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#gecko

5 posts5 participants0 posts today

so for years and years everyone on the correct side of the #tech politics spectrum has been weary of #mozilla foundation but also aware that the ... like 2%?... market share that #gecko holds among web engines is the only thing left from giving away the entire internet to google and apple.

whats keeping anyone from forking gecko and developing it separately? if the community rallies around it, then all the non-corpo aligned #foss browsers can build on it (significant proportion of them already do) and granted we have to give credit to mozilla but at least we don't have to constantly chase and disable every ai product they try to shove into their updates.

what am i missing?

I really want to keep using & supporting #gecko but #Mozilla is going down the toilet- what to do?

#Firefox desktop -> #LibreWolf (that was easy, simply copied my profile and it all came back exactly as before)

#Firefox mobile -> #IronFox (also easy on #GrapheneOS via #Accrescent store)

I can still use #FirefoxSync on both which is nice 'cos I am not quite ready to leave that convenience yet.

Now it's mostly just a matter of replacing my dependency on #Pocket (compiled out of LibreWolf), but that was on my list of services to deprecate anyway...

Replied in thread

@trs currently using #WaterFox, so all my usual extensions are working fine.
I could even enable sync (it uses Mozilla account) safely because all data is encrypted at rest and the key never leaves your browser, and Mozilla cannot reconstruct it.
(#LibreWolf and #floorp are also built on the #Gecko foundation afaiu -- I imagine they should also be a fairly smooth transition).

I think it'd be a horrid thing for the web to be *entirely* shaped by Google/Chrome/Blink — so I'd encourage anyone shifting away from #Firefox at the moment in the wake of #Mozilla's insane moves to destroy itself to please consider sticking with a #Gecko-based browser.

And maybe we should all be keeping an eye on #Servo: servo.org/

Servo logo
ServoServo aims to empower developers with a lightweight, high-performance alternative for embedding web technologies in applications.Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, with WebGL and WebGPU support, and adaptable to desktop, mobile, and embedded applications.
Continued thread

In any case, I think the whole "we can't just have one browser" argument has been put to bed, and arguably #Mozilla isn't the only one still implementing the #gecko engine.

I hope to see a fork between various vendors, that #librewolf, #zenbrowser, #floorp and others cross swords, and with these powers combined make #mozilla regret their decision to abandon libre principles.

The engine isn't bad. I think it's pretty good... just maybe they could update the standards for it :3 plz?