Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

It's no longer the fault of long-term CEO Mitchell Baker, she of the six-million-bucks salary. She took the cash and left in February 2024. After the February 2024 layoffs that went with the "open source AI" announcement, in November, new boss Laura Chambers laid off another third of the staff, but somehow found the money to hire new executives.
Money is the problem. Not too little, but too much. Where there's wealth, there's a natural human desire to make more wealth. Ever since Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It's been attached like a mosquito to an artery to the Google cash firehose. The Reg noted it in 2007, and it made more the next year. We were dubious when Firefox turned five.
...
Mozilla's leadership is directionless and flailing because it's never had to do, or be, anything else. It's never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It's no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It's role-playing being a business.

This is the exact block I came to quote.
The rest of the article is good too, though.

mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.

- i was talking about both mozilla and firefox... and the internet has plenty to do with that as a communication device for good.
  instead of using the internet for war and hate, use it for unity and openness.
stand up against racism and discrimination
What does this mean for a browser company? I understand this being an important company value, but I don't want them filtering the internet or anything. Their primary goal should be to foster a privacy respecting web and a high performance, standards based browser.
I don't think eliminating profit from the web should be a goal. I don't care if websites make money, I just care they don't profit from my data without me agreeing to it explicitly.
I think Firefox needs to become financially independent, and that means finding a privacy respecting business model. My personal preference is a micro payment system where I can pay websites for content in exchange for no ads. That provides value to me and websites that I'd otherwise block ads on.
If AI is part of that, sure, just make it opt-in and very obvious when it's working.
y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination
I concur, I think they should push towards a more positive internet. Though I think they are a bit wary of doing it ever since the toxic backlash to this blog post
https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
- which is exactly why they need a strong positive leadership that doesn't bend the knee to bigots.
Companies should be allowed to make a profit, you need that to cover bad years, invest in the future of the company, etc. A company without profit (unless it is a non-profit) will not survive.
- And what share of the profit should go right in executives pockets? How many employees should be laid off to increase this profit? Is 6 million $/yr enough for a CEO to feed their fucking family?

That's a weird way of saying firefox is not fine.

I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!

forks cant survive without firefox unfortunately
The article says you should stick with Firefox. If you have time, I'd recommend reading the entire article!
Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my "feed" browser. Qutebrowser you don't need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.
For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it's a fork of firefox and they're at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.
Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there's a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it's been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.
I'll never use a different browser again.

Yeah, this is part of the new Reaganomics I like to call AIconomics. The goal isn't to produce a good product, the goal to make something flashy that tech billionaires want to throw cash at. It's not unlike crypto. Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big. Meanwhile tech billionaires keep minting new ones to entice new suckers every other week. The tech billionaires want you hooked on AI so you'll give up your private info that they can sell to each other so they can cash in, the software companies are investing their time and resources into making AI LLMs in order to get tech billionaires to give them money. It's a viscous capitalist circle. Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation. But with Republicans in charge that will absolutely never happen. Trump practically made his entire cabinet out of billionaires and corporate shills. And too many Democrats gave them the thumb up, so don't count of Dems doing a whole lot to stall the big tech chokehold on everything either.

How viscous is the cycle
- Very. It's like molasses.
There's been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market "rationality". And we get the benefits ever since.
People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they're not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don't seem to see the "investment" markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That's either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.
- The amount of power shareholders hold over every major (American) enterprise isn’t talked about in a way that presents a clear problem between increasingly expensive and shitty services, layoffs, anti-worker practices, political corruption and these shareholder groups. C-suite are part of this group but they’re also afraid of removal via hostile board takeovers and so easily justify acquiescing to shareholder demands. Perhaps it’s because the same investors hold the same sway over (American) media with the added benefit of using it to brand themselves as exceptional leaders. Lots to untangle there…
I'ld like to vote Cryptonimics as term, because it encompasses both the cryptic nature of the product, and the clear example of cryptocurrency.
Check out enshittification and the rot economy. I feel like those two terms encompass pretty much what we are seeing these days
- I'm quite aware of enshittifacation. And, though the word is new, the concept is not. It was most recently called "planned obsolescence" and I think older folks just called it "trashy new stuff" or something folksy like that. But that's harder to apply to the amorphous entity that is the Internet and the economy that's been built around it. Don't fall for the doomsday cult of "it's all just going to shit anyway so let's only care about ourselves". That's how we got Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Mormons (among so many others).

