Comment by MrAlex94 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrAlex94 | Hacker News Reader

Huh, didn't expect to see this on here again!

Just before I continue I'd like everyone to know I have complete respect for Mozilla and everything they have achieved with Firefox in v57! It really is awesome and a testament to their engineering talent. I used to submit patches to them to get the code base compiled with Intel's C++ compiler and they really are great in communicating with you and even going out of their way to fix obscure issues. I hope to return to submitting more helpful patches and I'm excited to see where Firefox goes from here on out!

Now on to some other points:

* v56 with security patches from v57 is available to test here if anyone is interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/7ed9sf/waterfox_5...

* v56 will stay here with security patches remaining until the end of v59 ESR (I'll be using it to track security issues and patch them).

* In the spirit of YCombinator and HN, my next step after the release of v56 is to go to VCs (or other funding sources) and show that open source projects can be successful business ventures without having to sell out the user. Then hopefully set up a team and create a power-user focused browser based on all the exciting technology out there - (servo would definitely be a fun base).

Of course I'm young and Waterfox was a side-project that I thought made me a real programmer at 16 because I managed to set the 64-bit flags on MSVC (oh dear). I never thought it'd basically become a full time job, get me into prestigious universities and even land me job contracts because of all the years I spent working on it!

If anyone has advice I certainly wouldn't knock it and it would be much appreciated. If you think I'm crazy go ahead and let me know as well haha!

I have a lot of respect for open-source contributors and for OSS project maintainers.

However in order for a fork to be sustainable it means that it needs to be more than a rebranding, otherwise it cannot survive. In particular, if Waterfox is retaining the XUL support, then it's going to get harder and harder to merge upstream Firefox into it, which means a bigger and bigger burden on you.

> my next step after the release of v56 is to go to VCs (or other funding sources) and show that open source projects can be successful business ventures without having to sell out the user

If you succeed, that's going to be great, since it means more funding for open-source.

However the elephant in the room is that you're dependent on Mozilla's developers for continued development. That's much like greenwashing, you know, how some companies claim to be "green" by outsourcing pollution to other countries.

And implicit in this claim is that Mozilla is selling the user out and I don't see how. I understand the reticence for Google being the default search engine, but as a DuckDuckGo user and as an European I can tell you that the difference can be night and day. And it's easy to change the search engine, there's no other browser that makes it easier, desktop or mobile.

Speaking of which, Ecosia might be cool for having trees planted from its revenue, but it kind of has the same problem — being dependent on Bing and thus Microsoft. And I'm going to guess that the results are at least as poor as DDG and the problem for users is that most users will apply the "three strikes you're out" rule, because you don't want to second-guess your search engine on every search, unless you really, really care so much about privacy that you can take that pain and most people don't.

Sorry for the delayed response!

> However in order for a fork to be sustainable it means that it needs to be more than a rebranding, otherwise it cannot survive. In particular, if Waterfox is retaining the XUL support, then it's going to get harder and harder to merge upstream Firefox into it, which means a bigger and bigger burden on you.

I am aware, but the plan is to keep XUL support going for now until the end of ESR 59 (Q1 2019) and by then having an appropriate replacement.

One path was the idea to keep following Firefox except to extend the APIs available (and submit them to Mozilla as well in-case they get would like to merge).

> And implicit in this claim is that Mozilla is selling the user out and I don't see how.

Sorry I didn't mean it to be interpreted that way! Just meant that the general stigma about OSS + business not working together (although the last few years that has been changing).

> Speaking of which, Ecosia might be cool for having trees planted from its revenue, but it kind of has the same problem — being dependent on Bing and thus Microsoft. And I'm going to guess that the results are at least as poor as DDG and the problem for users is that most users will apply the "three strikes you're out" rule, because you don't want to second-guess your search engine on every search, unless you really, really care so much about privacy that you can take that pain and most people don't.

I see. Well I believe it's still worth it and from feedback I've heard, many people don't mind the results as they find Bing results fairly decent and are more than happy to support the project. I don't think it's too unreasonable to not want to have to rely on Google for everything? People are free to use it if they want to though.

It's not unreasonable to want to be free of Google. I went through this process already, which is why I'm a Firefox and DuckDuckGo user and a FastMail customer, having used Google Apps before.

I'm glad to see your attitude, I guess I've read too much between the lines — personally I'm a little annoyed by a double standard I've seen here regarding Firefox, which is somehow held to a much higher standard.

So good luck to you and your project.

On a separate note (Since title says XUL support), how do you plan for Waterfox to keep getting extension updates as, developers will slowly move away from XUL? Would Waterfox support both? If yes what's the point of spending energy on XUL?

I'd like to see it more as a stepping stone for when Mozilla extend their API/we implement similar ones that keep a lot of the old functionality found in the low-level APIs. I've mentioned to the users already it would be unfeasible to do it by myself and this would be a good stepping stone. Hopefully more competition is seen as healthy that everyone can benefit from.

Thanks for all the work you do, Alex!

Will we also ever see quantum-based waterfox?

With him wanting to keep compatibility with XUL, that's basically impossible. Mozilla didn't just deprecate XUL for fun, compatibility with most XUL extensions is now already broken, just because they moved around so much stuff in the browser to achieve Quantum.

If you’re thinking abount funding, you must have a vision of profitability, mass adoption, controlling a platform, or amazing innovation or technology.

What’s your business model?

Currently: - The browser is generates revenue with next to no cost (although employees etc. and that changes, but hopefully a better product means more users) from search engine revenue. They pay quite a bit as well, depend on the search engine some reach between $70-90 CPM. - Although there's no direct way to measure, assuming we can woo the current user base, there's around 50K active a day using the default search engine from what I'm told - Brave, Vivaldi etc manage to keep a decent user-base being based on Blink and a basic feature set.

I speak with the users almost every day, am always transparent with them and some users have been using the browser for years. There always seems to be people looking for 'something else'.

More importantly, I have a voice that gets heard by the users as they're very involved with everything - loyalty which I think is something money can't buy. I have received funding before for a spin-off, so I don't think it's an impossible situation.

Alex, with your confidence some past successes you're already checking the right boxes. I sincerely hope this ends up being a win for you, good luck.

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