Feddit.onlineHow is Mozilla doing you ask? Firefox VCS has completed the move from their own infra to checks notes oh yeah, GitHub dot com
Sunshine (she/her)github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox
Title is from Linus Torvald’s quote
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I would have preferred if they used Codeberg or something not attached to MS, but this will likely be better for getting community support their their old setup. Maybe they just wanted to offload hosting to save money as the Google search deal looks to be going away.
sexy_peachWhere were they before? Gitlab?
Troy00Why Github and not Codeberg or other not big tech platform?
jutty
𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬Didn’t they move to Microsoft for hosting quite some time ago?
Eager Eaglethey only had this mirror
https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/
but it seems they were using mercurial at https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/
jagged_circleGenerally thats concerning.
But hopefully this means its easier to find and submit bug reports. Their issue tracker beforewm was a terrible UX.
douglasg14bNot only that, it's easier to contribute. And generally more accessible to more developers. Which is a damn good thing.
Possibly linuxIt is still an improvement as this makes it easier to bring in more people.
With that being said, I think it would've been better to use Forgejo.
And this is... good?
Yes, it's incredibly good.
If Firefox is trying to get more developers on board with working on it than being on the largest development platform helps them.
It's a move that should benefit Firefox by making open source contributions more accessible And bringing in more developers.
ArdensStrange how so many, are so quick to anger towards Firefox. I have used it since Navigator, and I've always felt quite safe with it. I am in awe of a browser that not only competes, but also surpasses other browsers with a ton more money behind it.
so they're getting rid of mercurial and self hosting? not sure if this is positive..
TermightDeleted by author
unfinished | 🇵🇸
nocturneI thought it was good to move away from GitHub since it is owned by m$?
It's not a big deal since git repos aren't hard to migrate. GitHub is fine currently and if they push people away then there are a couple of alternatives.
Firefox hosting on Github is a good move because it lowers the barrier of entry for contributors.
melroyI agree here.
cloveMoving to git is one thing, but doesn't going to GitHub put all their code at risk for CoPilot AI mining by Microsoft? (If one considers that a bad thing, which many don't, I guess.)
Your code is AI mined regardless where you put it today I'm afraid to tell.
Unless you put your code in a private repository self hosted behind a login. However, if your code is public. You can bet it will be used for AI training. Again regardless of which platform. And regardless which LLM. So all platforms, all internet, all LLMs.
Thanks, that's what I thought. I've never put anything personal in a public repo in my life for reasons just like this. Bleh.
Also maybe a private repository on github might also not as private as you think. Just saying.
Projects are more than just code. They are all the metadata, ecosystem, and people around it. You can easily move a git repo, but try moving github issues or github PRs, pipelines, community questions, and so on. You'll realise how much of a fallacy "It’s not a big deal since git repos aren’t hard to migrate" is.
Daniel QuinnLowering the barrier to entry by moving from a technology few use (mercurial) to something popular (git) makes sense. Requiring participation on a proprietary platform owned by Microsoft instead of an open one like Codeberg or GitLab is just lazy. If someone wants to contribute to Firefox, asking them to create an account is a small ask, and I'd argue that if they're unwilling to do even that, then their participation in the community is likely to be far from useful.
FaceDeerIndeed. This "GitHub is owned by Microsoft, therefore evil lurks around every corner" thing has been going for many years now with no sign of the promised apocalypse and no real reason to expect said apocalypse. Back in the day I used to do a lot of modding for an open-source game and almost all the mods were hosted on GitHub, but then when Microsoft bought it about half of the modders threw an ideological fit and moved their mods to a wide scattering of other hosts. It made everything so much more of a hassle to fork and submit issues and whatnot, I'm sure it's done more harm to the project than anything Microsoft would ever do.
Wasn't it revealed that Microsoft was training their Copilot on Github repositories, including private ones such as paying coorporations believing their source code to be safe and secure, resulting in secrets suddenly being made semi-public?
