Any hope for a firefox fork available via official repos?

Shapeshifter · 2025-03-12 13:26:30

Given recent moves by Mozilla, I'm looking to move to one of the forks like Librewolf or Icecat. Unfortunately, I think none of them are available via official repos, only via AUR.

Is there any discussion for adopting one of them into the official repos? If not, why not? They both have quite a number of votes on AUR.

Hope this discussion is warranted.

V1del · 2025-03-12 13:51:08

The why not is the same answer it has always been, none of the maintainers are doing it and thus it hasn't happened.

Whether the recent internet drama is enough to justify this is ultimately up to the maintainers. Generally speaking Arch doesn't tend to take strong stances in these kinds of circumstances so my gut feeling would be it'd be somewhat a waste of resources to basically duplicate an already complex build pipeline over some ToS ambiguities.

See also https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=303831

Last edited by V1del (2025-03-12 15:23:22)

xerxes_ · 2025-03-12 17:32:22

What "moves" has Mozilla done? I didn't heard anything. Is Mozilla doing something wrong with Firefox?

mpan · 2025-03-12 17:53:37

Mozilla’s own announcement.

Changed ToS by including a blanket copyright legalese statement, which journalists instantly spun up as Mozilla infringing privacy. The foundation also modified an ideological exclamation in FAQ, removed the fragment about “never selling your data.” Citing legal implications, that using word “sell” might have.

Shapeshifter · 2025-03-12 18:50:03

xerxes_ wrote:

What "moves" has Mozilla done? I didn't heard anything. Is Mozilla doing something wrong with Firefox?

Over the years, Mozilla has continued to do more and more things wrong with Firefox: adding Pocket, adding ads to the New Tab page, implementing DRM, enabling telemetry by default for targeted advertisement, routing all DNS requests through Cloudflare by default, and now changing the TOS for threadbare reasons... often they backtracked on their decisions or changed the offending features to be opt-in rather than enabled by default, but in the opinion of a growing number of people, they've just been moving steadily in the wrong direction.

Unfortunately, Mozilla is not focused on making a good browser for the open web anymore. They've devolved into an advertisement and "AI" company.

But I appreciate that Arch does not get involved in the politics and drama.

Pyntux · 2025-03-12 19:21:43

Shapeshifter wrote:

xerxes_ wrote:
What "moves" has Mozilla done? I didn't heard anything. Is Mozilla doing something wrong with Firefox?
Over the years, Mozilla has continued to do more and more things wrong with Firefox: adding Pocket, adding ads to the New Tab page, implementing DRM, enabling telemetry by default for targeted advertisement, routing all DNS requests through Cloudflare by default, and now changing the TOS for threadbare reasons... often they backtracked on their decisions or changed the offending features to be opt-in rather than enabled by default, but in the opinion of a growing number of people, they've just been moving steadily in the wrong direction.
Unfortunately, Mozilla is not focused on making a good browser for the open web anymore. They've devolved into an advertisement and "AI" company.
But I appreciate that Arch does not get involved in the politics and drama.

Where is "support button" here on forum?

You are old Arch user, judging by the date of registration on the forum, I have to support that.

Few of us know how to use a wiki and we don't write much, but we've been around for a long time.

Last edited by Pyntux (2025-03-12 19:24:36)

xerxes_ · 2025-03-12 19:31:09

As you summed it up it looks like Mozilla is not so good as they want to look, but I think that some things from that list don't work on Arch.

BUT Google with it's Chrome browser is A LOT WORSE! And they are forcing that changes to all chromium based browsers.

That leaves as with third party browser creators that are taking from these 2 code bases that will have to revert all those "bad" changes. They are rather small, lack of security checks of their product and may be slow to update it.

Behind them are all outdated and small projects which are not suitable to daily use.

Trilby · 2025-03-12 21:50:24

There own announcement says they needed to remove the statement that they don't "sell" user information because of the varying definitions of "sell". They say something along the lines of most normal people's definition of selling would not match what they are doing, but the California legal definition of selling would match what they are doing.

The problem I see is that California's definition is pretty damn good. I'd like to know who these alleged normal people are who define selling differently and specifically how they define it.

Mozilla is playing a semantic game saying they don't sell your information - so long as you're okay with that being true only for their internal and unstated definition of "selling".

Personally I'll commit to not talking shit about Mozilla... so long as "not talking shit" is operationally defined as not making derogatory comments about Momma-zilla - because other than that, I totally will.

seth · 2025-03-13 08:52:32

The problem is and remains html5

"Modern" web is so complex that we're down to two browser engines covering the entire web (yes, you can read *some* webpages from lynx to webkit, that doesn't count).
Both are massive pseudo-OS beasts and resource hogs, both hardware- and financially-wise. Ie. they need some form of serious funding, nobody can handle that in their spare-time for free.

