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Jason Lefkowitz

"Explain." OK.

1) No Firefox fork is doing large-scale engineering work on the browser. They're all small teams whose main contribution is things like different configuration settings. If Mozilla dies, these forks will all die too.

2) Some forks consider it a feature that they keep old, insecure APIs Firefox itself abandoned because they could not be secured (NPAPI, XUL, etc.) Mozilla could not secure these APIs; forks aren't going to be able to. Most don't bother trying.

3) You're still running on Mozilla code, so your trust model still includes Mozilla. Now it just also includes a third party. Do you trust them? Why?

28 February at 18:07 | Open on vmst.io
2 comments
Jason Lefkowitz

4) Because your Firefox fork is still 99.999% Mozilla code contributions, you're dependent on Mozilla fixing security bugs in your browser. But you don't get those fixes when Mozilla releases them; you only get them when the fork team merges them into their fork. You have no guarantees that will happen in a timely fashion. It may never happen at all.

28 February at 18:14 | Open on vmst.io
Jason Lefkowitz

Follow-up points, to answer frequently asked questions:

"Are you saying I should switch to Chrome?" No. I hate Chrome. I'm just saying no current Firefox fork is the silver bullet many people seem to think it is.

"Are Firefox forks inherently doomed?" No. I could imagine a Firefox fork that was a credible alternative. It would just require a lot more resources than any existing fork has.

"What's your suggestion then?" I don't have one. The current options all come with a long list of drawbacks. You have to choose which drawbacks you can live with.

"That sucks!" Yeah man. Everything sucks these days. I don't know what to tell you

Follow-up points, to answer frequently asked questions:

"Are you saying I should switch to Chrome?" No. I hate Chrome. I'm just saying no current Firefox fork is the silver bullet many people seem to think it is.

"Are Firefox forks inherently doomed?" No. I could imagine a Firefox fork that was a credible alternative. It would just require a lot more resources than any existing fork has.

28 February at 20:29 | Open on vmst.io
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