I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.
It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.
One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.
I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.
But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.
If they were violating people’s privacy, it would be completely unacceptable to make it opt-out.
But they aren’t. They are doing things that some people believe they’ll want to violate people’s privacy in the future to do in a different way.
I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up. Their description is here:
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
It sounds interesting… It also sounds like it will fail, because Mozilla seems to think that trackers are primarily interested in collecting ad stats, and that targeted advertising is less critical, but I think in reality it’s the other way around, and advertisers won’t accept such a limited solution.
I see no benefit to this because it will never be used instead of traditional tracking. It will just be a way for advertisers to get data from people who are blocking normal trackers and get even more data from people who aren’t.
Oh, I wish them the best and hope they succeed.
But I also think they’ll fail. And not even for that one reason, I think there are enough advertisers not interested on tracking to make it succeed. I just think they’ll flounder it. What is too bad, because they are the ones best positioned to make it.
The sanest take yet. If this were reddit and gold meant anything, you’d deserve it
I was an early adopter of Firefox 20+ years ago. It started going downhill more than 15 years ago and I bailed to Chrome when that launched. It really was better than Firefox at the time. Then Chrome got worse and I wound up back on Firefox, not because Firefox had gotten better in that time but because everything else had gotten worse than Firefox in the intervening time. Also, if going from 48% market share in 2009 to a barely relevant <5% in 2024 doesn’t count as a downfall I’m not sure what does.
Firefox not getting better in the last 15 years is quite disingenuous though.
Also the plugins eventually caught up and made it more usable.
I’m just following the warning signs, in the last year:
There’s the news of the opt-out only on tracking as you brought up. Then they fired one of their open source executives because he had the audacity to get cancer. Then they acquired an ad company because “we’re built different and we can fix her and totally not get corrupted by ads in the process”. Then the AI shit oh and ofc the news where they almost sucked Putin’s dick and pulled FF from being accessible in Russia for a day or 2
And a bunch of other stuff that I’m probably forgetting about. And that’s just within the last year.
Google and Chrome were great to! Until they weren’t. FF probably won’t ever actually die, not for a while at least. But the User and Privacy first aspects certainly will. They’ll probably succumb to enshittification and become like any other corporate browser like Chrome or Edge for years to come.
Ah I just searched for Firefox news and the PPA thing was the only one that came up.
As for firing the executive, I can’t find anything about him being specifically relayed to being open-source anything. Steve Teixeira was their Chief Product Office briefly- he only was hired in 2022 and left the company a few months ago, and prior to that he worked for Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. So I don’t think this can really be framed as some attack on open-source or privacy. If the allegations are true that they discriminated against him for having cancer that’s shitty of course, but Mozilla has of course claimed that they did not and it’s going to court. They didn’t fire him either- they asked him to take a demotion to Senior VP of Technology Strategy and he chose to leave instead.
Yes Mozilla bought an ad company. They’re called Anonym and their stated goal is to provide an advertising service that can exist profitably without violating privacy. I hate ads- I block as many as I can and I use a pi-hole. I avoid ad-supported services as much as possible. I’m also privileged enough that I can afford to pay for a subscription to a lot of stuff or just buy physical media to rip and store on my own server. But there was a time when I was a broke college student stuck using campus Internet and playing by their rules, so the safest option I could afford was just to watch ads. Ads can be an ethical business model that helps improve the lives of low-income households. For people with legal or ethical concerns about piracy, or additional restrictions on their Internet, or who just lack the technical skill.
It’s certainly fair to keep an eye on Anonym and Mozilla in this regard, but I haven’t seen anything objectionable there yet.
Similar for the Mozilla AI. It seems it’s still in it’s infancy and I’m not a fan of companies jumping on the air bandwagon in general, but at the very least Mozilla has identified the problems with other AI’s and is looking to create a better alternative. If they get caught stealing training data, releasing tools to allow high schoolers to make deep fake revenge porn, tell people to start putting glue in their pizza cheese, or some other crap like that then they should absolutely be criticized for it. But none of that has happened yet that I’m aware of.
I also can’t find exactly what you’re referring to with Russia. The closest thing is that it looks like there were some extensions that were made to work around Russian state censorship. The Russian government passed a law in March banning such workarounds. In response, Mozilla took down 5 extensions, reviewed them, and then decided to reinstate them in June. Not quite ideal, but still seems like reasonable action to me.
It’s fair and a good thing to criticize Mozilla and Firefox. But it seems like you’re trying to spin every single move they make as a sign the sky is falling.
And I also know that there are both states and corporations paying people to go on the Internet and push propaganda. Firrfox has a lot of enemies. You cant just blindly believe every article saying they are succumbing to enshittification.
