WebKit and Chromium are hard forks. The former is a fork of KHTML, and the latter is a hard fork of the former. However, in recent years I’ve only seen soft forks, and as for hard forks, I’ve only seen one with Pale Moon, which hard forked Gecko and named it Goanna due to disagreements with the direction the Mozilla Project was taking.
But why wouldn’t any organization make a hard fork, whether of WebKit, Chromium, Firefox, or another browser not based on the three mentioned above?
On the specific case of Firefox - its code not only is huge complex but also a bit of a mess. There were efforts many years ago to do a Qt port of Firefox but they found out it was really hard to decouple the Gecko engine from the UI part. That’s why you can’t find 3rd party “frontends” using the Gecko engine, but only what would be Firefox forks with extra steps, cosmetic changes and so on, but nothing really substantial - big changes in Firefox would break them.
One of the reasons I’m really looking forward to Servo development is for this reason.
Isn’t that exactly what WebLibre is?
Wasn’t Servo Mozillas attempt to solve that before they laid off all Servo staff and gave the project to the Linux foundation?
It was one of the stated goals for Servo itself to be designed like that. But I don’t think anyone at Mozilla expected Servo to take over from Gecko. They were already quite happy that they were able to incorporate Servo’s style engine and URL bar implementation and such into Gecko.
What’s Servo? 🤔
A playable character from the Sims 2 expansion “Makin’ Money”
a browser written entirely in rust, should be fun on redoxos when it matures (all rust operating system with a mini kernel)
Whoa, didn’t know about redox os. Neat.
The preview on their site make it looks like it’s pretty usable for basic daily use (even has balatro). I’m gonna try it. Thanks !