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A comment on Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would y... by StillBored on Monday February 14, 2022 @05:28PM (#30339274)
Well a large part of the problem with a fork is that you don't see a lot of random drive by contributions. As a possible contributor myself a couple times, firefox is a development nightmare because it doesn't have a good autoconfig system that lets one download the code and start being productive quickly.

Then like chrome, i'm betting most people can't actually built it in reasonable time on their laptops since it burns a good 64 core machine with 128G of ram for a hour or two. Screw up said configuration, and your in for another rebuild loop. It can take days just to get a working development environment.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would y... by freeopinion on Monday February 14, 2022 @05:44PM (#30339452)
And these are what is holding Firefox back?
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Re:Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would y... by StillBored on Monday February 14, 2022 @06:24PM (#30339976)
No, that is one the problems you have to solve before you can have a successful fork unless you happen to have a few million a year coming in to compete with the main branch.

I've been known to waste a weekend or two a year working on open source projects. These though generally are small things that scratch and itch for fix a bug. I don't work on projects where it takes a month+ of weekends just to get a working dev environment. I don't think that's unusual, you have to pay people to put up with that kind of pain.

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