One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi

...

Zawinski has repeatedly said:

Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

Building THE reference implementation web browser, and

Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.

There is no 3.

This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.

Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.

Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.

Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn't have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Support PostmarketOS maybe.

Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel but they're all pretty much things that are relevant for users of Linux operating systems. Mozilla could have found some software centric focus that in some way came together thematically. I would guess privacy focused browser and software services

That assumes though that the definition of web browser and its needed stack stays static.
What happens if we all browse the net primarily via VR then? The line is blurry, so is Mozilla org.

Sadly I am running into more and more things that don't work on firefox. Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently. They don't say it is the browser. I don't know how they are doing it, but google is winning the fight.

When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that's what most people use.
It's turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- It's so damn stupid. If your site works meaningfully differently in Firefox vs Chromium, you're already doing something very, very wrong.
- It's ironic that I use Firefox personally but unfortunately we prioritized Chrome when I did more front end work too. Firefox would often render views differently compared to Chrome (Safari was also a shetshow) and we had to prioritize work ofc, especially for legacy stuff.
  The thing is, as a pure guess, I would bet that it's Chrome that's not adhering to the web standards.
- I switched from Chrome to Firefox at work recently once they added tab groups. A few parts of one of the web apps my team maintains straight up don't work. I mentioned it in a meeting, received a full 10 seconds of silence before someone said "Well customers aren't complaining..."
- Yeah, I'm not a dev, but I work with dev teams. They all don't test with firefox anymore. Not enough ROI according to the product managers.
If a site I have to use doesn't work for no apparent reason, I e-mail the company's Support. Let them sort it out, or provide another way I can do what I'm trying to do. Personally, I think a lot of the problems are from more and more websites integrating privacy-invading "features", and FF interfering with their operation.
- I talked to tech support once, they said it won't get fixed, and there was no workaround. It was a platform type site. So I'm not their direct custom. A small business is. And the people at the small business have never heard of firefox. So they don't even understand the problem.
Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently.
I recall how South Korea literally painted itself into a corner for becoming too dependent on Internet Explorer after years of using it with a security implementation based entirely on ActiveX.
I'm currently using a user-agent switcher plugin. Allows me to spoof servers into believing I'm running a different browser.
- I tried the spoofer on a few, and they still failed. I thought it was supposed to be all chromium under the hood, but somehow it's different. And companies don't test firefox, nor care.

You know you fucked up when even a traditionally hardcore Mozilla fan since the early 2000s like myself has had enuff and recently switched to Librewolf.

I'm with you. I was using Netscape way back and loved Firefox from its inception, and tried to convince everyone I knew to use it. Earlier this year I finally switched to Waterfox, and I haven't looked back. I tried Librewolf first, and it was great, but they don't have an app and that was a dealbreaker for me. Waterfox feels a lot like older Firefox UI-wise, and I love the tab containers.
- Librewolf has tab containers as well. So does Firefox. Unless Waterfox works differently somehow?
Is it good so far?
- Yes! A bit annoying with no built in pw manager but I manage. It did show me how much of the problems which I thought were Gecko related were actually Firefox related, tho.
  Basically it's a faster, bluer, and less buggy Firefox. 🐺>🦊

The fact that they are now selling our data seems like both a browser problem and a leadership problem. If the browser were fine, we wouldn't be seeing a moderate exodus to choices like Librewolf and Zen.

For those holding out for a hero: https://ladybird.org/

Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.

