this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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[–] HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee 38 points 3 months ago (13 children)

I wish someone could explain to me how it is firefox, which is not chromium based but larely dependent on google for funding, has the ability and manpower to maintain not just the manifest v2+all the other stuff, while every single chromium fork has no choice but to use v3. Why can't they just fork the last usable version of chromium and go from there as an independent fork? Is it just that no one wants to?

Like firefox has lots of ports, some of the follow the main branch but then others like waterfox forked off older versions at some point and just kept going, why can't chrome based browsers do a fork like that? How is it there are people making new browsers from scratch like ladybird, but this manifest stuff is just out of reach for everyone, except mozilla (and i guess other firefox forks).

[–] Goodie@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago (3 children)

A port of a browser is relatively minimal effort. Typically, the changes are largely cosmetic, and occasionally skin deep.

There's a reason none of the ports of Chrome caught the recent snafu with Google having its own special addon that fucks your privacy.

Developing a browser, Firefox or Chrome, takes a huge amount of effort, and are on a similar scale to both Windows and Linux. It's a lot. There are a lot of places to hide things. Taking all of that, and making V2 continue to work... well it'll be alright to start with. It's probably a flag somewhere currently. But in 2 years time? 5 years time? It will take a lot to keep V2 working, let alone back porting V3 features that people may actually want.

Just use Firefox instead.

[–] HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

But firefox is funded by google and has been making questionable decisions for years, LibreWolf is the only fork I would use at this point but I think waterfox really proves my point though that its not really the impossible undertaking people seem to be making it out to be. Waterfox even support BOTH chrome and firefox addons somehow and they have no where near the amount of funding or manpower Mozilla does.

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