i despise where Google is going with this. it's a duopoly in the smartphone OS space and we need (for lack of a better analogy, spare the technicals) open-source distros like we have with Linux on desktop.

Graphene is reaching that status for me every day and i'm looking forward to switching to it as my daily driver.

GrapheneOS is pretty neat, https://postmarketos.org/ is also pretty damn polished out of the box these days. I'd argue the "mobile desktop Linux systems" are actually a bit more polished than Graphene, esp. when it comes to default apps (no AOSP abandonware dialer, contacts etc. apps to fight with, it's all just maintained, responsive GNOME/KDE apps)

I want to believe this, but it's hard for me to take this at face value. It's been about 4 years since I've run pmOS, so my experience IS very out of date, but I also have a hard time believing that the experience has radically changed in the meantime.

The short is that yes the GNOME/KDE apps do often look more impressive, but they suffer the same sort of malaise which seems to have infected Linux desktops sometime since Eternal September, and between the sporadic crashing and "this doesn't feel right", it's really hard for me to accept "It's more polished than AOSP!".

pmOS's installation page opening with a warning:

   Make sure you read state of postmarketOS before installing postmarketOS. 

Which leads to a page that opens with:

  The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for everyone, but we are not there yet. Usability and most importantly stability issues need to be worked out first. If you are looking for an OS that is as usable as iOS or Android, this project is currently not for you.

Does not do a lot to dissuade my skepticism. I know you said the apps specifically, but even there, it's like... I dunno.

I tried getting it to run on a Pixel 3a and struggled for hours, eventually gave up (albeit I tried running it with Wayland and Niri which seems less tried-and-true).

PMOS doesn't run with full support and performance on any decent hardware. Would love to be proven wrong.

2nd vote for postmarket. have put it on an old tablet i pulled out of ewaste and it is excellent.

there is clearly no future for android for anyone wanting an open and spyware free platform. its time to invest out efforts elsewhere.

GrapheneOS provides drastically better usability, robustness, overall functional and app compatibility. Privacy and security are also drastically better in AOSP and especially GrapheneOS than that desktop Linux software stack ported to mobile.

All of the default apps in GrapheneOS are being rapidly overhauled or replaced. It wasn't a priority due to the incredibly good open source app ecosystem with many existing alternatives available. There isn't a similarly high quality open source mobile app ecosystem available there.

“rapidly” - how long has it been?

I just wish Graphene had better support for non-Google hardware.

More like OEMs need to take security more seriously and add in the capable hardware and commit to firmware updates long term.

Unless there is a real market advantage to it, they won't. Consumers prove over and over again they are willing to trade security to save a few dollars. Furthermore, why commit to providing hardware and software support for a device to last 5+ years, when ~25% of Americans report damaging their device each year[0]. Most of a device's population will have been replaced in 3 years.

[0]: https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2024/03/15/32248...

They can't due to the shortcomings of the hardware (why develop a hardened os to the grossly insecure hardware) or the vendor (no/slow updates, etc).

Anyone is free to fork, add the desired hardware support and flash.

(that's aside of some Moto flagships in 2027)

they can, but don't want to

OK, I'm confused, explain how they can deliver comparable security on a hardware that does not offer the same capabilities, from a vendor who doesn't provide patches.

You say they can. How?

The hardware capability that GrapheneOS loves to use as a shield to deny support for other devices is the ability to use custom AVB keys. Without custom keys you can't relock the bootloader after installing a custom OS on most phones. The consequences of having an unlocked bootloader are that you are susceptible to an evil maid attack.

This is a real threat, but the reality is that the average person is more likely to be hacked/spied on from the software side, which Graphene would protect you from as effectively as it does on Pixel.

So you're saying that being unable to prove the provenance of the image (whether it's original or not), becoming immediately exposed to downgrade attack, to someone injecting malware to /sys and you being unable to detect it.... That's not a big deal?

:)

Well, go for it, fork and "provide support" to the hardware hostile to non-stock OS, be a hero :)

If Google doesn't smarten up, it will no longer be in control of Android.

Oracle was a mighty powerhouse when it bought MySQL, StarOffice, and more. It lost defacto control of all of them, due to its stupidity. In the world of open source, the tighter you hold on, the less likely you'll retain control.

And yet, here we are, with Google playing games.

Google, a note: there are far more relying upon Android than you, and now there are forced alternative stores in the mix. If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.

They can now fork, and force old Android to have their new fancy pants 'Play' store too.

Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".

Oracle was a mighty powerhouse

It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.

as someone who is associated with “the big guys”, I can tell you this is changing.

Our Oracle license licensing went up so dramatically that the team I work with is moving some very large databases to postgres from Oracle because it doesn’t make financial sense anymore.

now, if we could only stop eating at the trough of Broadcom…

I'm advising a startup doing software for banks, and the overall attitude of their clients is: "We want to get away from the #&I$*@&^#$ Oracle, but we're stuck for now".

Oracle used to be a must-have because it was one of the few products that could handle transactions on a scale of a bank, with all the requirements for backups, redundancy, etc.

