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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[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

Google has a perverse incentive to keep evolving these standards so that other browsers struggle to keep up, and their browsers feel outdated and feature lacking relative to Chrome.

ditto with their office software and filesystems.

[-] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 3 points 17 hours ago

Wouldn't Microsoft be the main perpetrator of this in office software? Google Docs, LibreOffice, etc have to read their .docx files correctly so they keep changing how it works?