Comment on Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox

• KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Says who?

  says me, the one who made the original comment.

  How is “being bulkier” relevant at all? But let’s just go down that route and say that a fork does not necessarily end up in a bulkier product. A dev team could decide to fork, then remove unwanted features from the original project; which is what’s happening with Librewolf as far as I know (e.g. no Pocket bs.)

  now you just have a patched together, disjointed, mess of a browser, on top of a second dev team, who now needs to unpatch it together, re patch it together, and then somehow repackage that. It’s just hopeless. It’s like trying to turn a full size pickup into a small lightweight town car. It’s just not going to happen.

  Finally, let’s remember that both Safari and Chrome have their roots on Konqueror’s KHTML rendering engine. By your metric, we should be saying that they don’t count either; because they’re “(definitely) bulkier forks” of KHTML.

  It’s worth noting that when a fork is building on top of something, there is a point where the original roots are no longer present, or no longer significantly present. It’s like saying that android is linux. Which doesnt stop the charts from displaying android separately to linux, or chromeos for that matter. Even if it did i don’t like the browsers because they’re too bulky so it’s not like it influences my opinion anyway lol.

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  • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    says me, the one who made the original comment.

    Then it’s a weak argument without real support.

    now you just have a patched together, disjointed, mess of a browser, on top of a second dev team, who now needs to unpatch it together, re patch it together, and then somehow repackage that. It’s just hopeless. It’s like trying to turn a full size pickup into a small lightweight town car. It’s just not going to happen.

    You are assuming way too much. As if Apple and Google did all this with KHTML. Which lead us to:

    It’s worth noting that when a fork is building on top of something, there is a point where the original roots are no longer present, or no longer significantly present.

    And what’s your point by saying this? What does it matter if the roots “disappear,” if the product is good enough for competition?

    Even if it did i don’t like the browsers because they’re too bulky so it’s not like it influences my opinion anyway lol.

    What bulky browsers don’t you like?

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    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Then it’s a weak argument without real support.

      I mean yeah, but it’s my opinion on the matter. Even then my original claim is based on the fact of something being an active fork of another browser. Which is still going to line up with my point just fine.

      You are assuming way too much. As if Apple and Google did all this with KHTML. Which lead us to:

      assuming too much if you think modern applications are programmed/designed well. Ultimately no matter what you do, having a product be around for a decade, let alone multiple of them, is going to incur substantial tech debt, and significant feature creep. There is nothing you can do about this. It happens in EVERY industry. In fact the only thing that helps to prevent this is an almost religious and fervent dedicated to pure minimalism when it comes to what your software is doing. Look at something like DWM for example.

      And what’s your point by saying this? What does it matter if the roots “disappear,” if the product is good enough for competition?

      My point is that beyond a certain point, a fork is no longer a fork, but more like a competing piece of software. You see this all the time, look at android or chromeos. Technically “based” on linux, but so far gone that almost nobody considers it linux, i only ever see it mentioned in jokes. Something like prism which is a fork of poly, which is a fork of multimc is starting to get to the point where it’s more of an alternate piece of software, than a direct fork. It’s twice independently maintained, it’s feature set is focused differently.

      If you need more examples why dont we have a look at a COW filesystem? When you make a change to a file, a fork is created, and that change is then saved on that forked path, so now you have multiple different versions, throughout the chronological history of that fork. If you have auto-deletion enabled for old forks, as you should, at some point you will have “orphaned” forks. Which no longer represent in anyway the original file, but exist as an independently separate instance of that file, in a different state. It’s a similar idea, in a different scale, on a different system. There is also a point where it no longer exists as a fork, but as an implementation on top of that original piece of software. How that’s defined is a little more complicated though.

      It’s a little bit philosophical, and semantical, but my point is simple, if your piece of software exists as a fork on top of another piece of software, you don’t get to call yourself “faster” or “leaner” or “more optimized” than the original. Your base browser is still a piece of shit, you’ve taken a bad car, and repainted it, now it looks a little bit better. But it’s still a shit car. You turn a beater into a race car by completely stripping it to bits, at a certain point, it’s not really a fork anymore. In the same way that putting a body on a different frame isn’t the same as the original.

      What bulky browsers don’t you like?

      it’s not like i’ve literally named them or anything.

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      • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        assuming too much if you think modern applications are programmed/designed well. Ultimately no matter what you do, having a product be around for a decade, let alone multiple of them, is going to incur substantial tech debt, and significant feature creep.

        I still don’t understand what this has anything to do with “forking makes a product bulkier,” the original claim. At most, what you’re saying is that the fork will have its own set of tech debt. But that doesn’t make it bulkier by default. Again, a fork of Firefox without the Pocket and “experiments” crap will be lighter.

        My point is that beyond a certain point, a fork is no longer a fork, but more like a competing piece of software.

        Well, yeah, isn’t that the point of forking? I still don’t see why a forked browser being “yet another competing browser” is a bad thing. It’s the opposite!

        if your piece of software exists as a fork on top of another piece of software, you don’t get to call yourself “faster” or “leaner” or “more optimized” than the original.

        I completely disagree with you, and I think I know why you think the way you think. It seems like you assume that all forks:

        • Must always follow the development of the original software. Nope. Not true. It can happen, but not with all forks.
        • Are inherently bulkier because devs add features on top of it. Which again, it’s not true for all forks. Some forks solely exist to remove crap in the original software.

        Your base browser is still a piece of shit, you’ve taken a bad car, and repainted it, now it looks a little bit better. But it’s still a shit car.

        Man, have you never seen TV shows about mechanics taking shitty cars and making them awesome? It appears that you have a narrow way of seeing how software development works. Devs don’t need to take in the whole “shitty project” and be resigned to deal with it. They can take the good parts, and rewrite the bad parts. And that’s just one example.

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