Firefox already has ads. (Though you can turn them off.) As does its default search engine.

I think you might be looking for tab groups? Which, incidentally, are also coming.

Keep in mind that having an extensively customised setup makes you more fingerprintable - just the fact that some things are not visible to a website makes you unique. Generally, most of the defaults will be best for everybody - especially when it comes to options that are not exposed in the UI (i.e. through about:config).

What could be interesting for you is just running uBlock Origin and have it block all JavaScript by default. That’ll block most of the scripts that potentially do tracking (and that Firefox doesn’t block natively, e.g. because they also provide functionality), and you can relatively easily enable them on a per-site and per-script basis.

Sounds like maybe there’s a need for a separate “development” foundation that would be a contributor just like the corporate contributors?

I’ve got them here: you’re done.

You have to go out of your way to install (“enable”) it.

Yeah and the reason they get away with it is because a single person’s (exorbitant) pay in the end hardly affect what’s left for the shareholders, whereas giving all employees raises costs a lot more.

Yeah I’m not against the CEO earning similar amounts to those of organisations doing similar things and bringing in similar amounts of money… But those CEOs, too, are compensated disproportionately.

They are the collective main browser makers, including Mozilla. One thing Mozilla can (and does) do is insert site-specific workarounds (e.g. changing the User Agent), and/or work with the website to ensure compatibility.

https://webcompat.com/ to report. (Also in the menu: “Report broken site”.)

I mean, come on.

This (vertical tabs) is still an experimental feature that isn’t even in Firefox Labs yet. It’s not that surprising that all edge cases have been ironed out yet. I mean, come on.

I think in another comment they mentioned that this was only in Nightly?

I think that means that it’s opt-in.

Might be worth reporting a bug against the Snap version? I think there’s usually a “Report a bug” menu entry under “Help” in the menu?

Unrelated because it’s a different problem, but if a website actually disables your right-click, try holding Shift while right-clicking.

Ah I was just wondering, been a while since LWD tried to stir up some Mozilla-related controversy.

I think I’m getting it, I’m just trying to say that I think you’re underestimating how hard it is to fund web browser development.

What incentives does the for-profit (that’s owned by the non-profit) have that a non-profit without a for-profit subsidiary wouldn’t have? Both aren’t able to maximise revenue for shareholders, and both will always have the option to pay their leaders extravagantly.

And as a well-paid programmer, I haven’t been known to donate $100 a year to software projects. As a conservative estimate, let’s say Mozilla could run Firefox at one-fifth the current budget, that would still mean we’d need a million people like you that would continue to do so even if, say, the most-often-voted-for feature request is misinterpreted, or changing a “view all tabs” icon suddenly pisses off a significant portion of them enough to stop their donations.

And even if that happened, it’s not clear that that would necessarily lead to gaining market share on default browsers or ones that get heavily promoted through search engine homepages or shadily bundled with installers. Which would still mean more and more websites would start to ignore it, which would mean web compatibility would continue to get worse and worse.

Ah, that’s the secret? Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?! All this slaving away at my day job, when I could just have built a self-sustaining good product - it’s that easy!

2. ???
3. Profit break-even, somehow?

This is very well-informed, nice job on the research.