Sarah Jamie Lewis
Mozilla and, by extension, Firefox have laid out the direction they want to go - and have consistently moved in that direction. There is no redemption arc there, they are not going to turn the ship around - and every week and month that goes by, Firefox gains more slop and drifts further from the visions that founded it.
Projects like Tor Browser and Waterfox are painstakingly disabling / patching out the worst - but every release becomes more expensive, and things do slip through.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
If the independent, non-slop web has any future at all, then now must be the time for every firefox fork to commit to working together to maintain a hardfork isolated from Mozilla.
It's a project that is too large to be handled by any small project alone (and maybe even all of them combined), but one that is too important to left under the guidance of an organization like Mozilla.
Without such bold co-operation I fear we have already lost.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
An uninformed plan:
- Take Tor's base Browser, the one they use as a branding-neutral base (very clever name) for the privacy-focused soft forks Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser (i know, i know - but they already paid for the work, so some good might as well come out of it)
- Rebase your soft forks on Base Browser, and benefit from that work
- Form a working group to co-manage base browser
- Hard-fork from firefox as you reject future rebases in favour of privacy and humanity.
Rich Felker
@brillenfux @sarahjamielewis Ok, let us know when you've got that ready for us and when it has even the bare minimum hardening features needed for usability (UBO support for starters) rather than being a tech PoC that just trusts sites to be acting in your interests.
brillenfux
@sarahjamielewis Instead of continuing the train wreck that is the former Netscape Navigator, I would appreciate a functional formally verified implementation. I'm very certain that maintenance of an implementation in dependent types (while requiring categorical knowledge) would turn out to be much, much less of a burden in the end.
Rich Felker
@MegaMichelle @yoasif @jbowen @sarahjamielewis @servo Until then we need unified effort behind Firefox fork. We can discuss Servo once there's an actually usable browser (minimum requirement: full site isolation & UBO) built on it rather than an impressive engine demo.
Michelle Hughes
@yoasif @jbowen @sarahjamielewis @servo
Contribute to Servo I guess, LOL.
We failed to prepare for this, is the problem. If you get caught out in the rain, there's not much you can do until you can get an umbrella or get to shelter.
I mean, yeah, the best thing to do would be like the post above says: Maintain a firefox hard fork. But in this part of the thread, we're talking about independent browser engines. That's where it's about Servo.
Michelle Hughes
It's all about @servo now.
yoasif
@MegaMichelle @jbowen @sarahjamielewis @servo It definitely makes sense to build an all new codebase instead of forking an existing one while the new one matures. 🙄
What are we supposed to do until Servo is ready?
Jason Bowen 🇺🇦
@sarahjamielewis
> I fear we have already lost
I tend to think we already have. What's needed is an independent browser not based on Gecko, Blink, or WebKit. I was initially excited about Ladybird, but they turned out to have weird right-wing leanings. So I'm just back to despair (which would be a fun name for a new browser engine...)
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