For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox.
The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.
I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites. One person complained that their meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).
I can confirm that. I switched to using LibreWolf as a work-dedicated browser parallel to Firefox Developer Edition.
In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following:
- no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off)
- timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer)
- login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox)
- WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)
I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.
I used to have terrible time with forgetting my keys, or letting the cleaner in when I wasn't home. Then I just stopped locking the door and never looked back. It's so convenient and saves me precious time. What can I say, it just works!
The browser engine landscape presents an interesting paradox: we have an open specification, yet multiple implementations with their own quirks and incompatibilities. This seems to undermine the very purpose of standardization.
Consider our current situation:
- The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies that develop the engines
- Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source
- Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining compatibility
What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains, we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I understand the historical and theoretical arguments for implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits still outweigh the costs in 2025.
I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an earlier era.
There was a reference implementation called Amaya.[1] It died, because the set of web standards is vast and sprawling, and without a business model implementing them has been seen historically as overly expensive.
In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web, which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always has been) bigger than one engine.
The issue is that if someone found a major issue in Blink, would it even be feasible to get every Chrome, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi user to switch to Firefox while the issue is fixed?
The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives. OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than 20% of all users.
Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that case.
If there was a group/vendor you could trust to develop such a universal engine to rule them all, that could work out. But, alas, no big tech company could ever be trusted with such a task (they would try to push their agenda, e.g. by preventing ad blockers).
> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant. It is developed by a community of Japanese students called Ablaze. Development is hosted on GitHub, and the project solicits donations via GitHub donations. According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page—but the ads, which are displayed as shortcuts with a "sponsored" label, can be turned off in the settings. I've been unable to find any information about the project governance or legal structure of Ablaze.
So a group of contributors, presumably upset about Mozilla making "user-hostile" changes like displaying ads in the new tab page, create a fork of Firefox, and then solicit donations for their fork using the exact same revenue model?
The biggest issue with forks, which is pointed out in the article, is Mozilla still does the heavy lifting. None of the forks have the resources (and probably interest) to fully fork Firefox and make it their own codebase to maintain.
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
If Mozilla needs additional funding, I'd much rather contribute to the project with an "opt-out" subscription plan (say for $20/year) to help support the project without giving away personal data. The author correctly points out that these forks are dependent on Firefox's continued upstream development; however, having this option would provide people with the choice to support the project without giving up personal data, and Firefox and its forks could continue to be sustainably developed.
There's an article about insecurities in Firefox (<https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...>), which is a few years old now, but it made me curious as to whether it actually is better to run a Firefox fork, like Librewolf; Firefox itself; or a Chromium fork like Ungoogled Chromium.
Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security risks versus the privacy risks.
Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple as it sounds.
Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically).
At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome.
Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
Look at how llvm forced gcc to improve their error messages (among other things).
Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine this applies to the web just as well — a web browser implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.
I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it.
> At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP.
That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users.
Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
What if the developers of the dominate engine becomes complacent and decides that it's "good enough" and we get stuck in another IE6 situation where development stops for years and years?
Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy with their direction you'll need to fork it.
If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent implementations to become standards. I think that would be a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.
Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda crucial for that.
I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all the numerous open source solutions.
Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong.
Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing.
China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.
Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense, Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's.
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.
They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.
I don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I added that the interests of Google and Microsoft coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of Microsoft.
> They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.
IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.
I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.
My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many others.
Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.
This recent Mozilla stuff has got me wondering if one could fork Firefox, strip out the AI/adware code, then sell the binaries. How much would people pay (who would pay for a web browser)? Just Firefox, minus the crap. Would it generate enough revenue to cover the maintenance costs? Etc, etc.
Arguably that's what Librewolf, Waterfox, and Palemoon are doing, except via donations.
Considering how quickly Netscape died once IE appeared, I think the market is so small that sites will never test against them and they'll never get a seat on a standards board.