Really awesome response, thanks for sharing a different opinion on all the points people have been bringing up in this thread.
The most fragile thing to me is their funding stream, which may even serve as a source of enshittification demands, implemented as subtly as possible.
PPA works for ad networks and not users. I don’t care about your ‘moderate take’ about a technology invented by the actual opposition who would strip-mine your corpse for minerals if they were given the opportunity just because it’s not as evil as it could be. It is still evil technology that works against you.
Oh so tracking cookies should be the same, find the settings menu to opt out since the majority of the population just clicks to accept everything.
This process has been underway since the project switched their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox. Early Firefox was lightweight with limited features and the idea that you would add your own as extensions for the features you wanted. Then it started gaining traction and the Mozilla developers started forcing features in that should’ve been extensions. It’s been downhill ever since!
Even better, they took actual extensions and made them built-in and impossible to remove. The work was already done to keep a lightweight browser with extra features in option, and they reverted it.
A few months ago people would have still downvoted your comment, but the message has made it to everyone now. Mozilla and with that Firefox is an endangered species that needs to be steered back into safety.
Can confirm, this is accurate.
Fucking Pocket.
It’s been going for years now. We just don’t want to move away because, frankly, there’s little viable alternatives.
Some people are working on ladybird atleast. And gnome web preforms decent
Some people are working on ladybird atleast.
Another permissively licensed toy.
Video Streaming on Gnome Web is a mess. Especially on YouTube. And It’s still lacking addons.
Very manageable though. Probably easier to fix then Mozilla’s enshitification
safari? but it only comes on mac and apple devices (OK not a good idea for a question)
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i think that the first sign of enshitification is its leaders and it seems like it’s already here.
i’m wondering what browser to switch to next.
Lynx
lemmyverse
Dammit you beat me to it
M-x eww
Ladybird! Though it’s not slated to be fully ready till 2026
Doesn’t it has some political issues?
If I recall correctly, they rejected a patch to make their documentation inclusive, rather than assuming that developers were all male, calling it a political crusade. It’s not so much a political problem as a sexism issue.
Pretty ironic, considering the project’s name (Ladybird).
Zen browser has been an interesting experience. Librewolf & Mullvad have been great 🤠
librewolf is my most likely bet; i want to stay away from anything chromium based.
ladybird might become a thing someday. And if all else fails we can still use curl or emacs.
I’ve also been trying out zen. While I really enjoy the sleek Ui and some addons it’s kind of slower than „vanilla Firefox“ which it depends on if I’m not wrong. I’ve tried on multiple machines though mainly on my work laptop which is quite beefy. I’m still using zen though so take what you want from that.
Librewolf is firefox based but still good for now. But long term we need either another engine or a major fork of firefox not just a cleaned up copy.
i’m aware of it and havent yet jumped the wagon because of my experience in the past w other firefox clones like iceweasel.
Firefox users were too cocky and wouldn’t shut up about how amazing it is. The universe took them down a peg.
Do you hear that Linux users?
Do you hear that Linux users?
There’s only one Firefox, there’s fucktonnes of Linux Distros. I am even willing to move to fucking Arch if push comes to shove.
Librewolf, Mullvad, Tor, Snowwassel… There’s more than one Firefox. Surely if some fucked up AI integration was included, one of them would just disable it.
None of them have the manpower or money to maintain a browser engine.
For reference, Opera stopped years ago and even Microsoft gave up.
You’re correct, that’s why they are not maintaining a browser engine.
They are forks of Firefox with relatively small changes, like default configs, telemetry disabled or Firefox sync and pocket removed.
But that doesn’t help if Mozilla goes away
There is only one linux kernel.
I’d like to see Linus’s response if anyone tried to enshittify the kernel.
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I like how whoever made this didn’t bother to put IE on the first door.
This is a 100% handmade meme by me lol
I actually did consider putting IE, but then I realized IE never went through enshittification it was just always shit lmao so it didn’t fit
IE had a near monopoly on browsing for a long time after Netscape Navigator enshittified (the true first door).
IE used to be great. But that was when the animals still spoke.
There will be no improvement with browsers until the introduction of one with a strong copyleft license.
I’m curious, how would copyleft license improve the quality of browser development? That is really about funding and management.
Don’t Firefox and Chromium already have that?
Chromium is fully entrenched. “strong copyleft”? Even Microsoft bent to the will of Chromium. And Firefox is just a silly thing where people like me hang on
If I remember correctly it’s under a copy left license which makes sense given it’s ultimately a derivative of KHTML.