I'm not looking for a hero, I'm looking for stability.
- Did you read the thing?
the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though
- I truly couldn't give a single solitary fuck what opinions the devs of software I use have, no matter what that opinion is. As long as they're not trying to shove that opinion down my throat via their software, their opinions literally have no effect on me whatsoever. You either, whether you want to believe that or not.
- I think this may be the issue to which you are referring:
  https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
  While this is troubling to read about, this narrative’s lack of evidence or references keep me from accepting it at face value. Old mastodon chatter (and perhaps deleted posts or scuttled instances) may be difficult to retrieve, but GitHub discussions shouldn’t be hard to find.
  So I’m withholding judgement for the moment.
  UPDATE: Commenter lime!@feddit.nu wrote this terrific comment that provides confirmation of the above narrative, corrective action that the LadyBird engineering team has taken taken, plus some vitally important context of the entire kerfuffle. A+ work.
- some context and/or link would help for everyone who just learned about this project and knows nothing about the devs
- with a project named ladybird you'd think otherwise.
- If that's true, shame on them. But it doesn't mean their browser isn't good.
- Right, so what does that have to do with ladybird
Why not just run a community build of Firefox, like IceCat?
- If Firefox doesn't keep up with web standards, neither will any of the forks
Question. Does it have uBO or an equivalent yet?
Without it, it'll simply not be internet-ready.
Why the downvotes??

Firefox still hasn't fixed Bug 1938998 despite me reporting it multiple times. There's a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile. I've been using the internet for 26 years, and have used Mozilla based browsers since 2001, I want them to survive to the next era of the internet, but they are struggling to keep up. Opera and Edge already gave up their engines, Webkit and Blink are basically the same engine with different standards enabled, and Firefox is under 2% on some days on Statcounter. I feel that soon AI based browsers using their own AI-engine will probably take over the internet soon anyway.

I use Firefox on mobile all the time. Works fine for me. The fact that I get adblock on mobile makes it a no-brainer to use over chrome.
- Ad block *
I have never encountered that bug, seems like an issue with the duck duck go not doing proper url encoding. I daily Firefox on mobile and its the best option by far with all the available extensions and of course working adblock
- It's got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it's Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.
  I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.
I use it on mobile. It's mostly OK tbh, and the addition of a working ad blocker means it's far better than Chrome for me.
In fairness that is an invalid URL in my book, but it should at least be consistent across desktop and mobile, or at least tucked behind an option.
- Web standards don't care about "your book", spaces in URLs are valid.
There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile.
And the reason is monopoly abuse by the big tech companies. Apple is banning other browser engines from the app store and does not allow Firefox onto iPhones. Google is shipping its own Chrome with every Android device and they are breaking their own sites like YouTube or Gmail on purpose for Firefox users and push them to install Chrome. Microsoft is bundling Edge with Windows as a default browser and will aggressively enable it as a default browser during updates.
that's bullshit. spaces are not valid in URLs. they always need to be URL encoded. I see you complaining about such manual work, but that does not make sense, as it just shouldn't happen!
where are you getting that URL? ddg has been inserting a + sign in place of any spaces for a very, very long time. this is not even a solved problem, it's not a problem at all!

Excuse you, I don't have a problem.

I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?

Did you read the article? It says Firefox is the best choice you have, and all of the criticism is directed at the organization's leadership.
- … leadership impacts the product. Ff might be the best choice rn, but leadership will fuck it up.
i’m running waterfox… it’s firefox, but with junk stripped out, and performance optimisations
there’s no real alternatives between chromium and firefox based engines, and chromium includes pretty much everything you’ve heard of except firefox
I run IronFox for Android and Librewolf on Desktop. Since they are both Firefox forks, migrating is not that bad.
- I don't mean to disagree with you, but isn't IronFox pretty slow? I was using it for like one to two weeks after I got an Android, but I switched to Bromite because of the horrible performance. Maybe it's because of my devuce though (I'm running an 2018 second-hand Pixel 3a with EvoX)

Both currently sucks.