If you're rich you should consider this a menu. Chrome is about to be split from Google which will be a soft reboot that could go badly or really well, but at the least will lead into an awkward period for them. Alternatively, they won't be split, which will create public anger and likely true accusations of quid pro quo, and possibly a tiny bluesky-sized stampede to alternatives.
Chrome will be told they can't pay Firefox for nothing anymore, and Firefox will reply with a not-uninstallable crypto casino or something (why are you complaining, you can turn it off by simply changing 6 unintelligible about:settings, hiding the banner with CSS, and blocking the telemetry and auto-updates at your router...)
Grab one of these, and run a TV commercial for a week or two. You'll get 20% market share in a couple months. Hire all of these fork developers, and let them keep running their own projects as forks of yours. Pick up people who get laid off from Firefox.
Zen and Floorp look interesting, and librewolf.overrides.cfg is new to me. Making Zen your main sell for marketing purposes, but also distributing LibreWolf for people who prefer a classic setup would make sense. Or if you speak Japanese, replace Zen with Floorp.
If you think you can do better than Mozilla, here's your chance! One day we'll be explaining to people that Apache Firefox is unmaintained buggy garbage, and that when old people say "Firefox" they mean Zen.
I'd still take the crypto casino Firefox over Chrome :-D
JK. But yeah my main issue is performance. I honestly like the AI features, dunno why people so triggered over that. Don't think it affects performance at all.
The privacy invasion I need to look into more, maybe only inasfar as it affects performance as well.
It is an indictment on the state of the web that regardless of Mozilla's missteps, Firefox remains the best choice for a secure, open-source web browser that isn't another chromium reskin.
I don't get the public "step down" that people are taking from using Firefox. How many users are actually switching? I doubt it's much. Many are audible about it, though.
Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers
I switched on mobile and on MacOS. I intend to switch on Linux soon.
> Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...
No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better software, I’d spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with advertising.
I don’t mind crash reporting.
I don’t mind opt-in telemetry for QA.
There is no justification for telemetry by default, not informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and selling your data as payment for use of software.
Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue beats subscription money will always compromise their customers.
I don’t want that. And Firefox is now in the category of software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a fork steps up.
In the meantime, I’m using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-WebKit alternative.
I switched. I have been on the fence for some time now, what with the pocket nagware and the various 'sponsored' features showing up in FF. Very easy for me to start using librewolf. It even seems to be faster.
Perhaps more an indictment of failed regulators who have allowed these mega corporations to entrench a single browser engine, steer web standards, and consolidate so many of the social destinations on the web.
You can’t get an OSS team to fix vulns in a meaningful amount of time, let alone research them. Waterfox/Palemoon stay months behind the official branch and are always vulnerable.
Big corporations on the w3c board, and their control of the largest platforms, have contributed to the enshitification of the web by making web standards move just as fast as Windows APIs or Office formats. Making it much harder for open source volunteer driven projects to keep up.
I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.
And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new standards that they launch on their platforms and become ubiquitous to end users.
For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox.
The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.
I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites. One person complained that their meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).
It does break many sites. Especially if you disable WebGL. You do get used to it but that's a tall task for most users.
It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy.
Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside.
The time zone thing causes confusion with office 365, as well. It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch me off guard once.
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I can confirm that. I switched to using LibreWolf as a work-dedicated browser parallel to Firefox Developer Edition.
In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer) - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)
I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.
I used to have terrible time with forgetting my keys, or letting the cleaner in when I wasn't home. Then I just stopped locking the door and never looked back. It's so convenient and saves me precious time. What can I say, it just works!
It does that. Users have the simple option of disabling it in settings with one checkbox.
Where is this 'one checkbox'?
The browser engine landscape presents an interesting paradox: we have an open specification, yet multiple implementations with their own quirks and incompatibilities. This seems to undermine the very purpose of standardization.