A fun anecdote. Back in 2000, I was present at negotiations (as a note-taker) where database vendors were bidding for a project for a factory control system. Vendors submitted benchmark results for various DB sizes up to 40Gb, and Oracle's rep hautingly said something like: "Our minimal size for benchmarks is 80Gb, so here are our results for that size".

And this was a _lot_ for that time. Now? It's so ridiculously tiny that you can host it on a smartwatch. So why would you pay Oracle?

Agreed, I had the same talks around 2000 but at the time it was still very much mssql/db2/oracle for 'real companies'. Yet i'm still surprised how much pushback we get, especially in Asian countries (India) but we do get it, a lot. And we have conversations with financial partners in the US as they advice our VCs; those calls go the same way 'ah, you are using that hipster open source stuff, yeah we don't do that here'.

i so desperately wish we were still in the days of manufacturers making their own OS. It's why I moved to iphone: when the hardware company makes the software and vice-versa the integration is much better and less error-prone/bloated. It never made sense to me for android to be shoehorned into thousands of devices, instead of a fork being made and for thorough OS rework to happen to support the device.

Graphene has been my daily driver for the past year or so. The only thing I miss is the ability to do contactless payments. Otherwise, it's been awesome. I don't run any games nor do I care about any of the AI features. YMMV.

for some people contactless payments are essential for their lifes

Contactless payments do work on Graphene - but only with the Curve app. It also requires the card-holder to be from the UK or EU.

Android has been so thoroughly disappointing through the years. Started as a great open free form alternative to iOS, to becoming the very thing it sought to combat.

If Android wants to be the inferior not-open-source mobile OS, why would I not just buy an iPhone instead then?

It’s closed too, sure, but at least it’s more consistent.

The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.

There's a non-zero chance that three-letter agencies are lobbying for at least some of this.

GrapheneOS does not even register on Google scale! It does not even manufacture its own devices!

Bigger problem is HarmonyOS and similar devices, compatible with Android. Opensource threat from china!

And no NSA backdoors or honeypots!

Sure, let's just trade the NSA for the CCP, no issues there.

One poses an active, unchecked threat to the constitutional rights of US citizens, has a chartered mission to subvert and undermine the very field of cryptography itself - going so far as to bribe standards bodies to adopt backdoored algorithms (using taxpayer funds to do so), has plotted to mass-violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens and lie about it to the national legislature (which they carried out successfully, committing perjury in the process and facing zero consequences for it), secretly cooperates with the criminal justice system via parallel construction to target nonviolent, law-abiding political activists with fabricated criminal charges as retaliation for politically disfavored speech, while the other is about 6500 miles away, has negligible presence in / reach into the US, and is generally unconcerned with the domestic political activities of US citizens.

It's not a regret. Android would never have been popular in the first place if it had not been open source. If phone makers had been able to anticipate how much the demons at Google would be able to lock down the Android then they would never had used the OS back in ~2009.

That’s possible (never underestimate the bad decision-making of phone makers), but what would they have done instead? Windows Mobile 6 was the only licensable alternative, but it was a known quantity and obviously a generation behind Android and iOS.

Maemo.

Windows Phone was pretty nice, too bad Microsoft didn't follow their DOS and Windows strategy of getting it preinstalled on every consumer PC sold. There was really only the Nokia Lumia line that I recall, but everyone I knew who had one loved it.

Windows Phone 7 didn’t ship until 2 years after Android. 2 more years later Windows Phone 8 was released and it was a legitimate option but just too late.

Pre-7 was just not an operating system that anyone except the geekiest of geeks wanted to use.

Yeah I guess Apple set too high a bar and MS was caught flatfooted (again) and was too far behind.

There were several credible competitors: WebOS, Symbian, Maemo/MeeGo, Palm OS 6, and of course Windows Mobile. But they required cooperating with a single vendor and/or a lot of work to adapt.

Android won because it was available "right now" and easy to hack. Vendors could get a BSP (Board Support Package) from a chip manufacturer, slap Android userspace on top of it, and ship a phone within half a year. It was a glorious mess for a while.

Google then slowly tightened the reins and made the ecosystem more ordered.

Not even wearing rose tinted glasses right now, for having daily driven them back in the days, maemo and then WebOS had touch ergonomics and multitasking abilities which took Android/iOS decades to incompletely mimic. Maemo/Nokia N900's design principle seems to have been "let's provide the user with desktop-level productivity tools, and shrink the desktop into their pocket", the package was massive for the era's standards, but is tiny for today's, and those dumb-down/low density ergonomics we have now give us less capabilities for more screen estate and weight (even something like an iPod pro is a "dumb" content consumption device in comparison). WebOS on the other hand was not about "producing/delivering on the go" so much as it was about getting your digital must haves (booking an appointment, updating a contact details, moving a meeting, ...) done and out of the way with just a couple key presses and finger flips as so distract as little as possible from the present. Only some advanced Android launchers get close, but it's never the focused, well polished and distraction-free experience it was back then (and for the same reason, Android/iOS are addictive content delivery vehicules meant to sink your eyeballs and time as to sell you stuff or collect and merchandise your data).

