The ecosystem of forks is currently healthy but what concerns me is a lack of Firefox browser support leading to lagging in standards support over time as the browser goes out of fashion for ideological or marketing reasons that this article touches upon.
All forks depend on a strong Firefox base and no fork seems to do heavy lifting in terms of web standards, or as a prioritized feature. Instead, they focus on enhancing UX or adhering to open source ideals, but this does little to improve the core browser. :-/
It remains to be seen if we’ll have a new Phoenix moment out of Firefox…? Or does that future belong to Ladybird?
Firefox seems to be good enough - is there anyone who wants to fork Firefox out of a frustration over how it handles some web standard and a feeling that they could do it better?
Hard forking a browser and implementing all future features on your own is daunting enough that even Microsoft - a company with more engineering resources than all but a handful of others, and for whom having a branded browser is existentially important - decided not to do it and just to reskin Chrome.
So I expect that any truly new browser comes not out of a desire to improve Firefox or Chromium, but from an independent, not economically useful, hacker-driven desire to create something cool. Either Ladybird or someone's RIIR project.
Microsoft contributes a lot of web standard implementations upstream to Chromium. They are not just letting Google do all the work as your comment makes it sound like. They could have chosen to do the same with Firefox, which means the reason to fork Chromium and not Firefox had other reasons.
Hmm, yes. My point was that there’s no pressing need for this in forks because Firefox is (still) pretty alive and well and they strongly depend on the important standards work being done there.
But in a future where a critical mass of people moved to forks because they were dissatisfied with Firefox? I think the community is too small and fragmented across forks for that.
Firefox has made a few headlines over the past year for privacy-unfriendly moves. That's the context you're missing, despite it being in some of the first sentences of the linked article.
Which is a UX issue, not a Web standards issue. None of the major forks were made due to a difference opinion about how the standards should be implemented, so they are all dependent on Mozilla to implement the standards.
I suppose, but I wouldn't try to predict the response to Firefox becoming unmaintained and interested parties who might step up to carry the torch before it actually happens. It's the primary browser of the largest three commercial Linux distros.
All forks depend on a strong Firefox base and no fork seems to do heavy lifting in terms of web standards, or as a prioritized feature. Instead, they focus on enhancing UX or adhering to open source ideals, but this does little to improve the core browser. :-/
It remains to be seen if we’ll have a new Phoenix moment out of Firefox…? Or does that future belong to Ladybird?