Consider our current situation:
- The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies that develop the engines
- Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source
- Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining compatibility
What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains, we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I understand the historical and theoretical arguments for implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits still outweigh the costs in 2025.
I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an earlier era.
There was a reference implementation called Amaya.[1] It died, because the set of web standards is vast and sprawling, and without a business model implementing them has been seen historically as overly expensive.
In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web, which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always has been) bigger than one engine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)
The issue is that if someone found a major issue in Blink, would it even be feasible to get every Chrome, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi user to switch to Firefox while the issue is fixed?
The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives. OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than 20% of all users.
Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that case.
If there was a group/vendor you could trust to develop such a universal engine to rule them all, that could work out. But, alas, no big tech company could ever be trusted with such a task (they would try to push their agenda, e.g. by preventing ad blockers).
How is that any different from now? Look what happened recently with Mozilla and Firefox...
I think that people should look at what happened recently and realize that absolute nothing noteworthy happened.
And Firefox is still the only browser engine with support for uBlock Origin, on Android too.
Because reference implementations are often less efficient.
If the standard exists as an abstract interface then future implementors can make different tradeoffs.
> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant. It is developed by a community of Japanese students called Ablaze. Development is hosted on GitHub, and the project solicits donations via GitHub donations. According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page—but the ads, which are displayed as shortcuts with a "sponsored" label, can be turned off in the settings. I've been unable to find any information about the project governance or legal structure of Ablaze.
So a group of contributors, presumably upset about Mozilla making "user-hostile" changes like displaying ads in the new tab page, create a fork of Firefox, and then solicit donations for their fork using the exact same revenue model?
The biggest issue with forks, which is pointed out in the article, is Mozilla still does the heavy lifting. None of the forks have the resources (and probably interest) to fully fork Firefox and make it their own codebase to maintain.
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
If Mozilla needs additional funding, I'd much rather contribute to the project with an "opt-out" subscription plan (say for $20/year) to help support the project without giving away personal data. The author correctly points out that these forks are dependent on Firefox's continued upstream development; however, having this option would provide people with the choice to support the project without giving up personal data, and Firefox and its forks could continue to be sustainably developed.
There's an article about insecurities in Firefox (<https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...>), which is a few years old now, but it made me curious as to whether it actually is better to run a Firefox fork, like Librewolf; Firefox itself; or a Chromium fork like Ungoogled Chromium.
Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security risks versus the privacy risks.
Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple as it sounds.
Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically).
At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome.
Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
How is solving merge conflicts harder than developing an entire browser engine?
Plus Igalia, MS, Mozilla, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi etc could maintain a shared fork that kept stuff like Manifestv2 if they wanted.
Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing. If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be in trouble.
Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
Look at how llvm forced gcc to improve their error messages (among other things).
Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine this applies to the web just as well — a web browser implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.
I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it.
> At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP.
That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users.
Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
What if the developers of the dominate engine becomes complacent and decides that it's "good enough" and we get stuck in another IE6 situation where development stops for years and years?
Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy with their direction you'll need to fork it.
If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent implementations to become standards. I think that would be a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.
Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda crucial for that.
Couldn't this be said about the Linux kernel?
I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all the numerous open source solutions.
Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong.
Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing.
China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.
Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense, Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's.
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.
> Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome
Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?
They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.
I don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I added that the interests of Google and Microsoft coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of Microsoft.
> They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.
IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.
I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.
My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
Having all the eggs in the same basket is not a good thing.
Linux users should just switch to Windows too.
Why would they do that?
Microsoft doesn't compete with Google.
Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many others.
Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.
> for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome
This is not true
Doesn't a fresh Chrome install add those shortcuts to Windows' desktop?
Azure vs GCP
Microsoft 365 (Office, Exchange) vs. Google Workspace (Gmail, Office Apps)
Windows/Surface vs. ChromeOS/Chromebooks
Bing vs Google Search
...?
