I'm not sure about that. I think there's plenty of people who shit on Firefox to justify to their own ethical standards their preference for some Chromium-based browser.

> hate is a good thing.

Hate more if you care.

The more you hate, the more you care.

Support hate.

Relax people it's a joke, if I have to say it it's not funny anymore.

> MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread

That's interesting - why? Why torture yourself with abuse and ignorance?

It's somewhat like athletes who are told not to read social media. I'm sure many do, but what is the point? The people commenting know nothing of value about what you do - you're a professional working with professionals.

At least athletes are in entertainment so some aspects of public reaction are significant (not their advice on how to shoot the ball).

That said, if they're reading - hello! You guys do some of the best, most important work. The world without Mozilla and Firefox would be much less.

Not like Chrome, Chrome feels like it LOVES hanging out with me, looking over my shoulder, telling all it's friends about what I'm working on, what I buy, and how much money I make.

I use Firefox and I like it (especially being able to use uBlock Origin), but I really dislike what Mozilla has become over the last ten years or so. I think that's the key distinction, I can mostly manage Mozilla's crap by turning off a bunch of stuff in my Firefox settings, but I think it's really important for the web to not use a Chromium based browser.

Same. I want to love Firefox, but it does not have the polish on Android compared to Chrome-based browsers.

There are forks which will keep the sanity alive, but I worry about how long Firefox will survive if everyone moves to them, and I have doubts about how well those forks will be maintained after Firefox is gone.

This is exactly and precisely why open source exists, for both the "never upgrade frozen version" case, and the extension into "fork it and make your own" case

There's still seamonkey, lynx, and I think emacs has a browser built in somewhere.

Konqueror could be an option.

i missed the part where op you're replying to said switching to chrome was the alternative to pursue over holding firefoxes nuts to the fire.

Firefox has indeed done things that are worse than anything Chrome has done, such as abusing a privileged update channel to push content advertising a TV show to user’s browsers without their knowledge or consent.

> At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests

I don't see how cloudflare buying firefox would keep it from being a victim of corporate interests. That'd just make them subject to the corporate interests of cloudflare instead.

Cloudflare is corporate interests. What makes you think they or any other big corp is above messing with products they acquired? Remember when google used to be the good guys?

It is also very bad if the company that gets to decide which user agents get to see a webpage owns a browser. I could easily see some kind of fingerprinting mechanisms built into the browser if cloudflare is in charge. For your safety, of course.

Cloudflare is a vile company, who has destroyed large parts of the web and is almost certainly involved with intelligence agencies. Buying Firefox would push away what users they have left (many of which are due to Torbrowser)

> CloudFlare buys them out

That's even worse.

Scumsuckers at cloudflare buying Firefox would be the final nail for me. Cloudflare is every bit as evil as google or Microsoft.

> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.

As much as Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of Good, the existence of Worse shouldn't make anyone stop demanding Better.

Generally, while I know it can take time away from working on other things, I don't mind if firefox adds optional features like Sync, FlyWeb, Pocket, or Hello as long as they can be easily and permanently disabled.

Ideally they wouldn't be installed by default and users would be informed about what the features are, told what the risks of installing/using them are, and given an option to enable them or not first.

Who complains about sync thought? What tilts me is Pocket, AI features, integrated ads, and a plethora of other random acquisitions and side projects that constitute outsized expenses yet do zilch to drive adoption.

I also used to be a Thunderbird lover, but I was forced to ditch it due to crippling freezes, crashes, and slowdown when you have a lot of emails. Mozilla just feels like an awful steward of their projects at times.

EDIT: I also subscribed to Mozilla VPN for almost two years and was forced to ditch that too, due to... solvable technical issues, again. Mullvad was just a greatly superior product for the same price. I still use Firefox for all my browsing on desktop and Android at least.

> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.

Often it goes unacknowledged, leaving the reader to read the criticism as a tacit endorsement of switching off of Firefox to something else.

Sync and container tabs aren't on the list of features I recall seeing people complain about.

I’m fine with Firefox and run it as my main browser on all my devices. But their corporate behavior means I’ll never give them my money again.

I don't have any issues with the extra features they try to tack on. I just disable them.

I just wish they would fix the memory leaks and stuttering.

> It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted.

That’s because this mismanagement has been going on for nearly 10 years now, nothing is being done to address it, and if anything, it seems to be getting progressively worse.

> they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.

The average user doesn't really understand what a browser is, or how it works, and will never bother to look for an alternative to whatever default browser shipped with their OS. If Firefox plans on surviving by appealing to that audience they're doomed to fail.

Firefox got what success it's had by appealing to the people who care about browsers. They installed Firefox and then convinced the other people in their lives who couldn't care less about what a web browser is to install and use Firefox. It was easy for power users to recommend Firefox because it was a good product that offered clear advantages and didn't exploit its userbase. Alienating the people who know and care about browsers by enshittifying is probably not going to work out for Mozilla, and that means we all lose.

It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Mozilla has refused. I can't promise that allowing it would provide all the funds they need, but certainly every little bit helps. People could continue to contribute code to the project, but that requires a lot more time, effort, and no small amount of skill compared to the time it takes to enter your credit card number and submit and an online form. Contributing code to Firefox is still a good thing, but it's a process (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...) that won't be for everyone.

How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers.

Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing.

At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.

And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.

> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.

It could be a generational thing, but I've always associated "power user" with the DOS/Windows crowd and it isn't so much about knowing more as, well, treating a computer like a computer. That is to say that the person who uses scripting in Excel is as much of a power user as the gamer who tweaks power profiles or overclocks their processor. On the flip side, someone who uses the basics of Excel or the gamer who buys the fastest GPU is a consumer of products, rather than a power user.

Funny thing is, I never hear that term being used on the macOS or *ix side of the fence -- even though there are certainly people who who would qualify.

As for the AI thing: AI is something that nobody wants but "everybody" expects. I don't blame them for pursuing it, even if it's a type of integration that I really don't want.

> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.

That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Facebook appear on their screen. A few would know what a browser is, but couldn't tell you what engine it used or why that would even matter. Many of the folks around here know about browsers in a way that goes far beyond what is typical. We've sought out and experimented with several. We've written websites, extensions, and applications for them. We understand how browsers work, and the standards and protocols involved in what they do.

The result is that we tend to hold stronger opinions about web browsers than many others would. Our knowledge matters especially to Mozilla because the user who couldn't tell you what a browser is isn't going to bother going to their app store and searching for a new one. We are the ones who go to our friends and family and tell them about Firefox. We encourage them to install a new program on their devices and to learn to recognize and use an unfamiliar icon whenever they want to search "The Google". The more users like that Firefox pushes away, the more they'll miss out on the benefits of that kind of evangelism.

It used to be a whole lot easier to recommend Firefox. I could tell a moderately skilled person to download it and install it. If someone weren't comfortable with downloading and installing software I could install it for them plus an extension or two in just a few minutes. I knew firefox would work for them, and not try to exploit them. That's no longer the case.

Now firefox provides an enshittified product out of the box, and every update threatens more harm. While I might be willing and able to keep an eye on whatever new bullshit Mozilla pushes and make a bunch of config changes and customizations to work around it, I can't expect my less technical or passionate friends and family to do that.

[dead]

People saw what happened when you compromise with the ad companies. Remember when Google was good?

Some things are absolutely worth refusing to compromise on.