I'm interested and wishing to see a future mobile OS that does not pander to the "attention economy" like Android/iOS are, but with billions now addicted and trapped by it, I'm realistic that it won't be an overnight success.

Sailfish OS exists as a continuation of the Maemo project, even shipped their own phone recently.

I don't think this is actually true. Phone makers seem happy to have the platform locked down even further. They're putting even more roadblocks, as evidenced by most of them making bootloaders unlockable.

They're happy that it is locked down. They're not happy that they're not the ones doing the locking down.

This is what lots of people forget.

Android is not a Linux desktop or server distro. It is not about you getting to put what you want on the hardware you bought for free.

Operating systems are hellaciously expensive to maintain and that only gets worse in markets with rapid hardware improvements, as the smartphone market was up until maybe the late 2010s. Google is not a charity. SV did not come into national prominence for making investors $0. There is no money in giving maybe one in one-hundred smartphone users (and that's being generous) a bunch of code, for free, so that they can put it on their gizmo and talk to their nerd friends at their hacker meetup.

When they pitched Android as "open", they meant that carriers and device makers could load it up with all of the revenue-enhancing bloat that they wanted. In return, Google got a device that would let them hoover up all of the data they could ever want in order to build better ad service profiles for those using the devices. That is, after all, their business.

For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder. At some point, though, the free stuff turned into a revenue opportunity that had to be exploited. And so, it will be.

Especially Android, which is an ever-growing pile of spaghetti almost as bad as Windows.

I'd say Android is already worse. It uses more ram and resources to run smoothly than Windows does. Especially now that Microsoft is actively trying to speed up Windows 11 and make it use less resources.

Haha and not true. You would need to provide objectively more than your experience. And for an example clicking on Android Contacts would be instant vs load time in Windows 11 (the one i have).

Any discussion about this is shut down. I just read an article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckqxvy98x578o In the UK according to the BBC, politicians are pressing Samsung and apple to make stolen phones bricks. Samsung in response said that they have implemented several security features for this purpose. I think Samsung considers removing OEM unlocking a security feature according to the bootloader unlock hall of shame.

Intel used to do the same with their anti theft technology aka Intel theft deterrent on their classmate PCs, so students had to enter unlock codes from an IT admin every 3 months or every say 200 boots to prevent the computer from being locked at the bios level preventing it from booting an OS, and there was an update which disabled that functionality permanently. And you would be warned when you had around 50 boots left to get the unlock code.

Normally you have to unlock the phone before unlocking the bootloader, and that is the protection.

I would think they are guessing most people's passwords are weak or something. Like a screen pattern is weak, can be broken in just 300k attempts or maybe less because people use the same patterns and people can't be bothered to use passphrases.

Making the bootloaders unlockable is a good thing.

No, everyone knew what they were getting into with Android. It wasn't taken lightly by the power users of the time either. I still have a phone somewhere with Ubuntu Touch on it. I really was hoping that would be my phone OS by now. Not that Canonical isn't capable of similar, but that it would bring about acceptance of Linux phones.

I think we're all more surprised by how long it took for Google to make these bad moves. For a period of time in the 2010s we actually started thinking maybe Google was alright.

It wasn't Canonical's limitation. Mozilla can confirm: the barriers to enter the phone manufacturing market are immense. Samsung, Ericsson, Sony, LG, etc, all had solid control of the deals with the network operators worldwide. It's a highly regulated market, you can't get in without Verizon, att, Vodafone etc to let you in. Canonical, Open Moko, Mozilla... Didn't have the strength to push through. Google and Apple did.

It's operators that have grips on manufacturers. Phone OEMs don't make any without the sales networks and financing structures of cellular carriers.

This is to extent that some carriers still insist that they design phones and phone manufacturers are just factories. People need to understand that power dynamic before blaming those "mere factories" for not making Linux phones.

There has to be like an SVP of SoandSo Wireless pushing like three pillar approach of iOS, Android and Linux. Otherwise the pitch decks for any alternative phones just go straight to trash(or into a motorized shredder if it is still physical).

It's operators that have grips on manufacturers

Only in the USA.

Worst case we can buy phones and physically replace their Application Processors with liberated ones.

Phone manufacturers had Symbian which became open source

And was burned to the ground by a trojan horse from microsoft.

Google is also seriously dropping the ball in terms of security. The CVE-2026-43499 root LPE (aka ghostlock) is still unpatched across all Pixel devices, on the latest """security""" update, despite weaponized exploits being public for months.

I just ran https://github.com/CakesTwix/Android-CVE-2026-43499 on my Pixel 9 Pro and it seems to have been patched. I did get a system update not long ago, though.

Pixels used to have far better updates than any other Android devices but they stopped improving it years ago. It should have kept improving because it's not at all adequate. They need to be able to release OS updates more than once per month and it shouldn't take months for patches to make it into the OS. It currently takes them at least around 2 months to get even the most urgent patches into the OS. They could fix emergency calls being broken if the patch was made around 3 weeks before an OS release, but that's about as quick as they can go. It's not at all adequate for security and is a complete joke compared to Chromium's release cycle. They can get an emergency Chrome update released within a couple days. They should at least be able to do it for the Pixel OS in a week.

