In general it seems to me Firefox codebase is too big for any of the current forks to really be independent alternatives. It’s all just my opinion and personal experience though. Librewolf has different priorities to me to the point where I found that usability suffered, whereas Waterfox’ inclusion of Brave’s adnlock engine is highly unwelcome in my book - I want nothing to do with brave. Zen Browser seemed messy to me, though I can see how it’s great for others.
It seems to me Chromium, WebKit and Servo are better at separating the engine from the browser, making it possible for smaller actors to make their own browsers without forking the engine. A Firefox fork seems to me to just become a very big thing very fast, and one that requires a large dedicated team to be done right. I know other people enjoy the forks, they just never feel quite right to me.
In short, if Mozilla has turned evil and does shitty things to Gecko as a result, I don’t trust that the current forks of Firefox can really provide a real alternative as they depend on upstream development of Firefox.
What is wrong with ff forks?
In general it seems to me Firefox codebase is too big for any of the current forks to really be independent alternatives. It’s all just my opinion and personal experience though. Librewolf has different priorities to me to the point where I found that usability suffered, whereas Waterfox’ inclusion of Brave’s adnlock engine is highly unwelcome in my book - I want nothing to do with brave. Zen Browser seemed messy to me, though I can see how it’s great for others.
It seems to me Chromium, WebKit and Servo are better at separating the engine from the browser, making it possible for smaller actors to make their own browsers without forking the engine. A Firefox fork seems to me to just become a very big thing very fast, and one that requires a large dedicated team to be done right. I know other people enjoy the forks, they just never feel quite right to me.
In short, if Mozilla has turned evil and does shitty things to Gecko as a result, I don’t trust that the current forks of Firefox can really provide a real alternative as they depend on upstream development of Firefox.