The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I’ve seen it done - if you’re familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn’t really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.

With Firefox, it’s practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The “forks” that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.

Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they’ve had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I’ve read, they’re struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it’s pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.

Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don’t have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can’t really implement it… unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.

That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don’t forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.

I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.

But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you’re predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn’t seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it’s only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.

Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.

People are quick to assume this, and there’s a very good chance that they’re right, but I don’t think we should take it as a given. It’s always possible that there could be some sort of court decision that allows Google to keep funding Mozilla after the “breakup” is complete.

In any case, we don’t yet know what the outcome of the antitrust case will be, so I think it might be best to avoid making statements of certainty like this until we see how things really shake out.

We should definitely take the possibility of this happening very seriously though.

You’re right, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don’t think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don’t do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome’s grasp on the web.

Because let’s face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don’t really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It’s because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they’ve taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).

They need to empower others to build the browser that they can’t. That’s what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

Completely agree. He just needs to look within his own borders to see why. The Left Alliance scores the largest bloc of the election; then Macron spurns them and looks to the right for a Prime Minister instead. Are we really supposed to believe him when he says he’s shocked that people are losing faith in the system?

At this point, it’s hard to see how he can be this stupid. The man is a liar and always has been. He understands well that to build trust (no matter with whom - either the Left Alliance in his own country or the Global South, or anyone else), he has to back down and learn to compromise.

But for him, it’s much easier to pretend that he doesn’t know what’s going on, bury his head in the sand, and continue with the status quo - the way he’s paid to do.

Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?

This is the one that broke my back. Understandable that XPCOM extensions had to go, but leaving nothing to replace them, and then going on to push their trash UI redesigns without giving us any recourse to change them back - that was just unforgivable.

Then again, that was still well before they started pushing spyware in their own browser, so in retrospect, those were very quaint times!

Not on the outside, at least.

Not necessarily! I always run ln -s '/usr/bin/$EDITOR' $(which $EDITOR) after a fresh install, so I have a valid executable on the path called $EDITOR.

Of course, then I have to make sure to add export EDITOR=\$EDITOR to my .bashrc. (Obviously.)

What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?

Welcome to the crowd! Eventually, you realize that an operating system is just an operating system: something you use to get work done, and the less you notice it, the better it’s doing its job. The pride of setting it all up mostly ends very shortly after you’re done. At that point, you realize that pretty much all distros are the same, give or take.

That said, there are always moments that make you realize that your OS is amazing. When you’re faced with a new and difficult task that you don’t know how to achieve, then you look at your distro’s documentation and solve it in a few elegant steps. And I’m not an Arch user, but that’s when the Arch wiki will really be your friend, as well as all the other resources that Arch has for its users. I can’t think of examples of these kinds of moments because they’re so rare, but those are the moments that feel great and really make you appreciate your OS.