Unless you're willing to use a state-driven, publically funded browser (or pay for it like before the browser wars) you're gonna pay with your data.
Using stripped down, privacy-protecting derivates stumbles over the "derivate" thing.
If everybody moves away from the privacy-selling base, the base cannot sell anyones data, won't be funded, disappears - and your derivate dies quickly thereafter.

You can have the modern web free as in freedom, but not a in beer - and you're also not getting some non-profit consortium of the major beneficiaries (amazon, facebook, and whoever else then sells your data) to fund a privacy-protecting browser because they don't want your privacy, they want you to use apps to also stay on their platform.
Get used to the idea.

Shapeshifter · 2025-03-13 10:00:34

Pyntux wrote:

You are old Arch user, judging by the date of registration on the forum

Indeed, and have been using Firefox for just as long. Seen how it changed.

Trilby wrote:

The problem I see is that California's definition is pretty damn good.

I agree. I'll quote it here:

Trilby wrote:

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by (a) business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

Sounds about right to me?

seth wrote:

"Modern" web is so complex that we're down to two browser engines covering the entire web (yes, you can read *some* webpages from lynx to webkit, that doesn't count).
Both are massive pseudo-OS beasts and resource hogs, both hardware- and financially-wise. Ie. they need some form of serious funding, nobody can handle that in their spare-time for free.
Unless you're willing to use a state-driven, publically funded browser (or pay for it like before the browser wars) you're gonna pay with your data.

I agree with everything you're saying. But the fact is, I'm absolutely willing to pay. In fact, we've seen a change from ad-supported (i.e. personal-data-selling) to subscription-based services for some time now. Streaming services like Nebula are a good example. Patreon works, too.

I'd happily pay 5, or even 10 dollars per month for a Firefox browser that is made as it was pre-2016. I can afford it now. I also pay a mail provider, for example, instead of using "free" email services.

Mozilla should just offer a subscription for people willing to pay and ship a version without all the garbage in it.

In any case, I still think it's Mozilla's culture that's the problem. Just a few thoughts:

In 2020, Mozilla had around 1000 employees worldwide. They laid off 25%, meanwhile the CEO got at 400% salary increase. Did that help their market share? Did that help literally anyone, except a few upper-level managers?
While writing a browser is hard work, would you even need 1000 engineers? Mozilla now spends many resources on entirely unrelated stuff, like Pocket, their own VPN service, and now that whole AI hype.
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that you need no more than 500 employees (including admin staff) if you just focus on implementing web standards. So you spend around 50'000'000 on salaries a year. First of all, that's pocket change for any large governmental organization, such as the EU, but we know how well politics is working for the people at the moment. Second, you could finance that with less than 1 Million users chipping in 5$ per month. That's less than 1% of active monthly users (about 180M).

I know, I know, it's all wishful thinking and daydreaming in "what-if" land. While I grew up in a time where you had to pay for things, I, too, got caught up in two decades of getting things "for free". I just believe it's time to collectively turn our backs on that idea.

On topic, I'm still looking into Icecat. It's basically what I'd want. Building it via AUR is cumbersome, unfortunately. I wouldn't really trust the -bin version. Maybe the best option right now (on Arch), is to install Icecat via guix?

Trilby · 2025-03-13 12:54:10

Frankly I don't mind if they sell some data. Obviously I'd prefer they didn't. But I'd also prefer to ride a unicorn to work. In the world we live in, some selling of our data is (currently) unavoidable. I'm just pissed that Mozilla's trying to be so dishonest about that. They're trying to sell data while still promising that they don't really sell data. If they'd just own up to what they were doing we could all move on with life.

But then I don't really have a dog in this fight as I stopped using firefox a while back. I thought quite highly of their rendering engine - and still am watching out for usable servo builds that don't depend on a major bloated toolkit as that could be my ideal browser - but for now practical builds of mozilla rendering engines have way too many "features" for me.

Last edited by Trilby (2025-03-13 12:59:14)

seth · 2025-03-13 13:51:03

@Trilby, explanation for that bullshit bingo is in

They laid off 25%, meanwhile the CEO got at 400% salary increase.

I still think it's Mozilla's culture that's the problem.

