Asking after the privacy debacle and manifest. I’m not keeping up closely, but iirc Firefox is the browser recommended because of Ublock. After the privacy data issue I’ve noticed broken trust from Firefox users, recommendations in favor of switching browsers, and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.
So I’m here asking the seasoned sailors’ thoughts, aye. Is this just a storm passing by or are you really considering jumping ship?
Possibly true, but abandoning ship is only bringing us closer to that timeline. People seem to be completely ignorant/delusional about how much work these forks will require to maintain if Mozilla’s full time employees stop working on Firefox. If you have a practical reason to use another fork (like maybe a feature Firefox doesn’t have) then I totally understand using that instead, but if you are simply making some kind of ethical protest change like all the new LibreWolf users who are so loudly virtue signalling at the moment then you need to think seriously about whether this course of action will ultimately end up hurting your ideals. Mozilla definitely has a big communication problem and I understand the desire to distance oneself from an organisation that repeatedly disrespects its supporters and never learns from its mistakes, as it is very fatiguing to endure their constant failures and the massive fall-outs from them, but ultimately I feel like switching away from Firefox is still an emotional decision rather than a rational one.
What other problems has Firefox had? Everything I search sends me to this recent controversy
One of the more recent examples from last year was Mozilla’s announcement of PPA (Privacy-Preserving Attribution). Essentially the organisation is trying to create a new system for click-based advertising where an advertiser can be notified that you clicked on their ad, helping them and the websites which host their ads, without compromising your personal privacy. The way it has historically worked is you click on an ad and give away a ton of your personal data, or you straight up block all these ads and their trackers which makes a lot of the web unsustainable (because it is funded by advertising). Anyway, like with this latest controversy a lot of people didn’t bother to read any of Mozilla’s statements and instead based their entire opinion off clickbait headlines like ‘Firefox’s New ‘Privacy’ Feature Actually Gives Your Data to Advertisers’ which made PPA sound like a reduction of consumer privacy, which it isn’t. And again, like this current controversy, you also had a lot of privacy activists who do not live in reality claiming that anything other than a 100$ rejection of all advertising online equaled 100% complicity and that Mozilla had sold out on one of its core principles.
If Linux can be developed, then a public fork run the same way for browser can too. It’s possible just no interest yet.
A huge chunk of Linux development is subsidized by the hundreds of corporations which depend on it and pay developers to maintain things. There is no corporate interest in developing and/or maintaining an alternative browser engine when chromium already exists and dominates the market.
Yea I thought of that and have no real answer. But should that be solved, without advertising income, it would change everything
It would be amazing of course, and my entire attitude towards Firefox would change overnight if we had that kind of guaranteed security. At the moment I just look at it as the best least-worst option for the short to medium term future. I recently learned about Ladybird but that is still a fair way off, so for now my priority is to continue supporting Firefox and trying to avoid a future where Google has theoretical control over everything.