Unfortunate, I suppose, but this is the kind of tradeoff that is to be expected when switching to something maintained by one guy in their bedroom instead of a megacorp.
Thanks didn't know, thought Waterfox etc. were just a new UI on top of Firefox rendering/HTTP/HTTPS/etc. engine and were depending on Firefox development. Didn't know they were forks like the Redis forks for example. Will take another look.
I mean I guess that depends on what you mean by fork? Most of the above projects follow upstream Firefox/Chromium (Pale Moon, for example, doesn't -- but that also means less support for recent web standards) but they are forks in the sense that they maintain the codebase/patchset themselves. How much they actually diverge from upstream varies by project.
So you're right that they are dependent on Mozilla for now. With Mozilla circling the drain lately, maybe that could change. But right now, for the purposes of removing privacy-unfriendly antifeatures, I find them sufficiently independent for my purposes. Most Firefox code isn't evil.
If you want something like Firefox but you're adamant that Mozilla can exercise no control over it, Pale Moon is probably the one you want to look at.
With fork I mean, taking the code, forking it, and developing it on your own.
If someone would take the Redis-C lib and the Redis CLI and change it, but keeping Redis unchanged, I would not call that a "Redis fork".
Valkey who is forking Redis and everything, does not depend on Redis (at most cross patching exploits). I would call that a fork.
"Most Firefox code isn't evil."
You are successful, they will change the license, and you're dead - most current fork will not keep up the work because it is too much compared to changing the UI.
"recent web standards" The only reason for these is the cartel of web browser vendors (Google,Apple,Microsoft,Mozilla) to keep out competition. Worked for 10+ years, until Ladybird showed the strategy is flawed.
You are successful, they will change the license, and you're dead
Yeah, but this assumes that Mozilla itself is successful enough to retain the leverage to pull back users towards Firefox.
With the kind of stuff they have been pulling lately it's possible to see a future where one of the above forks (or call-them-what-you-will) gain traction and take users and developers away from Firefox. If this happens, Mozilla deciding to close off the code would just be the last nail in their coffin.
* Waterfox
* Librewolf
* GNU IceCat
* Pale Moon
* Seamonkey
Chromium forks:
* Ungoogled-Chromium
* Thorium
* Iridium
You'll have to do your own due diligence as far as how trustworthy or suitable these are, but nominally privacy-respecting alternatives do exist.