I feel that there were other incidents too, though I can't remember them off the top of my head. Definitely not a place I'd recommend anyone to keep anything they love, even if they keep to best practices and don't store secrets in their repositories.
It was an open source game with open source mods. It wouldn't have made sense to have private repos.
I did a little Googling and Microsoft denies using private repositories for training. Do you have a source?
The claim above was off the top of my head, but I've found multiple pages of results describing the panic that ensued.
Now, Microsoft (Copilot and Github) are less than clear on what exactly is used for training, but the general consensus seems to be, that they don't train on private repositories. Though there appears to be some confusion about this, especially regarding Microsoft's honesty about not using loopholes (this article might be faked, I haven't tried confirming it, though, this topic is a shit show ripe with miscommunication, misinformation, and quite a lot of confusion and fear regardless).
It appears that the specific issue I was referring to required a human error for copilot being able to train on the private repositories. Namely, some unfortunate fool temporarily making the repository public (in which case it obviously isn't private anymore, and therefore free for grabs by scrapers). Usually this wouldn't be a problem, since no indexer or scraper can check all of Github all at once all the time, so the chance of a briefly exposed repository being cached is rather small, albeit always there.
That said, Copilot, Bing, and Github are likely better integrated than Bing simply wasting resources on continuously scraping Github for new repositories. I personally imagine that Github saving resources by sending a signal to Bing when a repository is made public isn't entirely unlikely (that's something I might do, harboring no ill intentions), meaning that it is possible (though in no way confirmed) that Bing punishes briefly exposed Github repositories instantly by forever caching them.
Is this 100% Microsoft being predatory? No, obviously not, since it requires a user error to happen in the first place, and since Copilot is technically only trained on public or exposed data. Though, Microsoft learning about this rather scammy behavior and simply classifying it a "low-impact-severity" and disabling the Bing cache for humans (but apparently not Copilot) doesn't sit right with me. I'm sure that they knew exactly which kind of data they were working with during dataset sanitation, so they could have chosen not to use sensitive data or at least inform exposed clients that they are adding their cached secrets to Copilot.
Mozilla just can't kick their proprietary addiction, can they? I bet they use google docs and JIRA internally.
500M/year can't buy you a forgejo instance or radicle node?
500M probably could buy that, but what would that cost look like in comparison with using GitHub? When you are on a fixed income, making decisions based purely on philosophy becomes a luxury.
Where has this narrative that Mozzila is poor come from?
They can afford to make this decision based on philosophy.
They're not Apple rich, but they're not struggling for money. They would just rather give it to their executives than use it wisely
They could have opted for Codeberg for example and made a public donation to the project of a few hundred dollars a month. Instead, they opted for funnelling more power and support into a terrible company.
Maybe I'm thick, but what's the benefit for them in moving from self hosted to MSFT hosted?
they were using mercurial
That's the version control system, not the hosting platform. They didn't need to go with microsoft
GitHub is the most popular forge, if they want people to contribute, it's a clear favorite.
BezierBiggest site that most to-be contributors already have accounts at?
kbalWell, going with Github wasn't quite as stupid a decision when they made it, which iirc was so long ago that it hadn't yet been acquired by Microsoft. As with other typical corporate problems, once they got started down that road and had some sunk costs they couldn't find the strength to turn back even long after it became apparent that it was a mistake.
sabreW4K3Didn't they just move off of GitHub like last year, forcing everyone back to bugzilla?
Bugzilla is still where they are managing bug reports and contributions will still go through (I think) phabricator. Note the lack of Issues and Pull Request tabs on the GitHub repo. This is more just a change of hosting than anything.
Yeah this is just a code mirror. There's a GitHub action to automatically close PRs with a message directing people to the right place.
KissakiThat's a read-only mirror, not a "move onto GitHub".
PRs get automatically closed, referring to the contrib docs.
It looks like the main repository. The "How to submit a patch" mentions even the github repository. Even though it does not accept pull requests it seems to be not just a mirror.
