So the other day I was testing a new browser called waterfox. What stuck me as odd was how a small company seemed to have made Firefox so much more usable everyone. I normally use librewolf for privacy and security reasons but waterfox actually temped me to switch. (I ended up not switching for privacy and security reasons)
After I used waterfox for a bit I started thinking more and more about Mozilla the company. What are they even doing these days? It seems like they have stopped with the innovation. They could of setup a competitor to google with a custom nextcloud but they haven’t made any competitive products other than a VPN.
I also saw a Nord VPN commercial and it was full of lies are usual (seriously, malware protection?). However a lot of there arguments could apply to Firefox. Why doesn’t Mozilla do any sort of advertising? Admittedly Firefox isn’t great in the UI department for the average user so it may be worthless
Honestly, much of the problem is us, not them. At some point they did Firefox Send, but people misused it for sending malware and stuff, resulting in Mozilla having to shelve the project for legal reasons, for example. (Now, if it was me, I’d just have said “just base Send’s operations on Sealand or someplace without DMCA”, but that’s a call they did not make). They now created a VPN but the problem is, AFAIK, it’s not their own product it’s just Mullvad with extra steps, so people just use that instead. And when they do stuff for web freedom / digital sovereignty awareness, such as campaigns against DRM or a study on the car IoT market, people (aka: we) complain that they are “doing useless stuff”. Just about the newest good thing they’ve done is Relay, and I’m pretty sure there’s hefty complaining about that.
And then there’s the idiots who moan than “peOpLe wHO wANt prIVacY uSE BraVE”, so there’s that too.
With our attitude like that, there’s no way for them to win.