Ie. the solution won't come from there.
It'll still take a corporate structure to create and maintain an independent fork, also because you'll inevitably enter a poltical realm about webstandards and then the chinese government wants to have a talk with you and some dingbat demands you rename it "browser of america" or so…
The problem is not the absolute effort, the problem is that the entrance barrier is so high that there's not going to be a real market and every serious player immediately gets undesired attention.
I'll bet Mozilla employs more lawyers/diplomats than engineers.

https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/ makes bold claims about protecting your privacy, the browser has proprietary parts, though.
But for context: this is 50 people, just to maintain a chromium derivate that's not just a rebrand.

As for pay-to-play (mozilla actually collects donations, but they're only a fraction of their revenue): you're probably old enough to remember the browser wars.
As long as there's free beer, too many people won't care that there's maybe a tiny bit of dog piss processed and your dogpiss-free but paywall'd beer will go stale.

librewolf-bin looks like binary is provided by upstream, so if you trust the code there's little reason to not trust the binary.
(because that's the next problem of the complexity - nobody has validated all of it)

icecat-bin seems to be the fedora build.

If you're ok w/ a 90%-solution, falkon might be good enough for you.

Trilby · 2025-03-13 15:14:03

Or we could focus on the root of the problem of powerful financial interests or too many "lawyers / diplomats." The French came up with a good solution to this problem years ago: the guillotine.

ReDress · 2025-03-14 09:17:17

Shapeshifter wrote:

[*]In 2020, Mozilla had around 1000 employees worldwide. They laid off 25%, meanwhile the CEO got at 400% salary increase. Did that help their market share? Did that help literally anyone, except a few upper-level managers?[/*]

Seems like this is how most non-profits work. Or, well, another good example of a non-profit offering huge/hefty salaries for little or even no work. Wikipedia is another.

OpusOne · 2025-03-15 18:42:45

Are those forks stable enough to get into the official repos?
Also, thing is, Firefox users are already probably a small minority (they are globally, I don't know if they are specifically on Arch, but I suspect so as well), so users of Firefox forks would be a smaller group of users yet. I doubt Arch maintainers will bother, unless they decided to completely replace the firefox package with one of its forks - which would be a big decision to make at this point. Just my 2 cents.

Succulent of your garden · 2025-03-15 22:59:14

For those who just don't want to use the aur, and are willing to change from gecko, vivaldi could be a nice choice.

For those who don't want to switch to chromium based, then maybe ladybird is an option. It's still in development but it's seems fine. And probably you will need to use aur.

Last edited by Succulent of your garden (2025-03-15 22:59:26)

seth · 2025-03-15 23:04:13

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/vivaldi/ is in the repos.

Edit: hey, not fair

Last edited by seth (2025-03-15 23:04:38)

Succulent of your garden · 2025-03-15 23:35:20

seth wrote:

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/vivaldi/ is in the repos.
Edit: hey, not fair

Lol you got me caught , English is not my native language and made a typo error cuz i'm a little tired.

But you made my day.

Last edited by Succulent of your garden (2025-03-15 23:35:34)

ReDress · Today 16:34:40

ReDress wrote:

Shapeshifter wrote:
[*]In 2020, Mozilla had around 1000 employees worldwide. They laid off 25%, meanwhile the CEO got at 400% salary increase. Did that help their market share? Did that help literally anyone, except a few upper-level managers?[/*]
Seems like this is how most non-profits work. Or, well, another good example of a non-profit offering huge/hefty salaries for little or even no work. Wikipedia is another.

Okay, that might have been a bit blunt, though...

My point probably got across. It's more or less some kind of a trend for non-profits to pay hefty salaries now.... not like it hasn't always been ;-)

Arch Linux

#1 2025-03-12 13:26:30

Any hope for a firefox fork available via official repos?

#2 2025-03-12 13:51:08

Re: Any hope for a firefox fork available via official repos?

#3 2025-03-12 17:32:22

Re: Any hope for a firefox fork available via official repos?

#4 2025-03-12 17:53:37

Re: Any hope for a firefox fork available via official repos?

#5 2025-03-12 18:50:03

Re: Any hope for a firefox fork available via official repos?

#6 2025-03-12 19:21:43

Re: Any hope for a firefox fork available via official repos?

#7 2025-03-12 19:31:09

Re: Any hope for a firefox fork available via official repos?

#8 2025-03-12 21:50:24

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#9 2025-03-13 08:52:32

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#10 2025-03-13 10:00:34

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#11 2025-03-13 12:54:10

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#12 2025-03-13 13:51:03

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#13 2025-03-13 15:14:03

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#14 2025-03-14 09:17:17

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#15 2025-03-15 18:42:45

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#16 2025-03-15 22:59:14

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