When I searched for text "github" I did not find anything. But searching in the inspector to cover urls:
Firefox and related code is stored in our git repository.
Which makes it all the more confusing. Stored there, but patches only elsewhere?
Really, for a "moved their sources" claim I'd prefer some form of announcement or docs that describe this.
I have searched a bit more.
The transition is in process since 2023. [1]
I don't find any announcement though.
It looks like the process is now finished and the github repository is now the official main source.
There are other news sites claiming this. [2]
[1] https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4346
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-On-GitHub
roadrunner_exI was about to reply with a "oh, really? Whoops, I maybe should I have looked a little deeper" and edited for the post title, but I'm not so sure, looking into the first link you posted.
RE: phabricator...I don't know what that service is or is for, so I can't comment if there's any proof therein.
But the "how to submit a patch" page linked has a section that seems to at least suggest that their Github repo is now first-class, per the first line of the section.
Phabricator was an alternative for a development platform of sorts; development ceased in 2021. They're still running here and there, but I expect them to be in the process of being deprecated.
RE: phabricator…I don’t know what that service is or is for, so I can’t comment if there’s any proof therein.
The how to submit a patch section documents that that's where they accept patches. And they do their reviews and change iterations there. By necessity, that also means hosting/having the repos.
That's confusing to me.
They only accept patches on Phabricator, have the sources there, but suggest using GitHub, but afterwards Phabricator to submit the changes?
I can only imagine it's to lower barrier to entry because GitHub is more well known. But this just seems like a confusing mess to me, without clear wording of intentions and separation of concerns [in their docs, not your post or comment here].
That's very good. Once I wanted to compile Firefox myself for some reason I no longer remember, but their Mercurial-based system was a hassle to work with. Most of us are already familiar with git. So, I know I'm going to be more inclined to make code contributions now that it uses git.
Just wish they could've chosen another git-based option like Codeberg, or even an internally-hosted server. I'm rather wary of GitHub/Microsoft swallowing up so many open source projects.
Seems that they're not accepting pull-requests via GitHub, which is a bit of shame.
spartanatreyuFor a complicated project I get it, github's PR system is kind of bad (horrible branch based workflow and no stacked diff support resulting in increased churn) compared to the alternatives.
That's why we have tools like Graphite to add stacked diff support on top of github, and other devs creating new VCSs because git still hasn't made it's interactive rebase and merge conflicts easy enough to handle for juniors and it should be simpler.
qweertzBc this seems to be a crosspost, imma cross-comment:
I get wanting to phase out Mercurial in favour of git. But why did they have to choose Github T_T
Ideally they would have just hosted a their own Forgejo instance (heck, a Gitlab one would have been better too FFS). Even just using Codeberg and donating would have been better
The for-profit side of Mozilla seems to have succeeded in purging most of the principles Mozilla used to have (IK they have been eroding over the years and sometimes been too "pragmatic", this is just the cherry on top of a long series of shitpiles)
If Mozilla actually stood for a free/libre future they'd push Forgejo to the lvl they need it to be (if it already isn't capable of all that stuff. Haven't rly interacted much with it).
Since they will still keep the CI/CD on Mercurial for now, there is even less valid reasons for using Github...
Mozilla is just a mouthpiece nowadays. Google money goes in, bullshit comes out. They are only around to accept Google money and to do so, they don't have to actually compete, they just have to be bigger than the alternatives.
If they self hosted a git forge, that would mean paying less money to some "thought leader" and we all know they can't have that!
I personally wouldn't go that far tbh, but I haven't rly looked into it that much so idk.
To me it seems like they are still maintaining Firefox, Gecko, and Thunderbird (which is more independent tho IIRC) quite well.
I use Thunderbird directly and Firefox through Librewolf
(haven't rly had the drive to look into Thunderbird analogues to Librewolf. Should rly do that tho)
But why?
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stinkyhow does moving to github help them if chrome is sold?
