Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

It feels like the only reasonable path forward would be for the EU to buy Mozilla and fund it as a public resource.

Capital extraction is fundamentally opposed to user freedom. If we want an open web, we, the people need to be maintaining it and not rely on MBA types to do it for us.

Time to migrate to a Firefox fork

Just when I re-started using it because of the vertical tabs.

Wait, how could "blocking ad blockers" bring in money at all?

Sincerely, I'm just using Firefox ATM because of Sidebery.

If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant.

My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the web developers don't optimize for it... but still, it's not a problem on Brave, so, I don't really care for apologising for it).

as soon as ublock goes, firefox goes.. more anonymity that way anyway since being a firefox user already makes me stand out from the crowd.

For fuck sake, for-profit side of Mozilla, get a damn grip!

Update, since this is getting traction on Reddit

I'm not against Mozilla making money. Like a regular citizen needs to make money, companies and even nonprofits need it too.

Don't second guess yourself OP. Firefox is not a product. It's an open-source project countless people have contributed their time and dime to over the years. The Mozilla corporation didn't create Firefox, the open-source community did. Mozilla was entrusted to be the stewards of the project and have repeatedly violated that trust. Mozilla is commoditizing other people's hard work while enriching themselves in the process at the expense of the community and abused the trust we placed in them to get away with it.

Every bit of the base is free s/w including both phones. Stop felating trump epstein and gang incoudingbrms.

Grow a pair already. And stop calling normal average "typical"

Mozilla received $555 million from Google in 2023

Half a billion, they are both milking and lying to you

I exclusively used Firefox for 20 years. I moved over to Edge and haven't looked back. Mozilla and the people still using it seem to think maintaining your own rendering engine with Gecko is somehow keeping the internet free. Wrong abstraction layer of freedom to worry about. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. It should have moved to Webkit or Blink many years ago, and focused on user experience. Such as extensions to keep MV2 addons working, and even expanding on the capabilities, like the old XUL/XPCOM Firefox extensions. Those things are why people like me used Firefox, not because of all the money and work put into Gecko. Which is just redundant in the end.

Moving to Blink or Webkit, keeping MV2 and XUL, was where the effort should have been placed. Also, I never understood Pocket or any of their other decisions. Now it's being floated to ban adblockers. Poorly run organization that given its direction and decisions, deserves to die.

This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough. We need a web browser that is actively hostile towards corporations and surveillance capitalism.

I realize that a FOSS browser is an absolutely enormous monstrosity of a project. An undertaking akin to a whole FOSS OS. But it's also comparably important, especially when no FOSS alternatives exist in the browser space. We (I mean that very loosely, not having contributed anything myself) have managed to produce _several_ FOSS OS-es. Why are we seemingly completely fucked if Mozilla does in fact kill itself/Firefox? I don't doubt that we are, I just don't understand.

[dead]

Ok win

You can't kill ad-blockers in a browser, unless you don't allow running AI models in browsers (which will become very soon an integral part of your browsing usage - for some of us it already is, mostly through extension).

I will one day just add "Remove all ads on the page I am browsing" into my BROWSER_AI.md file.