KHTML is a discontinued browser engine that was developed by the KDE project. It originated as the engine of the Konqueror browser in the late 1990s, but active development ceased in 2016. It was officially discontinued in 2023. Built on the KParts framework and written in C++, KHTML had relatively good support for Web standards during its prime. Engines forked from KHTML are used by most of the browsers that are widely used today, including WebKit and Blink
Yes, blink is the engine Chromium uses. Since KHTML was an open source project any project based on it will have to be open source, unless of course it’s just used as a library. Even in that case though blink the engine is forced to be open source even if the browser as a whole isn’t. GNU licenses are considered infectious because anything containing any GNU code automatically and legally becomes open source. So KHTML being unmaintained is irrelevant.
doesn’t gpl exist? its quite strong.
can’t wait for lady bird browser
can’t wait for the servo browser engine
you can already build it, fairly featured
Same
Lynx is still here for you.
Lynx bros and gals, unite! ✊️
You are not alone… there is me and this dude above
Did you post this from Lynx?
It does not support JS, which as I understand, locks me out of lemmy. I may be wrong.
No, you’re not. I’ve been looking for a CLI way of posting on lemmy for quite a while.
So far, without success.
the so called end-of-world “enshittification”: anonymized telemetry
good way to see who’s paranoid ngl
It’s not just that, it’s the AI bullshit they’re adding too that will absolutely have forced data scraping eventually since we’re “using their product.” They’ll have some bullshit excuse like “we don’t take your browsing data, just the data of any interaction with our AI product for training purposes.”
You know because…?
This blind hate of AI is also a great sorta red flag. Currently afaik it’s only for auto image captions and some not even released (?) feature. Not all AI is the hostile copyright ignoring AI like gpt and shit
The ai integration Firefox has so far is an offline translator which is good, actually
It’s not about where it is, it’s about where it’s going. Tech companies love the slow burn. Chrome kept getting progressively worse and now they’re at the point where they’re blocking ad blockers at the browser level. Windows got away with nags to use MS Office products and now they’re leaping into start page ads and integrated AI shit you can’t remove. Mozilla is starting to enshittify, just like MS and Google did all those years ago.
zen browser (hardened) or forked librewolf that is designed to be fast is nice (my distro has this browser called cachy browser its based on librewolf with some compiler optimizations and its nice)
Yeah so I also use CachyOS on a couple things and one of them also uses Cachy Browser.
Noooooo.
I like my Extensions.
The internet isn’t worth having without Ublock, Ghostery, Scriptmonkey, etc.
i like the cut of this jib. But Firefox has for years been literally behind Microsoft on sidebar vertical tab browsing. Wasn’t it Firefox to make browser tabs mainstream?
they’re still working on it though, right ?
Check out Sidebery, it’s a vertical tab extension.
i’ve been using tree style tab for many years now. works great. I’m just confused why it isn’t native to firefox. kind of like why hasn’t VLC incorporated a dark mode with the classic interface? AH! I love open source software, not kidding.
Hey! Why not add an AI assistant that summarizes each page I visit! It would be awesome 😎. But only if the computation is done off-site. I don’t want to bother my computer cpu too much…this page depicts 7 consenting adults engaging in what would otherwise be described as an Australian cum slut gangbang clusterfuck with a 3 finger twist and large bottle of rum up the asshole…
Joe! Joe! Come here quick! Remember the dude from yesterday? Yeah, cum slut cluster fuck? Exactly! Look he’s asking for it again! I think he likes it. Why don’t we send his information to the appropriate authorities?
…ring ring! Yes? Is this the guy who really likes Australia cluster fuck videos? Ehhh, why would you ask such a thing?..well I am the authority on this topic! I wrote the book, see?..and another page …and another page… Yeah, it’s mostly photos of me and my 6 male friends. Oh! Ah!.. Can I help you? Well I didn’t bring my 6 friends with me but do you have sex guy friends? Oh I said sex, didn’t I. Yeah I do have sex friends! Wait a minute, did Mozilla Firefox sent you after they shared my most intimate searches thru the NSA AI servers? Gosh darn it! Well it doesn’t matter, what’s done is done. I guess I’ll just take my pants off, go ahead and get more comfortable too. You want anything to eat while we wait here for my six friends? One of them is really fat, is that okay? I mean he’s really, like you know, morbidly obese sort of fat. I hope you are okay with his girth.
And Soo the user had a great time thanks to Mozilla Firefox. The end! She was never found until the x-ray, when her body was found biologically fused and bonded to the user’s friend’s body along with two other doctors from previous visits. It was pretty bad. It was big news in Australia 🦘.
I gotta go sleep 💤😴💤💤.
Think this is from bribes paid by Google?
I’m really holding out for Ladybird.