GrapheneOS is often around 4 to 6 months ahead on merging Linux kernel LTS releases. We used to handle this ourselves but switched to the Android GKI LTS branch maintained by Greg KH. Unfortunately, it was often struggling to keep up even before the absolutely massive increase in Linux kernel security patches this year. AI models have rapidly accelerated vulnerability discovery and it's an ongoing crisis for the Linux kernel. We want to be on the latest LTS revision within days and want to be using the latest LTS branch within months of it being released. We're not at all happy with how Android is handling things and plan to fix that ourselves. We'll get things back to how they should be.

We also ship all the AOSP userspace patches months before Pixels due to shipping all of the security preview patches as soon as possible. There are sometimes minor regressions but we find and fix them ourselves downstream. The security preview system has a terrible design especially considering that frontier AI models can reverse engineer the patches. There should at least only be a source embargo for around 24 to 72 hours rather than pretending as if it can work with the patches available 2 to 6 months in advance.

I'd love to use GrapheneOS on less secure devices, just for the sake of Google autonomy rather than privacy.

GrapheneOS's goal is privacy for the world and that's achieved through secure devices. You can get a phone specifically for GrapheneOS just as you choose a new device when you're buying a new one. Soon there will be two different phone brands which you can install it on. There's already an estimated 500,000 users with Pixel exclusivity.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117249893761790371

GrapheneOS's goal is privacy for the world and that's achieved through secure devices.

Perfect is the enemy of good. What's better for privacy, an old but inexpensive smartphone running Android 11, or the same smartphone running an up-to-date third-party rebuild of Android 16 or newer with as many privacy-improving bells and whistles as the hardware can support?

Soon there will be two different phone brands which you can install it on.

...will they be available in my country (Brazil)? I don't think I've ever seen a Google Pixel phone in person.

Are all of these unsuitable [0]?

Not sure if you have any experience with eBay. I looked it up and people had problems selling to Brazil [1] but there are various listings that offer to ship. So maybe not a great option.

KaBuM!, Intec Store, Performance Solutions all charge significantly more with a 10a being more than double than from Google.

Motorola officially sells the Signature in Brazil [2] at the same price or cheaper than in the UK. It will be supported by GrapheneOS in 2027 on the 2027 version. From then on, hopefully Qualcomm brings MTE to the non-flagship chips and Motorola and GrapheneOS support budget or midrange devices.

perfect is the enemy of good

I don't consider that relevant when users deserve ≥ security than an iPhone. GrapheneOS is not purpose-built to avoid big-tech's services although it does that more completely than any other alternative mobile operating system, the focus is privacy.

GrapheneOS on the state of privacy and security for their ethos: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2044440381803069778

[0] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=google+pixel+9

[1] https://reddit.com/r/Ebay/comments/1d92pyn/

https://community.ebay.com/forum/shipping-57923/topic/diffic...

[2] https://www.motorola.com.br/smartphone-motorola-signature/p?...

What's better for privacy, an old but inexpensive smartphone running Android 11, or the same smartphone running an up-to-date third-party rebuild of Android 16 or newer

I see your point, but it would be very misleading, since the phone would still have a lot of known holes. Only the OS would get updated, typically not the drivers, driver firmware, possibly not the kernel. The phone would still be easily compromised through all the known RCEs. So you tie up non-profit projects in a lot of extra work to get an improvement that does not really matter.

This is a mess created by the OEMs and they will continue to create this mess until people will stop buying from OEMs that only give lip service to security updates (roll out Android Security Bulletins to show a high patch level, while in reality the phone the phone has many known CVEs).

Same thing here, I use Graphene for the sake of user control. All the security features and hardening of the Pixel phones and of the OS are good to have, but they not the main reason.

GrapheneOS will be available on Motorola devices meeting all of our requirements for updates and security features in 2027. It will be starting out on a high end flagship and expanding down from there as devices improve to meet our requirements. We aren't going to support devices unable to provide a reasonable level of security.

Why? Just release Graphene without those security requirements. It must be a user's choice and responsibility. You sound exactly the people you fight against.

You understand that just having a firewall is a big step for security?

You can dot his but it won't be Graphene but something else, like LineageOS. As long as Graphene's selling point is extreme privacy and not just more privacy, it will be this way.

There is no such thing as extreme privacy; it isn't something any phone can provide, especially if you are going to rely on third party software and services like email and instant messengers where the likes of Google and Facebook are dominant players. Even behind a VPN, Vanadium is fingerprintable by commercial trackers like fingerprint.com. Short of disabling Javascript, browsers leak enough information to basically follow anyone around the internet.

The thread states that Google is putting out patches that affect other Android vendors too.

They're not treating GrapheneOS very differently from other vendors, except that Graphene isn't relevant enough to sign a contract with because they don't make phones (or money, really).

Google should be putting out the code and patches like they used to, but the constant badgering of Google on this issue feels off. I don't see anyone complaining that Samsung isn't supporting their security-focused fork enough, or complain that Apple is delaying the bootloader unlock process by a day.

