Cyberfox author proclaims death of web browser

Toady, the lead developer of Cyberfox proclaimed the death of the web browser in an article entitled Cyberfox and its future direction.

Cyberfox is a Firefox-based browser that is available as processor-specific builds, in classic and Australis styles. It ships with additional features built-in to the browser, but is compatible mostly with Firefox.

Cyberfox, and other Firefox-based browsers like Pale Moon or Waterfox, came to prominence by offering optimized builds, especially for 64-bit versions of Windows, long before Mozilla started to even offer 64-bit versions officially.

The death of Cyberfox, or more precisely, the announcement of end of life for the web browser may come as a shock to users who run it. It should not be too much of a surprise though for users who keep an eye on the browser world and especially Mozilla and Firefox.

The death of Cyberfox

Mozilla announced major changes to Firefox, some of which landed already, some are in process, and others are announced for 2017.

You can read our state of Mozilla Firefox article for an overview. Only this much: multi-process Firefox is almost done, plugins are out except for Flash and Firefox ESR, Windows XP and Vista users are switched to Firefox ESR so that the operating systems are supported for eight additional releases, and WebExtensions will replace all other add-on systems of the browser.

That's a lot of change, especially for projects that are maintained by a small but dedicated group of developers such as Cyberfox.

Reasons given by the lead developer fall right into this:

Over the years the Cyberfox project has grown immensely and its thanks to all the amazing support of our users and has been an amazing couple of years this however has demanded far more of my time causing me to drop allot of projects and passions id like to pursue,the time factor this project has demanded has also take a toll lifestyle wise as have the changes made by Mozilla requiring more and more time to maintain so its come to a point
where i recently had to assess the direction of this project and the direction i wish to head for the future.

The author of Cyberfox made the decision to switch the browser's release channel to Firefox 52.0 ESR. This means that Cyberfox will be supported with security updates for the next eight release cycles, but new features that Mozilla introduces in Firefox Stable won't find their way into the browser anymore.

This is similar to how Firefox ESR handles updates, but with the difference that Firefox ESR users will be updated eventually to a new major build (except for XP and Vista users for whom Firefox 52.x is also the end of the line).

So in short for the next 12 months cyberfox will be on the ESR time line getting security updates at the end of which will likely be the EOL (End of life) now that is a long time and factors may change lifestyle wise that will allow the project to continue after the 12 months but at this stage its (EOL) at the end of the ESR Cycle, now this does not stop anyone from taking the cyberfox source code and re branding it as sadly can't use our name or trademarks and a 3rd party can take over where we left off.

The author mentions that there is still a slim chance that Cyberfox may make a comeback after all, but that it does not seem likely at this point in time.

Now You: What's your take on the death of Cyberfox?