Case in point, in any of the #Chromium based browsers, you can turn #JavaScript totally on or totally off. There is no option to turn it off for 3rd party domains.
So many sites are #JavaScrippled these days that turning JS all the way off (without a one-click way to turn it on for one site) is too frustrating for anyone to do.
I did see in #Edge today that I can add sites individually to either a separate Yes to JS or No to JS list. I don't recall seeing it until recently. But that's cumbersome.
A lot of us are concerned about #Firefox, about #Thunderbird, and about #Mozilla itself. The trouble is, most of the seeds of Moz's current affliction were planted early on, when the #Google search deal was first signed.
They received an unimaginable amount of money, and being good people, they decided to pour it into becoming the Web's advocate and (later on) the Web's privacy advocate.
They built a large organization, with some very high salaries at the top, based on the revenue they received from a single customer. And then that customer launched its own browser, #Chrome, in part because Firefox was going slower than Google desired because so many resources were going into other projects and because Google's plans were not always aligned with what Mozilla believed was best for the Web.
It was always an unsustainable situation, and when things changed due to cooperation being replaced with coopetition, they started a panicked grasping for other revenue sources.
Now, they've cut actual developers, which makes it even more difficult to keep up with Chrome / #Chromium (and the many browsers derived from it). And because they need to find other revenue sources, they keep looking for ad deals ... which runs crosswise with its core users, who want to block ads.
So, yeah, I don't see a way out that leaves them as anything other than a niche product produced by a small team of mostly volunteers.
I do think _personalization_ as a differentiator is going to flop, if they're thinking about color schemes and superhero logos. A big chunk of what people did with XUL (the former technology, and what made it so customizable) was produce ad blockers, script blockers, embedded-media blockers, pop-up blockers, cookie and tracking blockers, proxy tools, and web development tools (webdev toolbars, xml toolbars, json tools, css and xsl tools, sqlite tools). I just don't think that the ability to make your browser look like the Spiderman t-shirt you bought last week is going to win over a lot of people who are using Chrome/Chomium/Edge/Opera/Vivaldi/Brave/Iron.
Now, maybe if they make it the most secure and private browser right out of the box, with ad blocking, script blocking, and so on, plus make it faster than the Chromium family while consuming less RAM and crashing less often, then adding the ability to dress the browser up as Dora the Explorer will total enough advantages to make a difference.
guix manages to build ungoogled-chromium for GNU and that's hard enough, but for Android it's even trickier. Part of the problem is as usual to disentangle the Play Services dependencies.
For now it is, indeed, unobtainable.
To even almost-succeed you need over 4 GiB virtual memory for the linking, over 10 GiB disk space for the sources alone and over 30 GiB disk space for the build artifacts. If you are a bit starved for CPU or I/O you're looking at s 24+ hour build.
@mangeurdenuage I don't remember #Firefox taking a psrticulsrly long time to compile, but #Chromium did seem to take a while. Nothing compares to the week I once spent waiting for #Ruby to compile on a box with a really slow Celeron, 128MiB of RAM.
@rain there are free code forks of #Firefox, like #ABrowser and it's not too hard to maintain them. I'm not aware of a single fully libre fork of #Chrome. #Chromium and all the forks I know of have freedom issues.
I think you're overstating your case here, to the point of misleading people. AFAIK Riot *itself* isn't non-free, it's desktop apps have a non-free dependency; #Electron. Actually Electron itself isn't non-free either, it also has a non-free dependency; #Chromium. Actually #Chromium itself isn't non-free either, it just has some dependencies whose license situation is unclear.
@alpacaherder My main laptop (6GiB RAM) goes OOM if #Chromium is the only thing open and I have more than about 5 JS-heavy tabs open. On the other hand, I can have a combined total of 150 tabs in 4 windows with #Firefox and #Palemoon and it will run for day without issue.
@jcbrand have you looked into #Ionic? It does essentially the same thing, but without bundling most of a #Chromium browser with your app. I was introduced to it at the recent #Coopathon in Hong Kong. The team I was part of used Ionic (with a #Horizon back-end) to build an MVP for a cross-platform app for use by foodbanks, in 48 hours. https://ionicframework.com/ @shura@z428