Despite their very worst, selfish intentions, Google is the very best vendor of commercial open source software. While Google's open source project collapses, there's plenty of space for other vendors to step in.

We should bemoan Google's fall from grace, but only because they're on the way to becoming just as bad as every vendor but Librem if they keep this up another decade.

Google

Can we just stop saying "Google" as if it's same faceless org? No, it's not Google, one or two asshole execs are behind this policy.

I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.

  > Google simply regrets android being open source.

Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source. With all the work from outside Google. The same is true chrome.

But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand

So we move. We force their hand

What do you have in mind?

We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.

oh yes sure. just like we can shift the population into installing Debian into their machines so we also deter M$ and Apple abuse /s

We did it before. Thanks to Firefox we broke the IE6 monopoly even on Windows.

How did that happen, anyway? Tabs? What's the next killer feature after tabs? Maybe sync?

Adblock, I would have thought. And Google can't compete in this space, by their very nature.

This is the message that Firefox needs to push: Hate ads? Use Firefox.

Well, it is time to realise that GPL and similar variants, are better in the long term. I like MIT too, but GPL worked so much better for the linux kernel. Google and others abuse the ecosystem of open source contributors here.

You mean the Linux kernel that the GrapheneOS project has to request every update for and then has to wait up to weeks to get a Google Drive link?

The GPL is worth nothing if nobody is enforcing it aggressively.

Could you quote the part of the GPL that they're not adhering to (which you seem to be implying), in this situation?

Donate to Ladybird https://ladybird.org/

They have their own problems. They may be "open source", but they don't accept contributions. I'm skeptical it will ever become more than a hobby project.

Is not accepting contributions the only/biggest issue you have with the project? I'm honestly becoming more and more okay with the "cathedral" style of open source. Depending on the project, catering to "the community" can lead a loss of focus, lack of a cohesive "vision" or scope, and just generally trying to be everything to everyone without the resources to maintain a giant beast.

With something like a browser (engine), I'm totally okay with someone saying "I'm an expert and I'm trying something with my own vision/priorities. I don't want input from random people that I have to spend time evaluating."

It's on BSD license, Google or someone else can again Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

That is not possible. Google, or anyone else, can make a fork of the project. But they can't take away the original from the commons.

Handing even a slight control over the web to an all-out white replacement theorist is somehow even worse than the status quo. Ladybird is run by the kind of person I'd never want to financially contribute to.

- https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19693500085383702... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250920103645/https://twitter.c...)

- https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/18745182953508374... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250101180923/https://twitter.c...)

- https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19712877382689095... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250925185636/https://twitter.c...)

- https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19671787088520972... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914104847/https://twitter.c...)

I don't think he said anything factually incorrect though?

Where in those comments is the "white replacement theorist"?

White males are actively discriminated against

The words are unambiguous and not up for debate.

I'm reading your comment on Firefox. You can probably read mine and write a reply on it too!

LOL "start" using Firefox. I've been using Firefox for half a decade. There's zero I miss about Chrome.

LOL half a decade.

I've been using it for more than 20 years.

I don't know why either of use loled though

LOL, I've been using it since Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold, via Mozilla M3 (SeaMonkey tech preview), Phoenix, Firebird, and then finally Firefox :D

Me too. Too bad I had to abandon it because Mozilla seem more focused on making AI-nonsense than a browser nowadays. No, Firefox, you don’t need AI features. You do need a better UI. You do need smoother scrolling. You do need privacy focus (which automatically means you do not need AI features). You do need to feel like you belong on the platform you’re installed on and not wish everything were Linux. You do need better designers that understand UX is not just “add controls everywhere”.

Huh? What ai features? Firefox seems largely the same as it did a few years ago.

I’m not doubting they added some ai junk somewhere. But whatever they did seems very easy to ignore.

I've been using it since the time it was called Netscape Navigator. Just sayin'

Shit, remember Mosaic? Gopher?

Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.

If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.

But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.

But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does.

Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.

Forks are giving up on mv2 because it's not as important as the people online say it is. If mv2 was what would cause a browser to gain market share they would keep maintaining it, but if the market is not rewarding browsers with mv2 then it does not make sense to maintain.

Seriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.

Chrome attained its user base not by merit but by paying third party Windows installers to bundle it.

This is complete nonsense, it's a post hoc copium where you're trying to dishonestly rewrite history from your personal hatered.

Chrome was better than competition pretty much all its lifetime and there's plenty of historic articles to prove it, no matter how much your emotions refuse to accept the history.

You can argue the merits of a product without personally attacking people.

The only personal insult to everyone here is such blatant lying and rewriting of history. And it's telling about the bottom barrel culture of the internet that you're angrier about having someone called out as a liar they are instead of actual lies.

We were there and we didn't install Chrome via some made up toolbar installer, but because it was significantly better than what Mozilla and Internet Explorer offered.

but perhaps we dont need several gigabytes compressed code to have a browser. perhaps what google have been doing is an utter abomination?

This is cool until Google doesn't load in your free browser.

Then, you use this: https://duckduckgo.com/

Actually, use it now.

