Re:Why we Forked Firefox and Not Chromium
by bagacrap on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @04:10PM
(#21829504)
In that case it sounds like the real explanation for forking was "the relevant part of the Firefox codebase had too much tech debt to make contributions so we had to fork our bodges." (No offense wrt tech debt; I know what it's like to be saddled with it and congrats on addressing yours.)
I hope to soon see a cliqz blog post about their project unforking, only spun as an ingenious way of saving memory, improving security and extending reach.
Fair enough, but to be fair to cliqz, we didn't turn down their API proposal due to privacy or security concerns. The old address bar stack was kind of a mess and hard to extend in a sane way.
> Do you think the address bar rewrite will be able to satisfy cliqz's needs and therefore allow them to unfork/go back to being an add-on?
The rewrite makes it technically possible to provide any APIs they'd need. I think we'd consider patches, as we did before, with a better chance of them getting accepted.