181
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
181 points (92.5% liked)
Showerthoughts
29588 readers
2107 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
There are already other open source forks of Firefox that are community driven and maintained without employees or a for profit organization behind them. The obvious example is LibreWolf which describes itself as "a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom". There's no argument that maintaining a web browser is currently complex and needs to make security first decisions, but LibreWolf as an example shows us that it is not only possible but I argue proves it will continue even if Firefox as we know it goes away.
Those forks aren't maintaining Firefox itself, just their own modifications. If a bug is found in Firefox, the LibreWolf team don't have to fix it themselves, they can wait for Mozilla to do it, and incorporate the fix once it materialises. There are forks that diverge further, but they either get quickly abandoned after their creator realises how much of a headache maintenance will be, or they're left with gaping security holes.
I'm a Librewolf fan too, but the majority of the hard work is done by Mozilla developers. Their work is very important too, but what they are doing is preconfiguring prefs, adding patches, and writing the patches sometimes. Much easier to be done as a team of volunteers.
Makes sense that Librewolf work is done by Firefox devs - a recent LW notification recommended installing FF