This. Also, use OSM for maps and run your own SMTP server, if you can. Nobody should need Google.

Sadly, the to me most important parts of Maps are live navigation and live traffic status. I'm assuming you can't get those with osm (yet).

The actual maps are much better in osm than in Google.

This works for nerds, but not for grandma who can't even describe what she's doing without using the word "google".

The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.

Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.

Windows only isn't still 90% market share because of Wine, then Proton.

Neither Wine nor Proton run on Windows. Building Android emulators for Linux: Worth your time. Building Android knockoffs which claim to remove the Google from Google's operating system? Foolishness.

ReactOS was also a good idea.

Valve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.

The developer effort is not wasted because it's open source. Anyone can fork it at any time. None of it can be thrown away from humanity, wasting it.

The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation. Each phone manufacture wants to build their own experience and building on top of AOSP is how they do so.

Is it really a losing game? Building a new OS from scratch is not worth it. Why throw away an entire app catalog for your device? Consumers want access to existing app catalogs when buying a phone. If anything is a losing game it's building a new mobile operating system over forking Android as a base.

It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify building a new one from scratch.

AI generating code changes the game significantly, though there are issues with that. A new OS would have taken several millions and multiple teams, but can now be done for far less. The problem is hardware to run it on. Who'd pay $2,000 for a shittier phone with less features when a $500 used one with GrapheneOS is right there? So the market, (in)efficiently, hasn't come up with a new phone OS. Not because it isn't warranted, but because the free market isn't a perfect system.

You mean proprietary AI can do that, running on big corp servers.

What proprietary AI running on big corp servers was 6 months ago is now runnable on owned bare metal compute, and there's no reason to believe this trajectory won't continue for the foreseeable future.

The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.

No, the reason is that AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays.

AOSP apps were abandonned around Android 11, you can't just keep them as is for real users, it looks amateur.

Even the open-source ROMs came to the same conclusion eventually and developed their own.

the reason is that AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays

No one was using those apps so it didn't make sense to spend time on them.

So.. The market didn't actually support differentiation?

The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.

This is what empire-building middle managers say to rationalize their boondoggles, but in actual fact most customers can't even tell the difference between two different vendors' Android skins, definitely can't tell the difference before they buy one, and the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs like the camera or performance.

The hardware company's idiosyncratic fork of the software is irrelevant at best and annoyingly irregular in the common case.

wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.

It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.

Or go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.

The biggest mistake the web ever made was leaving it up to to the website to choose how content renders.

It should be the users choice how their browser renders, it's their damn browser. Instead, browsers are built to follow standards that mostly favor the developers preferences above those of the person who actually own the device rendering it.

The modern web is user hostile by design.

If a web browser allows images, then the website always has full control over how content renders. It's the default. HTML and related standards are trying to persuade developers to cede some of that control in the name of accessibility, user choice, searchability, device compatibility etc. that all-image websites lack. But this can only succeed if the developers still can do everything they want to. If they can't, then they'll fall back to images and everyone loses.

Users want an app platform that 1) works on every device, 2) is 1-click (no app installation / management, click a link and go), and 3) has advanced capabilities which let them easily do the task at hand.

Think "an interactive visualisation for choosing a seat when buying a concert ticket." That's not a "traditional" webpage, should work on whatever device the user is currently on (so native is unsuitable), and shouldn't require the user to install anything.

People clearly want web pages to be exactly this; we're on iteration #3 of the idea now. Iterations 1 and 2 were Java Applets and Flash, not necessarily in that order, and they were massively popular despite their shortcomings. Clearly, if we somehow deprecated the web as it is now (which is an utterly ridiculous idea, which makes me really curious what comments like yours are exactly trying to achieve here), as long as we keep it an open standard, users will choose browsers which offer this capability in some form. We should appreciate that the current iteration is an open standard which anybody is free to implement, instead of some proprietary blob that you need to license from Oracle or Adobe.

Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).

The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.

Apple can create a clone for their wall-garden when they want to catch up to the times.

This kills accessibility. You wouldn't even be able to select text unless the page implemented that feature itself. Screen readers would have nothing to work with. No high-contrast mode, no translation, no changing the font size, no reader mode........

Unfortunately none of the things you listed are what page vendors want you to have. They'd very much prefer you didn't. On the web, they're just too hard to prevent, so most don't bother.

I think that must be false. Serving the page as a static image was possible from the early days of the web, but vendors (mostly!) moved away from that as features like web fonts became available. I guess Flash was the big remaining exception. And remember Java applets? But even now as rendering to a canvas is possible, enabling animation and interactivity without necessarily including accessibility, websites are mostly not doing that. Accessibility is good for business. And sometimes it's legally required.

Software accessibility is bad for business - that's why it has to be legally mandated. There's no firm difference between "accessible", particularly to screen readers, and "amenable to end-user automation", and the latter is anathema to businesses.

As for the styling and fonts - it's all a bunch of low-key trade-offs here. The businesses want to exercise total control over the end-user experience, for sales/marketing and branding reasons. At the same time, going off the beaten path quickly makes development costs skyrocket.

