In principle, yes. But maintaining a browser is, as a understand it, a LOT of work. So it would take a sizable contingent of volunteers to take on a project like that and keep the forked version current.

The real concern is that browser is a hugely complex piece of software with lots of security, stability, and compatibility concerns. You could fork it, but now you have to constantly ensure you maintain all those things between your fork and the mainline. That will become increasingly difficult as they diverge more and more.

I wonder how vetting of Certificate Authorities will happen. I suppose that if your OS has a sufficient number of trusted CAs, then any browser can rely on those.

But consider this, from Debian's ca-certificates package:

---

This package includes PEM files of CA certificates to allow SSL-based applications to check for the authenticity of SSL connections.

It includes, among others, certificate authorities used by the Debian infrastructure and those shipped with Mozilla's browsers.

Please note that Debian can neither confirm nor deny whether the certificate authorities whose certificates are included in this package have in any way been audited for trustworthiness or RFC 3647 compliance. Full responsibility to assess them belongs to the local system administrator.

---

So as long as Mozilla allows OSes, and presumably other browser forks, to benefit from their CA vetting and monitoring activities ...

There really is a lot that does, or should, go into browser development and maintenance.

Maintaining a fork of a large browser is extremely difficult, especially for coordinating and merging vulnerability fixes.

Forking brave browser [1], or one of other electron based browsers may be a good way forward, as it will allow easy customizability of the ui, and get all the hard to maintain native parts from chromium.

Mozillas browser.html project may be helpful too, but it seems to be a bit too experimental for now.

[1] https://brave.com

No need to fork Brave, we will collaborate on extensions APIs as we scale. We're supporting tested chromium extensions that we curate and fetch from our own S3 (essentially a cache backed by the Chrome Web Store).

For an extension to get support, we need to rank it as in-demand, and then try adding it to Brave to see what missing chrome.* APIs it might need. https://twitter.com/bravesampson is leading this charge, using https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/projects/1 to keep track and engage with developers.

For future extension APIs that go beyond the chromium ones, we won't support XUL, but I'd like to take advantage of our Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon - we forked Electron, because security) React.js-based front end.

In 2Q2017 I'll hope to have more to say about extensions and where we'll go. Interested extension developers are welcome now to join our https://community.brave.com/ discourse. Thanks.

Great to hear you are interested in colaborating on this issues. muon and react based ui is exactly why i was suggesting to use brave as a base for experimentation.

I was not talking about the type of extension that allow to do some common things based on small api created specifically for that.

I am more interested in extensions that get full access to existing react components, and can modify the browser ui in arbitrary ways, e.g. by adding splitview similar to what cloudy has, or adding proper tabs on mobile instead of carousel.

I was chief architect of Mozilla back in the 1998 October roadmap period and onward, when we created XUL. Indeed we wanted powerful extensions, and got them. Problem is they tied Mozilla down for too long, without anyone stepping up to find a way forward that didn't just seem to signal "XUL going away... <angry dev feedback>. Oh never mind; or maybe later".

Brave UX will evolve but slowly and without big changes that break too many users (Australis). Still, we need to be able to change our UX. So if we have powerful extension APIs into that UX, we can't promise never to break extensions that use those APIs in ways that become unsupportable.

All we can do is try to co-evolve nicely and cooperate better. I don't see a silver bullet here, but I do see how Mozilla has burned a lot of add-on developer good will -- and we won't make that mistake at Brave.

Do no other extension developers have this issue?

The EPUBreader extension now notifies you on each relaunch that they need donations to fund a complete rewrite to work in future Firefox versions.

They have, many of them gave up earlier, e.g. https://github.com/estivo/Instantfox/issues/129#issuecomment... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer... http://www.downthemall.net/re-downthemall-and-webextensions-...

There have been a few articles submitted to HN that indicate some extension developers are giving up.

Yes, I've faced similar issues in the past, and had to update my add-on to get it working again.

Now it looks like it will once again break (this time permanently).

I'm in the same boat with other folks. Why use Firefox if it's just a poor man's Chrome clone?

There's already a fork, pale moon.

Their security story is laughable. It won't be multiprocess. It won't have sandboxing. They deleted every test directory from the source tree.

Has pale moon ever moved past their "windows first, foremost (and practically only)" attitude?

I seriously looked at it when australis happened before classic theme restorer was stable, but at the time they seemed to have no interest in anything but desktop windows. I suspect a single-platform browser (especially when the platform is windows) is a non-starter for most people.