Why are there no hard forks of Firefox, Chromium, WebKit, or other browsers? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 23 hours ago by IsaamoonKHGDT_6143@lemmy.zip to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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WebKit and Chromium are hard forks. The former is a fork of KHTML, and the latter is a hard fork of the former. However, in recent years I've only seen soft forks, and as for hard forks, I've only seen one with Pale Moon, which hard forked Gecko and named it Goanna due to disagreements with the direction the Mozilla Project was taking.

But why wouldn't any organization make a hard fork, whether of WebKit, Chromium, Firefox, or another browser not based on the three mentioned above?

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[-] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 12 hours ago

Because there's no good reason to do that that justifies the cost and effort.

Hard forks are generally fairly rare, e.g. you could ask the same about the Linux kernel...