Why are there no hard forks of Firefox, Chromium, WebKit, or other browsers? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 day ago by IsaamoonKHGDT_6143@lemmy.zip to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago

A big part of me wishes the browser would just die. Its become a bloated and surveilled mess, entirely controlled by like 2 companies, with 90% of the actual data being javascript spyware. There's almost no browser that can't be fingerprinted and linked to your identity nowadays.

A simple markdown browser for static content (IE like gemini), and native apps with open APIs that can render markdown for dynamic content (IE like most fediverse apps), should be all we need.