> Want a fully functional ad blocker

My main reason but also

* want to ensure competition because I'm sure that once it's chromium all the way, we're gonna have a bad time.

Mind you, you can get all that and more in a browser like vivaldi. And that market is.. small. Vivaldi doesn't have to develop a browser engine

The problem is the list keeps shrinking since now Mozilla Corp is an ethically dubious corporation.

> Want a fully functional ad blocker

Is this even the case? UBO has ~10 million users going by the extension store, Firefox has over 150 million users.

So less than 10% of Firefox installs also have UBO.

* But don't really care about privacy that much

Brave already has an adblocker built into the browser itself and supports vertical tabs.

Right and to your point, there's not a whole lot of precedent for browsers successfully funding themselves when the browser itself is the primary product.

Opera was the lightweight high performance extension rich, diversely funded, portable, adapted to niche hardware, early to mobile browser practically built from the dreams of niche users who want customization and privacy. They're a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to get most, if not all decisions right in terms of both of features users want, as well as creative attempts to diversify revenue. But unfortunately, by the same token also the perfect refutation of the fantasy that making the right decisions means you have a path to revenue. If that was how it worked, Opera would be a trillion dollar company right now.

But it didn't work because the economics of web browsers basically doesn't exist. You have to be a trillion dollar company already, and dominate distribution of a given platform and force preload your browser.

Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distribued for free. Donations don't work, paying for the browser doesn't work. If it did, Opera (the og Opera, not the new ownership they got sold to) would still be here.

Yes, I would literally pay a nominal fee for Firefox if I were confident in the org's direction. As things stand though, the trust is gone as you said.

Mozilla is (or at least started as) a nonprofit. Even corporation is only there to fulfill the nonprofit goals. They shouldn't even be thinking about monetization they should be thinking about getting donations and securing grants.

Yet ... with firefox that is exactly what you are using. Except there's a proxy in the middle (Mozilla).

Just one that is entirely funded by an advertising company?

I've been using Firefox for a long time, longer than it's had that name, and it used to be excellent for my tab hoarding habits. Specifically, it could handle a large number of tabs, and every couple of months it would crash and lose all of them. I would have to start over from scratch, with an amazing sense of catharsis and freedom, and I never had to make the decision on my own that I would never be able to make.

Now, it's no better than the others. I'm at 1919 tabs right now, and it hasn't lost any for many years. It's rock solid, it's good at unloading the tabs so I don't even need to rely on non-tab-losing crash/restarts to speed things up, and it doesn't even burn enough memory on them to force me to reconsider my ways.

This is a perfect example of how Mozilla's mismanagement has driven Firefox into the ground. Bring back involuntary tab bankruptcy and spacebar heating!

I think the problem with that is that Firefox Android with uBO still feels like it has worse First Contentful Paint than Chrome Android. Even on a high-end phone the difference can feel ridiculous; sites render after 1-2s on Chrome but sometimes I can count up to 5 with FF.

The benefits of having uBO might matter more to you and me, but let's not forget that faster rendering was arguably the main reason Chrome Desktop got popular 20 years ago, which caused Firefox to rewrite its engine 2 (3?) times since then to catch up. 20 years later this company still hasn't learned with Android.

It was that once.