renewal of "3rd Party Builds"?

[DN123ABC]

With all the upset and issues in Firefox coming, I am surprised there are not more "3rd Party Builds" like there used to be.

I remember when there were at least a dozen different builds, with various like added in and dislikes left out. There were also people who did performance optimizations, 64 bit optimizations, and different "specialty packages" (like a build with all sorts of tab manipulations, for example).

Right now, the only thing I see is this "Waterfox", which looks interesting.

Is there a reason there are not more of these one-off custom builds?

[DanRaisch]

Possibly too many forks and not enough users of each one. After a while the authors just couldn't justify the effort involved.

[Brummelchen]

all forkes go servo/rust, gecko is dead with v57, dont expect too much. and dont expect support on forkes, maybe not here also.

[DN123ABC]

Possibly too many forks and not enough users of each one. After a while the authors just couldn't justify the effort involved.

But I thought the point was that it was fairly easy for anybody to build these programs, with little effort involved once things were set up and automated.

[DanRaisch]

fairly easy for anybody to build these programs,

But that would not include any time/effort/expertise to make the changes necessary so the "fork" would not end up being simply a clone with a different name. Compiling can be automated but reviewing the source code, identifying areas to be changed and then coding the changes is where the effort comes in.

[DN123ABC]

I have no idea what you're talking about. People used to take the code, and tweak it to customize it, then provide "builds" which others then used. It was as simple as that.

[DanRaisch]

Nothing simple about it in many cases. What do you think is involved in "tweaking" code? For some things it might be as simple as changing switches during the compile but for others ("a build with all sorts of tab manipulations" for instance) it requires knowledge of both the functionality of the original source code and how to program the variant functionality desired. That means a detailed knowledge of both the C++ and Javascript programming languages. The source code for version 55.0.2 is downloadable as a 223MB compressed tar file, just to give you an idea of the amount of data that must be reviewed to find the elements to be changed or places where new code must be added to achieve the desired results.

[malliz]

Spare me from experts like the OP who think things are "simple" but are both unwilling and unable to do them

[DanRaisch]

Or to put it another way: "Everything is easy for the man who doesn't have to do it."

[Frank Lion]

I have no idea what you're talking about. People used to take the code, and tweak it to customize it, then provide "builds" which others then used. It was as simple as that.

What is stopping you from doing exactly that?