15 Years of Forking

Summary

Logo 2011-2014 Logo 2014-2015 Logo 2015-2019 Logo 2019 Logo 2019-2023 Logo Today Fifteen years ago today, I posted a thread on the Overclock.net forums. I was sixteen, I had an HP Compaq TC4400 that I’d convinced my parents would “improve my school work”, and I was frustrated that Firefox didn’t have an official 64-bit build. So I compiled one myself, called it Waterfox, stuck it on SourceForge and went back to my A levels. Within a week it had 50,000 downloads, completely unexpected. Frustratingly, being on an island in the Mediterranean meant there was no support network or anyone to turn to with regards to “what’s next”. Had I been stateside, with the infrastructure and institutional knowledge of “tech”, who knows - I might’ve had a guiding hand on how to manage something like this and work with the momentum. But alas, I would have to learn a lot of painful lessons myself. Fast forward to today, 15 years later, and Waterfox is still here. So am I, albeit a bit older and significantly more tired. At best estimates, Waterfox probably has around 1M monthly active users. Where it started If you go and look at that original OCN thread, it’s a very different world. People are talking about Silverlight support, MSVCR100.dll errors, and Peacekeeper benchmark scores. Someone asks for a 64-bit Chromium build and the thread title gets updated with every new Firefox version, all the way up to 56.0.2. Originally, and under the username MrAlex, I was only trying to earn enough forum reputation so I could trade and buy second hand PC parts. I didn’t have a plan and I certainly didn’t have a business model. I just thought it was cool that you could take someone else’s source code, compile it with some changes, and end up with something different. Open source is a wonderful thing when you’re sixteen and don’t know anything about the software development lifecycle, yearning for the mines knowledge. What happened in between You can scour the internet, read this blog or view the med...