason why Electron could be developed with Chromium but not Firefox. Mozilla really tried this as well, it just didn't work.

If you're forking, Chromium or Safari are a better start point than Firefox.

I'm pretty sure firefox itself is a direct contradiction to this, but ok...

How so? Firefox isn't a small, raggedy development project. Mozilla developers are well-paid and Mozilla has offices in a premium location and it can afford paying millions to their CEO, despite losing significant marketshare.

You don’t want a “never upgrade frozen version” for a web browser that is terrifying.

Also without Mozilla (and Google’s funding), “just fork it and make your own” isn’t reasonable either.

If Mozilla/Firefox goes away, so do all those ragequit forks maintained by a group of people I can count on one hand.

It would be up to companies like Redhat, Suse and/or Canonical (preferably AND) to step in but realistically I don’t see that happening either.

There's still seamonkey, lynx, and I think emacs has a browser built in somewhere.

Konqueror could be an option.

Eventually we'll have ladybird too

"When Ladybird comes out" is starting to sound like "when Star Citizen is released"

I expect we'll se at least five more language switches before that happens.

Ever screenshot I've seen of ladybird makes me not want to use it. It's too "modern". I need functional software where the text and background aren't the same color.

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