Post #1770959
2026-03-25 19:51 UTC
Replies (1)
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@confluency@hachyderm.io 2026-03-26 23:04
@jrredho I haven't migrated to LibreWolf or any of the other forks / reskins because I honestly don't see the point. They're all still Firefox, with modifications applied by someone else, maintained by a much smaller team and (last time I checked) providing much more limited distribution options. I prefer to maintain my own changes directly on top of base Firefox (applied automatically with an autoconfig hack). It's worked very well so far; this is the first breaking change since I moved to this system. I would very much like to see a credible alternative emerge, but it doesn't seem feasible in the current ecosystem. Maintaining a browser requires a constant active investment of time and effort from a large team in order to be viable. It really sucks that every organisation currently able to make that investment is becoming increasingly user-hostile, but here we are. It *should* be possible to decouple the hard-to-maintain core components from UI decisions like "should you be allowed to have a usable search bar", "would you like us to fuck up your clipboard functionality for consistency with an operating system you don't use" and "do you want AI shit absolutely everywhere", but I don't know if we *can* decouple those things in the legacy codebases we now have, and if there's any incentive for the maintainers of these projects to do so (I mean: to make the split once and to preserve it, so that other projects can sustainably build alternative interfaces on top of the core). But I'm not a maintainer of a browser fork. I'd be interested in hearing exactly what the process involves right now, and where most of the difficulty is.