Firefox

I think people come down a lot harder on Firefox than they should. It's a great browser, and they do a lot for the freedom of the community and as an open source ambassador.

I feel like people generally feel that, given their prominence, they could do a lot more. This is certainly true. Their weird corporate structure, their half-baked experiments like Pocket or VPN, their Google ad money, these are all valid issues.

But do you know what else is supported by Google ad money? Chromium and every browser built on it. Do you know what has a far more corporate culture? Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc. Do you know who else had weird little money making experiments? Every other browser (Brave's Basic Attention Tokens, DDG's Privacy Pro, etc.).

Firefox makes a bigger target because of their relative popularity and long history.

That's exactly what happens if we lose Firefox - Chrome (and those based on it) now have all the power to disable all ad blocking - enabling Google's horrific privacy-less future

It's a good opportunity for any Chrome users in the crowd to switch to Librewolf. It may be a small project but it's been around for a while and they haven't made any mistakes that I've heard about. Google has its various off-brand browsers using the engine, why shouldn't Mozilla get some? It comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, and has none of the telemetry and ads of Firefox.

Firefox stands as the lesser of two evils.

The problem is that for the past 8 months, Mozilla has been accelerating making Firefox more evil, and if it continues at this trajectory, it might catch up to Google.

I don't see any issues with Firefox?

Firefox has a lot of issues

I dunno... I mean, what are your expectations?

Ultimately I have actual problems in my life, my browser choice is an absolutely marginal decision I make when the actual goal is to visit a website that in itself is usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something, checking on a piece of information, etc etc.

It's kinda weird to even think so much about browsers - excluding when you are actively developing for/with them - that you recognize issues beyond a single big one like "Has no support for an adblocker". I can get behind that being big enough to matter in regards to which browser is usable or not.

But again, if you develop for Firefox or an addon for it, I can see why details matter and you'd probably have a long laundry list of issues, sure.

I see many people say to just use forks of Firefox. I use Librewolf myself. However, are such forks not very dependent on upstream Firefox not being completely enshittified? Will it be possible to keep the forks free of all new bullshit, or does that at any point become a too difficult/comprehensive task for the maintainers?

I switched back to Firefox two or three years ago. It was tough at first but now that I have it setup for me, I like it so much better than Chrome. Very little noise, ad-free most of the time.

Now I only use Chrome when I'm shopping because that's the only thing it's good for.

Firefox's desktop market share is the lowest it has ever been, and its mobile share is zero-point-smithereens. not to be a party pooper but google and chromium's monopolistic hold is only growing stronger.

Librewolf works just fine, out of the box.

Exactly, so you have Firefox, Floorp, LibreWolf and even Waterfox. Just pick one.

Even tho I somtimes don't care about floss I enjoy firefox it's customizable

Waterfox gang.

I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.

I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they've received show that there is real demand for an alternative.

But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.

There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.