We Must Fight for Firefox
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Software is apolitical, but the forces that develop it and use it aren't. A lot of users are very militant about ideology rather than technology, but equally, Mozilla makes stupid decision after stupid decision.
How do they compare to decisions of Firefox competitors?
Killing the RSS reader, which was awesome.
Mozilla Corp's CEO compensation is disproportionate to the value generated and users lost.
Treading water on low-hanging fruit for what a web browser needs to do.
Lack of focus on problem-solving browser-related issues.
Political activism is a double standard, particularly regarding censorship.
OOBE isn't privacy-centric. The privacy focus is largely a LARP.
Woeful Android app.
I could go on.
Everything worth speaking of has better performance, better Android app et al.
Mozilla are a shadow of their former selves, as is Firefox. The browser wars are over, they aren't a sexy thing, most people prefer apps for their centralized services instead. There's not much money to be made in being a second-rate browser whose users choose it because "it's better than using Google because it isn't Google derp", meanwhile Google are responsible for the majority of its revenue with the search partnership. It's lip service. Google pays them money so they appear to have less of a monopoly on browsers, Mozilla takes the cash, telling the public they deeply care about making a good browser and care about privacy and related digital issues like intellectual property—whilst delivering jackshit of actual meaningful substance.
AI is the next war. Is Google even prepared for the impact it'll have on search and their advertising model? Will AI make browsers and traditional search irrelevant for most consumers? Apps and centralization already put a pretty big dent in it.
They all suck. Pick the one that sucks the least in your eyes. For me, that isn't Firefox anymore.
It also isn't Brave for me, because Brendan Eich is a homophobe that channeled money into supporting banning gay marriage.
It isn't Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge either.
Why would rational users generate financial value for someone who spends it on homophobic causes?
If you don't see the issue with that then you're part of the problem.
Occasionally I have to switch to Firefox because some websites hard code agents and flag librewolf as not being Firefox, but that's rare and far apart. I also have to switch to chrome because of a few "chrome only" features like webgpu usb api etc.
All in all, it feels like I can stick with librewolf and mull 95% of the time with minimum hassle when switching, which gives me peace of mind compared to 0%.
Im sure that there are many tech companies that will support FF purely out of principle
When I was tasked with implementing CIS browser hardening policies at a previous job a few years ago, this was just a matter of enabling some Group Policy template settings for Chrome and Edge, but for Firefox this involved distributing a prefs.js file to all the workstations. In any corporate environment it's very likely going to be point and click Windows admins that are implementing browser standards, who tend to be allergic to anything resembling code and are already used to using GPOs for just about everything.
Yes, Firefox does have GPO templates but it's not nearly as rich as Chrome and Edge. Edge has even more GPO templates than does Chrome iirc, Chrome already had a lot to begin with and then Microsoft added even more of their own on top of that.
https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/v4.11/READM...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/configure-micro...
That alone already puts Firefox at a huge disadvantage for corporate deployment, the other thing that makes it even less attractive, even to companies where privacy/security is a huge requirement (like my previous job) is that Edge is already bundled with the OS, and is one less thing that needs to be manually patched. In high security corporate environments, just keeping things patched is always a huge task so it's very hard to convince someone that they need to put in more work to keep an extra piece of software patched (which is already very difficult considering how frequently browsers are updated). To make things even worse, just about all vendors will only support Chromium-based browsers for whatever SaaS they sell you, so Firefox is a nonstarter for getting support, even if it will work just fine 99.9% of the time.
For all these reasons, I lost the battle to keep Firefox around, which is a huge shame because of how much I love it and wanted to fight the Chromium monoculture. So I guess for a corporation to support Firefox despite how much more corporate-friendly the alternatives are, they'd have to reaaaally want to.
Citation please