Flash was a good choice back when all visitors were using a PC and there were like 3 different screen resolutions to choose from. Once laptops gained popularity, this started to shift, then pre-iPhone mobile briefly became consideration, and Flash stopped being sufficient; then iPhone came out, killed Flash, and started an era where every visitor has a different screen than the previous one. "Responsible web" became the cheapest option, and you can see its evolution as a trajectory towards giving more and more control over experience to developers, and less and less to the users.

Not denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.

Can anyone actually share 1 - 3 examples where a hard fork of a living os project has actually succeeded ?

If AMZN couldnt make their fire whatever it was called fork of Android really grow, what chance has the community got ?

OwnCloud -> Nextcloud, OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, Elasicsearch -> OpenSearch, privacyIDEA -> eduMFA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice

Difficulties maintaining a sufficient number of contributors to keep the project viable have persisted for several years. In January 2015, the project reported a lack of active developers and code contributions.[49] There have been continual problems providing timely fixes to security vulnerabilities since 2015.[50][51][52][53] In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues.[54][55][56]

Sounds like AOO is effectively dead, so this example is a fail to my challenge.

OpenSearch & ElasticSearch both seem alive, as well as OC & NC.

Neither https://github.com/privacyidea/privacyidea or https://github.com/eduMFA/eduMFA say either is a fork of the other.

I think you failed to share 3, 2 seem to valid examples of my challenge but the other 2 are questionable.

386BSD -> FreeBSD

NetBSD -> OpenBSD

To some extent I would argue that Linux is a spiritual fork of Minix and Unix.

But I think it’s also worth pointing out that these were in vastly different times where a single person or a small group of people could maintain an OS. An OS or browser is vastly more complex now.

But they won't learn that on their own

I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.

I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.

I think this is true, but I also believe the original people who built it are not the people in charge now.

We haven't had antitrust enforcement for 25 years. It's high time we did.

Google needs to be broken up.

MS was never broken up.

Its still crazy to me that a judge effectively said "yes you're a monopoly, but it's too hard to break you up so we won't bother"... I'm being glib, but only slightly.

Start with Apple which actually has a monopoly on mobile devices in USA and let's go from there then.

You do care about the market and aren't just angry because a corp doesn't listen to your orders, right? RIGHT?

You would have a heck of a job convincing a court that 60% domestic market share in a two competitor market constitutes a monopoly.

Then how is Google a monopoly at 40%?

Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.

So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.

Most successful open source projects have devs being paid by big corporations, including Linux itself, which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.

Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.

Google will do just fine.

I don’t get the hate for business licenses.

I’ve seen many open source contributors deflated because they wanted to share their code/solutions with other individuals and the world to learn from only to have their work sold as a service by a big cloud vendor without seeing something back for it. Or maybe even getting more work back to support the cloud vendor for free.

So I’m not surprised at all that licenses that allow commercial use up to a point and above that require seperate license or contributions back. It is still open source in a lot of ways. Can still be part of other open source distributions that themselves make no profit etc. And only companies that are more than able to pay must pay something.

It's a good idea if it actually works. Are enough commercial users paying up so that these projects get some serious funding?

If companies avoid using software governed by such licenses then the overall impact is negative in my opinion, because it will lead to competing and diverging clean room clones that just split the community and the ecosystem.

which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.

Correlation is not causation.

What I lived through, was Linux taking off like a juggernaut, and IBM embracing it as a result. Large corps came along for the ride, they didn't drive it and at best paid for some gas.

DEVs being paid is simply what it is. The entire scsi/sata stack was originally re-authored by 3ware for example.

Why?

To sell stuff, and the guy was an advocate too.

It's always been this way, under the great wonder of the GPL, blessed be it.

It was so relevant that even Wikipedia discusses this, we were using Solaris, HP-UX and Aix for actual production deployments. Linux was our MP3 server.

Meanwhile every startup in SV was using Linux, Facebook was using Linux, Google, and everyone in between. This was early 2000. It had immense momentum without big boys like IBM coming in (and IBM was massive compared to Google or Facebook of that day).

Google learned that it's exactly not in in their best interest when they lost their court case against Epic a few years ago which is why they are shifting focus away from open source and moving towards Apple's walled garden approach. If they had locked down their platform similarly as Apple did, Epic would probably have lost it's case for similar reasons.

Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.

Every time the HN crowd rediscovers that companies make business strategy choices rather than immutable principled philosophical decisions, the angst and dismay are really something.

When Android launched, making it open source (ish) was the right competitive decision. It got phone makers and carriers on board and accelerated the ecosystem’s development. Today it being open source (kinda) is a met negative for Google. So, yeah, they’re changing that.

Well-run companies aren’t zealots. They adapt to changing conditions. If a company’s actions happen to align with your personal preferences today, it doesn’t mean you’ve found a lifelong philosophical soulmate. Ditto if a company’s actions run counter to what you want today. Either can and will change, and there’s nothing morally concerning either way.

companies aren't human beings with morals.

companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.

but unfortunately a lot of people wanna see the world as they wish it to be, not the way it is.

