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I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower.

I think you can dislike the general move to a service like GitHub instead of GitLab (or something else). But I think we all benefit from the fact that Firefox's development continues and that we have a competing engine on the market.

It's good that they fixed one of the major tech debt for contributing to firefox. When I tried a few years ago, mercurial took multiple hours to clone, and I already had to use the unofficial git support in order to have things working before the end of the day.

Their docs was also a mess back then and made me recompile everything even if it wasnt needed.

(I work at Mozilla, but not on the VCS tooling, or this transition)

To give a bit of additional context here, since the link doesn't have any:

The Firefox code has indeed recently moved from having its canonical home on mercurial at hg.mozilla.org to GitHub. This only affects the code; bugzilla is still being used for issue tracking, phabricator for code review and landing, and our taskcluster system for CI.

In the short term the mercurial servers still exist, and are synced from GitHub. That allows automated systems to transfer to the git backend over time rather than all at once. Mercurial is also still being used for the "try" repository (where you push to run CI on WIP patches), although it's increasingly behind an abstraction layer; that will also migrate later.

For people familiar with the old repos, "mozilla-central" is mapped onto the more standard branch name "main", and "autoland" is a branch called "autoland".

It's also true that it's been possible to contribute to Firefox exclusively using git for a long time, although you had to install the "git cinnabar" extension. The choice between the learning hg and using git+extension was a it of an impediment for many new contributors, who most often knew git and not mercurial. Now that choice is no longer necessary. Glandium, who wrote git cinnabar, wrote extensively at the time this migration was first announced about the history of VCS at Mozilla, and gave a little more context on the reasons for the migration [1].

So in the short term the differences from the point of view of contributors are minimal: using stock git is now the default and expected workflow, but apart from that not much else has changed. There may or may not eventually be support for GitHub-based workflows (i.e. PRs) but that is explicitly not part of this change.

On the backend, once the migration is complete, Mozilla will spend less time hosting its own VCS infrastructure, which turns out to be a significant challenge at the scale, performance and availability needed for such a large project.

[1] https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4346

Firefox Mobile (Fenix) had just moved to Mozilla's Mercurial mozilla-central repository after using GitHub including for issues. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android/wiki#upcom...

Now, both the desktop and the mobile version will be on Github, and the "issues" will stay on Bugzilla.

This will take advantage of both GitHub's good search and source browsing and Git's familiar system.

As a former Firefox and Thunderbird contributor, I have to say that I used local search instead of trying to find something on the mozilla-central website.

Of course, when you're actively developing software, you search inside your IDE, but allowing to find things easily on the website makes it more welcoming for potential new contributors.

What is the source of “Firefox Moves to GitHub”? It could be a mirror, just like Linux also has an mirror on GitHub.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux

// EDIT: Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970574

I guess the dream is dead. Even in open source, we have consolidation with no real hard monetary markets involved.

EDIT: skimming these comments, I like how none of the top comments are talking about the bigger story here which is the move away from mercurial to git and instead everyone is focusing on github itself. This has essentially sealed hg away to obscurity forever. Do people not realise git is a program that runs on your computer and github is just a service that uses git? May be this is an old man gripe at this point but I'm surprised at the lack of technical discussion around this.

Great to see, but I wonder what lead to the decision of creating a new org instead of using github.com/mozilla

Why did they choose the mozilla-firefox org as opposed to the already existing mozilla org ?

https://github.com/mozilla

To me it seems absurd that such organization like Mozilla uses third-party hosting like GitHub instead of something self-hosted or at least running under their own name. I understand that one-person projects use GitHub, but forcing contributors to make account with third-party service seems contributor-hostile.

I hope the bugzilla stay there even if only read only. There is a lot of historical data in there, especially for the web which was built as a "ad-hoc" platform, many times when you wonder why does X the answer can only be found in bugzilla (which will explain that some random website that used to be major but doesn't even exists anymore, did something for some browser that used to be major but doesn't even exists anymore).

Why did they use mozilla-firefox org name instead of the already existing https://github.com/mozilla one ?

Star Wars reference in a comment: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/917c73cfe1a5...

Fun to get a glimpse into someone's thought process while they were working.

So they moved from hg to git? Or is this just an official mirror

Why is the mozilla-firefox org full of forks of the main repo named after trees?

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox

On one hand, centralization at a commercial provider isn't great.

On the other hand, the plethora of different self-hosted platforms with limited feature sets is a huge pain. Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise, and then trying to view, or worse, search the code without checking it out is often even more frustrating or straight out impossible.

Centralizing everything to GitHub really isn't a good idea given their frequent incidents every week.

Nice, I was just checking yesterday to find the source code of firefox. Even if it is only a mirror it's a nice step to make it more available I think.

They already have an org github.com/mozilla. Why didn't they move ff source there?

Why GitHub? If they truly cared about open-source they would've chosen something else, such as a self-hosted Forgejo [1], or its most common public instance Codeberg [2].

[1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/

Hate seeing how repos are so polluted by dot-files and dot-folders. I wish tools and SDKs converged into a single dot-folder, so that we could look at repos without seeing everything everywhere

Firefox moves to GitHub. Now someone better make a fork to make a proper web browser, small, fast, lean and without bloat and surveillance.

I assume this is now one of the largest (lines of code) projects on GitHub.

What are 'pine', 'maple', 'holly', etc?

First commit: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/c4cc52826a...

Hard to believe it's been 27 years. I remember when it was still in beta, and how exciting it was to have an open source alternative to Internet Explorer.

Good times!

Correct me if I'm wrong, IIRC the previous "master" branch is `mozilla-central`.

Now it has "main" and "autoland", what are they? Which one is the equivalent of mozilla-central before?

Pretty cool that Linus Torvalds invented a completely distributed version control system and 20 years later we all use it to store our code in a single place.

as a side note - I love the new bookmark tabs feature. About time :-)

nice, GitHub is defacto place to keep and release code

Not for PRs or issues though which are arguably the biggest reasons to use GitHub. Still this is definitely an improvement.

Bad Move.

github.com broke noscript/basic (x)html interop for most if not all core functions (which were working before). The issue system was broken not that long time ago.

And one of the projects which should worry about, even enforce, such interop, moving to microsoft github...

The internet world is a wild toxic beast.

So no IPv6 in the foreseeable future?

A BUILD.md could be useful.

Inevitable. GitHub is a good platform in need of some proper dev workflows (pull requests are atrocious, branches footguns, yml driven CI is a noose) but they've obviously won.

Would have been great if they used an European alternative ( like Codeberg ).

I wonder how long it'll take for my PR which entirely removes the built in Pocket integration will take to be dismissed.

Honestly surprised it took this long. For a project that depends so much on community contribution, being on GitHub just lowers the barrier for new devs. Curious to see if this revives contribution velocity.