this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Also, bundling extensions with the browser is not the way to cater to power users - they will install the extensions they want anyway.
If gecko became embeddable (or better yet, servo was finished), so users could make alternative firefox-based browsers, that would be really good for power users. Right now things like qutebrowser are all based on blink, because that's the only option.
Not sure I follow, there are plenty of Firefox-based browsers:
Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Floorp, Pulse, Mull, Waterfox, Mercury, Ghostery, IceCat, Iceraven, etc.
There is a difference between forefox-based browser and chromium-based one. Namely, if you base it on chromium, you take the blink engine and you can build watever UI around it you want. If you base it on firefox, you actually have to take the full firefox code and make changes to it.
All those firefox-based browsers are very similar to firefox with some small changes made. If you actually want to make large changes, keeping up with updates will quickly become a mess.
By contrast, qutebrowser has very little in common with Chromium except for the rendering engine - the user experience is totally different.
Brave even mention this in the old time how hard for them to fork it... Well.. it's a 25 years old code, even quite older as some even rewritten Firefox from netscape, have same pattern...