I'm not the OP, but it's probably easier to get (free) community contributions on Github than on any other spot.
Or it's to make it easier to fork, in case Mozilla goes out of business.
Because Mozilla is the master of bad ideas and most open source projects are leaving github, not joining it.
They're switching their main repository from Mercurial to Git. Mozilla started using Mercurial before Git became de facto standard, but I imagine these days learning Mercurial is seen as an unnecessary obstacle for new contributors, hence the current switch.
As for why GitHub specifically, it's because that's where the rest of Mozilla's projects already are. They have been using GitHub for a long time (14 years or more), with thousands of repositories there. It's why Rust and Servo are on GitHub, for example.
Edit: See <https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4346> for more thorough/accurate info.
finalaccountforrealIt's sad that an entity the importance and the size of Mozilla chose GitHub over self-hosting.
It's insane they were still using Mercurial in 2025.
They aren't moving, it's a code mirror. Everyone seems to be misreporting this. There's a GitHub action to auto close PRs.
It's not a mirror. It's the primary repository. And yes unfortunately they aren't accepting PRs or using it for issue tracking, but it's a start.
It’s insane they were still using Mercurial in 2025.
What?
What what? Mercurial is dead. Not even Facebook use it any more.
Dead? They just had a major version update 1 month ago and the last minor release was 1 week ago.
What does Facebook using it have to do with anything?
Dead as in essentially nobody uses it. Apparently it's used even less than SVN, which sounds kind of crazy. Doesn't stop them developing it if they want I guess.
Facebook is relevant because they were one of the last major users of Mercurial and were big contributors to it. They've moved to their own VCS Sapling now though.
What's the actual argument here? If Mercurial satisfies/satisfied the development team, then they should use it. I don't find this crazy. Like others pointed out, it's not like Mercurial was a dead project without maintenance.
No developer is an island. By using an extremely unpopular VSC they increase the barrier to contribution for all external developers, miss out on support in tools and projects that only support Git, and they don't get to benefit from the increased development effort that goes into more popular solutions.
Apparently it’s used even less than SVN,
Going to need a source for this.
Also a devclass post Mozilla quietly makes Microsoft’s GitHub the authoritative home for Firefox code suggests FF is making the GH repo the place to go as the source of truth for FF, :( This move to me is really sad, instead of moving to FLOSS alternatives it's preferring a proprietary with a terrible hosting licensing (gitlab one is much better for example, not sure about codeberg's one, but for sure is better as well), and what's worse, one that uses anything hosted in there for its own purposes, including feeding openAI stuff with FLOSS code violating any licenses and so forth. Which actually makes me strengthen the idea that mozilla is trending to go in the wrong direction making things worse on every step they follow.
I use a derivative, Librewolf, but in the end it depends on the FF code... Sadly, using GH is still like the norm, and I can change that. servo browser engine and verso (browser based on servo) are also hosted on GH. But at least they started there and migrating is always a hard decision, FF is just moving there having other options, so it means they don't care about GH mistreating users code...
I get wanting to phase out Mercurial in favour of git. But why did they have to choose Github T_T
Ideally they would have just hosted a their own Forgejo instance (heck, a Gitlab one would have been better too FFS). Even just using Codeberg and donating would have been better
The for-profit side of Mozilla seems to have succeeded in purging most of the principles Mozilla used to have (IK they have been eroding over the years and sometimes been too "pragmatic", this is just the cherry on top of a long series of shitpiles)
if Mozilla actually stood for a free/libre future they'd push Forgejo to the lvl they need it to be (if it already isn't capable of all that stuff. Haven't rly interacted much with it).
Since they will still keep the CI/CD on Mercurial for now, there is even less valid reasons for using Github...
Lime Buzz (fae/she)Yeah, came here to say this. Github is terrible for many many reasons. Codeberg/Forgejo would have been much better.
Norah (pup/it/she)CI/CD works well on Forgejo now in my opinion.