11-23-2024 09:57 PM
As we all know, there are Firefox forks with enhancements made to them that mainline Firefox doesn't have. I think that a reasonable attempt should be made to incorporate the advancements made to these forks back into mainstream firefox.
What do these forks do that Firefox doesn't?
Tor Browser -- advanced privacy and fingerprinting protection, and the ability to block javascript without needing an extension using its safe, safer and safest modes. Tor Browser is far ahead of Firefox in its privacy protections as measured by privacytests.org. Source: https://privacytests.org/ Generally, in the long term I think it is a good idea to strive for a perfect score on the privacytests benchmark, even if bundling a Tor client may not be a good idea for Firefox at the moment.
GNUzilla/Icecat -- The GNUzilla project's main innovation is the ability to build using entirely free software GNU makefiles. It should be possible to build Firefox using GNU make instead of a non standard build system.
Waterfox -- Waterfox has advanced customizability and options in the settings app that Firefox doesn't have. While Firefox attempting to compete with google head on is admirable, that doesn't mean that Firefox should be making decisions that upset long time Firefox users. Upstreaming Waterfox back into firefox would go a long way to win over long time firefox super users that are switching to Brave and Vivaldi for reasons they care about. For reference, I have played around with Brave and mainly use Vivaldi, upstreaming Firefox forks into Firefox would go a long way to make me consider using Firefox on desktop.\
Palemoon -- Palemoon is a distant cousin of pre-quantum Firefox. It is more akin to a javascript/XUL runtime with a browser on top of it. Its main feature is its continued support for XUL/XPCOM extensions that are more capable them Chrome extensions. Clearly with Google trying to kill ad-blockers abandoning a more capable XPCOM api was a mistake and Firefox should support XUL/XPCOM and Chrome WebExtensions side by side. This would allow Firefox to run the latest chrome extensions while also not being tied to Google's bad decisions. Another aspect that Palemoon gets right is its official binaries for FreeBSD. Mozilla should strive to support alternative operating systems other than Linux, namely FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris 11.4, QNX SDP 8.0, VMS and Arca OS in addition to Windows NT, Mac OS and Linux. Just because your computer is using an alternative operating system doesn't mean you shouldn't have access to the modern web.
As for the financial future of Mozilla, it would be a prudent move to pursue revenue sharing agreements with search engines other than google. I think Mozilla should preinstall Google, Yahoo, Bing, Duckduckgo, Ecosia, Qwant, Startpage, Metager, Yelp, Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica into the search engine selection menu and to make a reasonable attempt to strike a revenue sharing agreement with each of them.