On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 7:06 PM Robert Kaiser <kairo@kairo.at> wrote:
Michal Suchánek schrieb:
However, the overall theme is
- ignoring bugs - ignoring feature requests (minor, with patches provided) - removing features
Overall the Chrome upstream is bad in relation to users, and the project is not small enough to take over maintainership or keep maintaining a fork.
Yes, the problem with Chromium (and all software based on it) is that it's what I call "throw-over-the-wall" software. It may be released under an open source license, but it is created inside Google and just released out there to give an impression of being nice and open while real community interaction is not appreciated.
Now, it's not always nice and peachy with Mozilla either (I've been in that community for 20 years, I have experienced and seen much) but overall, you'll see that the way they treat the community is very different and contributions are for the most part really appreciated. Rants in bugs will not be treated well either (not sure if they are anywhere) and some decisions are made that are not always appreciated by everyone (also, same as in most projects, esp. large ones), but overall, community is being taken way more seriously. In the end, Firefox is the only really FLOSS browser with any substantial usage. And despite being deeply ingrained in its community, that makes me sad sometimes, but I also know how complex a browser is nowadays, as it's pretty much a "web runtime" as well as really a "user agent" on the web. Unfortunately, Mozilla has not made it easy for others to reuse modules of Firefox (like the Gecko engine, or the SpiderMonkey JS runtime), so there's little other software building on it, and not many other specialty or alternative browsers based on it, other than Tor Browser, that is. But at least it's one serious FLOSS browser we have there. Would have been great if the two companies that abandoned their own browser engines in the last years (Opera and Microsoft) would have opened up their code, as maybe that could have been the basis of good alternatives (well, at least in the Opera case - not sure if what MS had would have ever made a good base for anything, but only the code would be able to tell that story).
If anyone knew anybody at Opera Software, maybe it could happen. On the Microsoft side, who knows? -- 真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!