I think all of firefox's alternatives depend on firefox as an upstream. firefox itself has low adaption right now. I'm all for any approach that isn't google/chrome being the only browser standards driver. This type of knee-jerking doesn't help with that goal.. I don't care so much about mozilla's past or how terrible an "ai browser" will be, as much as having viable alternatives and not having a monopoly for browser standards. a fork and alternative browsers will do nothing to help with that. Either there is an alternative to Mozilla or there isn't.

This isn't kneejerk, it's bone deep weariness of year over year of failure and corporate schlock and weasel words and trying to rebrand firefox and sucking on the google teat while pretending they have a purpose. They're doing anything and everything but seriously putting in the time and effort to distinguish themselves and be a viable competitor. All of the good stuff happens downstream; firefox development is a continual disappointment and enshittification, and they don't even profit from it. They enshittify on behalf of google and the adtech blob.

The downstream projects constantly have to tear out features the mozilla team try to jam in, for no good reason, almost like there's an arms race and the adtech blob is just trying to slip one past all the people who want simple privacy preserving software.