It depends on how fat the fork is. While I haven’t worked on Blink, as a developer who works on other people’s very large codebases, including one from Google, I disagree. There are free tools for build automation. That’ll take care of being up-to-date with upstream in terms of security. Patching things can be done using conflict-minimizing strategies. I used to work at an Android OEM and I’ve seen it done with great success. Thinking of Blink specifically, there have been lots of forks during its WebKit days. If I remember correctly there are also thin forks of Firefox maintained by some open source developers. This is all to support thay I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Especially if most of it is rebranding and restoring some deprecated or deleted functionality. Could be wrong. I think we’ll see, because I have a feeling the cost of maintaining a Chromium fork could be cheaper than patching apps to work well on Firefox. Some corpos might even pitch in. Not to mention that it isn’t at all obvious for how long Firefox will be developed by Mozilla. If they drop the ball at some point we’ll be faced with implementing new features in Firefox vs patching features of Chromium. ⚖️
Maintaining a fork of Chromium would cost millions to do it responsibly.
It depends on how fat the fork is. While I haven’t worked on Blink, as a developer who works on other people’s very large codebases, including one from Google, I disagree. There are free tools for build automation. That’ll take care of being up-to-date with upstream in terms of security. Patching things can be done using conflict-minimizing strategies. I used to work at an Android OEM and I’ve seen it done with great success. Thinking of Blink specifically, there have been lots of forks during its WebKit days. If I remember correctly there are also thin forks of Firefox maintained by some open source developers. This is all to support thay I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Especially if most of it is rebranding and restoring some deprecated or deleted functionality. Could be wrong. I think we’ll see, because I have a feeling the cost of maintaining a Chromium fork could be cheaper than patching apps to work well on Firefox. Some corpos might even pitch in. Not to mention that it isn’t at all obvious for how long Firefox will be developed by Mozilla. If they drop the ball at some point we’ll be faced with implementing new features in Firefox vs patching features of Chromium. ⚖️