[ethanhunt_]

Anything to avoid working on the browser itself. Very sad to see the decline of Mozilla and Firefox.

I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.

[ravenstine]

If there was a serious financial effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it. The problem is these knockoffs that you know aren't going to keep up with development and will be relatively short-lived.

Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.

And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.

[agilob]

>effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it.

Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and Safari they can't lose the market.

Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt it with Servo.

https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...

[IainIreland]

> Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years.

Uh, [citation needed]?

Firefox was a valid target in Pwn2Own 2021: https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2021/1/25/announcing-...

Nobody attacked Firefox successfully, but that's hardly a point against it. I don't know what "made no improvements at all in previous 2 years is supposed to mean", either, since we had just released a major overhaul of the optimizing compiler a few months before Pwn2Own: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/11/warp-improved-js-performan....

[ksherlock]

2016.

> One change in the 2016 event is that the Mozilla Firefox Web browser is no longer part of the contest.

> “We wanted to focus on the browsers that have made serious security improvements in the last year,” Gorenc said.

https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...

[agilob]

>Uh, [citation needed]?

Literally provided citation in my comment above.

[Taywee]

Which browser developers do you propose paused these donations in order to "avoid working on the browser itself"? In what way would that even accomplish that end, given that those donations weren't even going to browser development in the first place?

[ethanhunt_]

Yes, I am aware that these donations don't fund browser development, and that hucksters laundered the reputation of Firefox to take donations to advance their social causes instead of the browser.

[zionic]

Awesome comment. I went from using Firefox (back when it was still called Mozilla) to Brave, mostly because of the Firefox/Mozilla org.

[daenney]

Donations to the foundation don’t pay for Fx development. That’s under the Mozilla Corporation.

[lnxg33k1]

I was completely not aware of this didn't even imagine something like that, but apparently it's so https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships-a...

[emerged]

You and probably the majority of donators. You’d think at some point that might be considered fraudulent on the part of Mozilla.

[estebank]

It is a legal requirement by US government that they can't.

[reitzensteinm]

I don't know if I agree with parent comment's concern. The what we do/what we fund pages are full of where the actual money goes. At worst, there's no disclaimer warning off people that arrived with a misconception.

But if we were to buy the premise, whether Mozilla can't or chooses not to use the money for browser development doesn't matter in the slightest.

And I think there's a pretty big citation needed on "they can't". Sure, they can't divert non profit funds in to the for profit corporation. But they could use it to build open source software with strategic alignment - like funding Rust.

[lnxg33k1]

Yeah but who would have the guts the sue a company that has worked so much to improve the world? You should be one of those people who hoarded toilet paper to resell it overpriced during the start of the pandemic to do something like that

[emerged]

The ends justify the means? If they hold me up at gunpoint for donations should I just not complain because they do other things that inxg33k1 believes improve the world?

I stopped using Firefox years ago because of such “improvements” they obsess over instead of stewarding one of the very few web browsers which could have helped keep the web open but is instead borderline controlled opposition.

[ca98am79]

we are working on a fork for Handshake: https://github.com/imperviousinc/beacon-ios

join us!

[woodruffw]

What exactly are you forking here? Your README implies that it's for iOS, where every browser is just a skin over Apple's WebKit engine.

(More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks" of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)

[jefftk]

Edge has serious development effort behind it, and isn't just a skin

[woodruffw]

Edge represents the best possible case for browser forking: a company approximately the same size as Google, with approximately the same technical resources, and a history of in-house browser development to boot. Most forks are a far cry from that.

[jefftk]

Yes, very similar to when Google started using WebKit for Chrome (which eventually ended in a full fork)

[woodruffw]

Right. But I don't see how either of these successes by large, cash-rich companies bode well for a random fork of Firefox.