Fireforks
Fireworks: Emphasis on colour, animation, bells, whistles and bangs.
Liarfox: Even more corporate shitfuckery and deception.
Firefux: Porn optimised browser.
endless possibilities.....
This recent Mozilla stuff has got me wondering if one could fork Firefox, strip out the AI/adware code, then sell the binaries. How much would people pay (who would pay for a web browser)? Just Firefox, minus the crap. Would it generate enough revenue to cover the maintenance costs? Etc, etc.
Arguably that's what Librewolf, Waterfox, and Palemoon are doing, except via donations.
Considering how quickly Netscape died once IE appeared, I think the market is so small that sites will never test against them and they'll never get a seat on a standards board.
If you're rich you should consider this a menu. Chrome is about to be split from Google which will be a soft reboot that could go badly or really well, but at the least will lead into an awkward period for them. Alternatively, they won't be split, which will create public anger and likely true accusations of quid pro quo, and possibly a tiny bluesky-sized stampede to alternatives.
Chrome will be told they can't pay Firefox for nothing anymore, and Firefox will reply with a not-uninstallable crypto casino or something (why are you complaining, you can turn it off by simply changing 6 unintelligible about:settings, hiding the banner with CSS, and blocking the telemetry and auto-updates at your router...)
Grab one of these, and run a TV commercial for a week or two. You'll get 20% market share in a couple months. Hire all of these fork developers, and let them keep running their own projects as forks of yours. Pick up people who get laid off from Firefox.
Zen and Floorp look interesting, and librewolf.overrides.cfg is new to me. Making Zen your main sell for marketing purposes, but also distributing LibreWolf for people who prefer a classic setup would make sense. Or if you speak Japanese, replace Zen with Floorp.
If you think you can do better than Mozilla, here's your chance! One day we'll be explaining to people that Apache Firefox is unmaintained buggy garbage, and that when old people say "Firefox" they mean Zen.
I'd still take the crypto casino Firefox over Chrome :-D JK. But yeah my main issue is performance. I honestly like the AI features, dunno why people so triggered over that. Don't think it affects performance at all. The privacy invasion I need to look into more, maybe only inasfar as it affects performance as well.
It is an indictment on the state of the web that regardless of Mozilla's missteps, Firefox remains the best choice for a secure, open-source web browser that isn't another chromium reskin.
I don't get the public "step down" that people are taking from using Firefox. How many users are actually switching? I doubt it's much. Many are audible about it, though.
Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers
I switched on mobile and on MacOS. I intend to switch on Linux soon.
> Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...
No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better software, I’d spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with advertising.
I don’t mind crash reporting.
I don’t mind opt-in telemetry for QA.
There is no justification for telemetry by default, not informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and selling your data as payment for use of software.
Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue beats subscription money will always compromise their customers.
I don’t want that. And Firefox is now in the category of software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a fork steps up.
In the meantime, I’m using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-WebKit alternative.
I switched. I have been on the fence for some time now, what with the pocket nagware and the various 'sponsored' features showing up in FF. Very easy for me to start using librewolf. It even seems to be faster.
the point is not that firefox is "not doing much worse than chromium browsers". the point is that they were founded upon principles of not doing that
I switched after years of annoyances with mozilla.
Perhaps more an indictment of failed regulators who have allowed these mega corporations to entrench a single browser engine, steer web standards, and consolidate so many of the social destinations on the web.
You can’t get an OSS team to fix vulns in a meaningful amount of time, let alone research them. Waterfox/Palemoon stay months behind the official branch and are always vulnerable.
Big corporations on the w3c board, and their control of the largest platforms, have contributed to the enshitification of the web by making web standards move just as fast as Windows APIs or Office formats. Making it much harder for open source volunteer driven projects to keep up.
I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.
And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new standards that they launch on their platforms and become ubiquitous to end users.
Netscape / Firefox once broke the browser market.
We need a hero.