Are mozilla's fork any good?

To answer that question, we first need to understand how complex, writing or maintaining a web browser is. 

A "modern" web browser is :

• a network stack,
• and html+[1] parser, 
• and image+[2] decoder,
• a javascript[3] interpreter compiler,
• a User's interface,
• integration with the underlying OS[4],
• And all the other things I'm currently forgetting. 

 Of course, all the above point are interacting with one another in different ways. In order for "the web" to work, standards are developed and then implemented in the different browsers, rendering engines.

In order to "make" the browser, you need engineers to write and maintain the code, which is probably around 30 Million lines of code[5] for Firefox. Once the code is written, it needs to be compiled [6] and tested [6]. This requires machines that run the operating system the browser ships to (As of this day, mozilla officially ships on Linux, Microslop Windows and MacOS X - community builds for *BSD do exists and are maintained). You need engineers to maintain the compile (build) infrastructure. 

Once the engineers that are responsible for the releases [7] have decided what codes and features were mature enough, they start assembling the bits of code and like the engineers, build, test and send the results to the people using said web browser.

 When I was employed at Mozilla (the company that makes Firefox) around 900+ engineers were tasked with the above and a few more were working on research and development. These engineers are working 5 days a week, 8 hours per day, that's 1872000 hours of engineering brain power spent every year (It's actually less because I have not taken vacations into account) on making Firefox versions. On top of that, you need to add the cost of building and running the test before a new version reaches the end user.

 The current browsing landscape looks dark, there are currently 3 choices for rendering engines, KHTML based browsers, blink based ones and gecko based ones. 90+% of the market is dominated by KHTML/blink based browsers. Blink is a fork of KHTML. This leads to less standard work, if the major engine implements a feature and others need to play catchup to stay relevant, this has happened in the 2000s with IE dominating the browser landscape[8], making it difficult to use macOS 9 or X (I'm not even mentioning Linux here :)). This also leads to most web developers using Chrome and once in a while testing with Firefox or even Safari. But if there's a little glitch, they can still ship because of market shares.

Firefox was started back in 1998, when embedding software was not really a thing with all the platform that were to be supported. Firefox is very hard to embed (eg use as a softwrae library and add stuff on top). I know that  for a fact because both Camino and Thunderbird are embeding gecko.

  In the last few years, Mozilla has been itching the people I connect to, who are very privacy focus and do not see with a good eye what Mozilla does with Firefox. I believe that Mozilla does this in order to stay relevant to normal users. It needs to stay relevant for at least two things :

1. Keep the web standards open, so anyone can implement a web browser / web services.
2. to have enough traffic to be able to pay all the engineers working on gecko. 

Now that, I've explained a few important things, let's answer the question "Are mozilla's fork any good?"

I am biased as I've worked for the company before. But how can a few people, even if they are good and have plenty of free time, be able to cope with what maintaining a fork requires :

• following security patches and porting said patches.
• following development and maintain their branch with changes coming all over the place
• how do they test?

 If you are comfortable with that, then using a fork because Mozilla is pushing stuff you don't want is probably doable. If not, you can always kill those features you don't like using some `about:config` magic.

 

Now, I've set a tone above that foresees a dark future for open web technologies.  What Can you do to keep the web open and with some privacy focus?

1. Keep using Mozilla Nightly
2. Give servo a try 

 

 

[1] HTML is interpreted code, that's why it needs to be parsed and then rendered.

[2] In order to draw and image or a photo on a screen, you need to be able to encode it or decode it. Many file formats are available.

[3] Is a computer language that transforms HTML into something that can interact with the person using the web browser. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/JavaScript

[4] Operating systems need to the very least know which program to open files with. The OS landscape has changed a lot over the last 25 years. These days you need to support 3 major OS, while in the 2000s you had more systems, IRIX for example. You still have some portions of the Mozilla code base that support these long dead systems.

[5]https://math.answers.com/math-and-arithmetic/How_many_lines_of_code_in_mozillafirefox 

[6] Testing implies, testing the code and also having engineers or users using the unfinished product to see that it doesn't regress. Testing Mozilla, is explained at https://ehsanakhgari.org/wp-content/uploads/talks/test-mozilla/

[7] Read a release equals a version. Version 1.5 is a release, as is version 3.0.1.

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars