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Comment by nortonham | Hacker News Reader

It certainly does to me....Firefox and ublock origin makes using the modern web easier. Anytime I use some other combination (at work, or someone else's device) I can't stand most websites.

I know there are problems around Mozilla the org, or the how firefox is funded, but I hope it's not going anywhere.

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Firefox and uBlock Origin definitely make the web more usable and I’m shocked when I occasionally see what a non-techie friend’s browser screen looks like. However, adblock is only a band-aid over the dying of the web overall. Blogs are dead, forums are dead, ostensible replacements like Reddit or microblogging sites suffer from the decline in longform text and nuance (as their userbase is overwhelmingly contributing from mobile devices now). So much information that would have once been presented in efficient text is now in time-wasting video, etc.

Thanks to LibGen and Anna’s Archive, I find myself reading actual books more these days, many published long before I was even born, to scratch my itch for learning. Wikipedia aside, a bunch of pirated grayscale scans from university libraries is suddenly more fulfilling than the information superhighway that the web was hyped to be.

If Firefox fails there is always a fork of it somewhere you can use instead like IceCat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

Having the software is not enough. A web browser is not one and done. Without a development team behind it, Firefox would fall even further into obscurity. Also, a failure at Mozilla would send a pretty clear message that the whole idea is untenable.

There has to be some web standard with a more sane feature subset. Google, MS et al. push to much features into the standard. The churn is silly.

This idea that Google is pushing too many features is just silly.

The fact of the matter is that the web has been losing to native mobile apps and closed ecosystems. For many people, Facebook's mobile app is the Internet, and they're installing it from a closed app store. The web is an open application platform, whether you like it or not, and it either evolves to compete with mobile apps, or it's going to die.

For this reason, Google does more to preserve the open web than its competition in the browser space. And yes, I find these stats worrying when opened in Firefox:

https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/

And look, if you want to use a text-based browser like it's the 90s, go for it, but I'm pretty sure that most people are glad to see apps running in their full-fledged browser; because the browser is cross-platform, it's the perfect sandbox, and opening a web page isn't gated. YMMV.

It's not clear that IceCat would continue if Firefox development ceased.

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