[martin_a]

I'm most probably somewhat naive here, but if you could fork the latest release, remove all Pocket, VPN, whatnot stuff and just give me that as a build, I would be totally fine with it.

I love the core product, I really don't need any of the fluff around it.

[jasode]

>, but if you could fork the latest release, remove all Pocket, VPN, whatnot stuff and just give me that as a build, I would be totally fine with it.

You've overlooked the main idea of the parent post. Let me try to restate it another way...

You can't just fork a web browser's source code and be done with it. A web browser needs constant ongoing new programming coding to keep up with the ongoing changes in the web ecosystem.

Already, we've seen the complexity of new web standards make Opera give up on their Presto web rendering engine and Microsoft abandon their Trident engine for Internet Explorer. Both companies switched to Chromium source as a base to save money and resources.

So no, you eventually would "not be totally fine with it" -- because your forked browser would eventually be useless without a big team of programmers to maintain it.

As examples of web browsers quickly becoming obsolete, I tried Opera 12.18 (last old 2016 version with Presto engine) and here are many problems I encountered:

- Google Maps -- Zooming in and out makes everything blurry. Street View hangs the browser. Opera is missing WebGL acceleration that today's browsers have

- godbolt.org -- compiler explorer online C++ website is broken with a blank screen and doesn't show any code panels

- chase.com -- that bank doesn't allow sign in with old Opera browser

- reuters.com -- images on news stories are blurry and don't load correctly

- various websites with newer TLS encryption protocols break because they don't exist in Opera

Nobody wants to take a fork of the Presto engine and expend 1000 man-hours to fix all those problems. Same would happen with a hypothetical fork of Mozilla Firefox. You still need an active programming community to keep up with evolving web technologies. Again, if Opera and Microsoft (with its billions) gave up, it should give an idea of how daunting it is.

[martin_a]

You're right. I was thinking that "add-ons" like Pocket might be modularized enough so that removing those parts would be easy with every release, maybe even (semi-)automated. Like a "Firefox Light" version.

Maybe this could even be maintained by Mozilla, I would not care in that case. Just the bare core browser. You can always choose to install "the normal" Firefox if you want the "full experience", but for me a browser is just another tool, I don't need pocket and alike.

[neurostimulant]

Is pocket integration really that obstructive? On my laptop, it just a persistent icon on the address bar that I can right click and remove.

[martin_a]

Yeah, maybe it's a little piece and nothing to worry about. But what will they come up with next? Maybe at one point they`ll integrate the "Mozilla VPN" functionality directly into Firefox. Or any other fancy thing they thought the world would need... So I guess it's more about software simplicity, but I find that helpful. I think it also helps developers if they have a clear goal ("build a great browser!") and don't need to take care about integrating side-projects and stuff.

[johannes1234321]

And then security patches have to be applied (a language runtime with full network access is an attractive target)

Also I would ask them to follow and participate web standardisation, else we end up with a Google web.

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_... for different attempts to do something independent.

[martin_a]

See the other comment: I would have hoped that removing "modules" like Pocket would be easy enough so it would be feasible to maintain a "Firefox Light" version.