And if I asked people to name companies which retain a good public perception of being not entirely profit driven, the ones that would most likely come to mind are ones like Costco, where there's someone who is setting the tone and not leaving it to the committee of free market/investors to decide the fate of the company. I wonder if there are parallels here to other similar economic models, hmm...

Not every business owner is a profit obsessed psycho. Most multinational CEOs are but you can find good people at every level. The "only exist to make money" thing starts when you let in shareholders, but a company can stay ethical as long as they put up strong barriers before taking outside investment.

A lot of people get the wrong impression from reading Dodge Brothers and think companies are legally required to put profit first. What really happened is Friedman and Reagan planted the idea of shareholder supremacy, convinced schools to teach it and now generations of business majors think it's a sacred truth they have to enforce anywhere they go. Never let a MBA take over.

companies aren't human beings with morals.

Companies are not sentient beings in themselves: they are made up of human beings with wills. If the human being(s) make moral choices the result will be companies that do moral actions.

companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.

That is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

There are others:

* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III

* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics

Or going back a few decades:

In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”

* https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history...

American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.

* https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol9/iss1/2/

or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.

With the way Firefox is heading, that might not be the best idea. Nowadays Mozilla seem more focused on riding the AI-hype wave than actually making an excellent browser people want to actually use.

It's not really a "both sides" thing given the scale difference between what Google is up to and that.

No one is forcing Mozilla’s hand (afaik) and no one is actually thinking “if Firefox had a chatbot that might convince me to move over”. Youre right that it is not a “both sides” thing, its a “Mozilla thing”. Through and through.

Some people are thinking "Firefox doesn't have a chatbot so I'll use chrome" though

Really? How many people can that possibly be, and how many of those would a reasonably sane developer actually want?

If your competition is attracting the worst kind of users, do you really want to get in their way?

Yes you want more users not less. This is business 101. Even business 000. Customers good.

It is sad to see Firefox riding various hype trains over the years, but I can't really blame them. Miss the wrong train, and you fall behind and may not be able to catch up. Miss the train to nowhere, and you are only wasting resources.

As for the excellent browser that people want, that raises the question of what people want. There are likely as many answers as people.

Yeah. It’s a tough balance to achieve but that’s the situation we’re in right now so Mozilla really ought to step up (and I totally wish they would).

My biggest pain point at the moment (entirely subjective mind you) is not even the AI nonsense, but how disjointed and alien the Firefox UX and general feel is to Apple platforms (what I use, at the moment). I don’t want Firefox to mirror Safari 1:1 but I do want the Firefox UI and UX to feel polished, well thought out and thoroughly in line with system HIG specs—given that I spend a lot of time in a browser, it shouldn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land amidst my other desktop applications.

Aggressive UI improvements would go a long way to restore some faith in the incandescent fox‘ mission—at least for me.

What aspects feel foreign on macOS? The Firefox preferences for sure. Anything else?

Tab close buttons are on the right (windows style) instead of on the left (macOS style), for one.

I mean, it’s the same on every browser except Safari

Not only that, but general colours are system-like but offputtingly different (dark theme is different from Mac dark theme just enough to be unsettling). Spacing (padding, margins, etc) is uneven on a lot of options, toggles and fields. Swipe back/forth being a simple arrow on the corner of the screen instead of full page swipe (like Safari) in the year of our lord 2026 is a complete disgrace (yes, chrome does this too, yes chrome also sucks). Press CMD+F and just watch as a search bar that hasn’t been updated to modern visuals in about 20 years pops up at the bottom. Pretty much everything around Firefox feels like a random collection of Windows and Linux behavioural patterns mashed together like a digital Frankenstein monster.

And despite what many people here like to think: these things matter. UX improvements compound exponentially, and so do UX problems. Firefox has an opportunity here to be a first-class citizen on every OS it runs on. It has the opportunity to be the browser that respects your OS choices no matter what, but alas, Firefox seems rather content carrying its “ah yeah I remember using it back in ‘06” reputation.

Firefox is not a bad browser by any means, but it feels like Firefox is the browser equivalent of the “how do you do fellow kids” meme. An out-of-time experience pretending to blend in under the guise of “AI”.

Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy but using work provided mac with firefox for 15 years I never noticed UI being disjointed from the system any more than Chrome.

Is Firefox or Mozilla perfect? Heck no. But we're not comparing Mozilla against pre-IBM Red Hat or Ben & Jerry's or whatever your concept of the ideal corporate citizen is. We're comparing Mozilla against Google. That's a very low bar that Mozilla clears with ease, especially if you're criteria includes shoving AI down your throat.

Firefox is no longer part of most browser compatibility matrices, what ease?

Firefox is no longer part of most browser compatibility matrices, what ease?

What would be the point of a browser compatibility matrix then?

Mozilla gets 100M a year from Google ??? No fucking way they are biting the hand that feeds.

Closer to 500M, actually.

~$585 million in 2024 (86% of total revenue) https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...

Mentioned as "one customer" in the PDF.

Lol yeah off by a factor of 6 but yeah no fucking way still stands

Edit: spelling