It's coming! :(

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.
- For whatever reason Lemmy seems to have an anti-firefox agenda. They make some good points but most of the posts on Lemmy are just pure emotion, speculations, and FUD.
  
  It's in the last line of their comment:
  But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.
  
  As a former moderator of r/Firefox... We inherited this from reddit.
  
  Deleted
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Can confirm, this is accurate.
  
  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.
  
  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.

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?
- 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.
  
  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.

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.

can't wait for lady bird browser
- can't wait for the servo browser engine
- you can already build it, fairly featured
- Same

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
- doesn't gpl exist? its quite strong.

- Ben garrison comic without any reference to cum?
  
  You just made the reference meta.
- Ok I'm probably just a simpleton who doesn't get it...but is this comic really suggesting that HTML5 I'd a negative thing, and worse, is the drumbeat of a tyrannical web?
  I mean really....HTML5 is one of the best things to happen to the Web and the W3C is imo the essential glue holding things together.
  Browser inconsistencies are so few and far between now it makes building an inclusive Web much easier, you can almost do it by accident.
  
  Ben Garrison is a right-wing idiot. He doesn't know jack about much of anything.

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?

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.
- You don't have a problem. You have a passion.
- 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.

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 💤😴💤💤.

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.
  
  There is only one linux kernel.

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

I'm really holding out for Ladybird.

Wuh oh, I'm OOTL here, what's happening to Firefox?
- They've been making announcements indicating that they're going to start focusing on chatbot/AI/LLM bullshit instead of what they should be doing, which is maintaining their web browser.
  
  Welp
  
  🤮
- Nothing. People have been memeing about it’s death for 10 years.
  
  I had another reply that gave a decent reason to support the meme :)
- Nothing. Lemmy hates Firefox for some reason. It's getting old and boring seeing these posts. You can disable all the telemetry crap and anything else you want in the about:config. The fact that they let you do this automatically makes it better than most other browsers.

This is actually perfect in that enshittification is exactly like death: it comes for everyone or in the context of technology, everything.
There is no popular product or service that doesn't eventually get the enshittification treatment to squeeze more blood from the stone.
- Not quite, I don't think. Enshittification is driven by profit motive, which means if there's no money at all involved, then there's no motive.
  I guess you chose your words carefully though because the terms 'product' and 'service' pretty much imply that money is involved somewhere there.
  
  In terms of foss projects it's ego of maintainer like in cdda case or/and competent maintainer stepped down like linus plans to

Think this is from bribes paid by Google?
- You mean 500 million a year ?

Until people are donating enough money to make maintaining an open source browser doable, this will continue to happen.
- The thing is that we need a better donation system, for people to trust it.
  An auditable system, and goal oriented.
  I'm tired of donating to something and seeing that instead of the good project I wanted my money went to some crazy side project or to some over the top salaries for high corporate.
  We need some kind of trustable platform that audits where donation money goes, and enforces binding of the donated money for the purpose it was donated for.
  I got really burned with the whole wikiMedia thing. And since them I'm very cautious to who I donate to.
- The chair-person makes 2.5 million a year....
  It think the problem might be they have too much money....

I've left Firefox twice now and come back. It's still far less shitty than the other main options.

Time to start using my Mullvad browser sigh.
- I dont mean to hate on Mullvad, but its got its problems too - mainly because it seems to be too unknown even to admins maintaining different services, bringing problems to its everyday use.
  I tried to start using Mullvad as my daily driver, but had to go back to FF because so many of our university's and its affliated services wouldnt work with it at all or would make it a pain to do simple tasks with all the shit web ui -services, portals and their logins that is the modern academia/work environment.
  Well, at least I educated about 4 service admins about the existence of Mullvad before going grudgingly back to FF, or rather with these past years controversies, SusFox.

Well then I'll make my own browser! With blackjack! And hookers!
Oh. Wait...that's just tor-browser.

Yeah, I moved to librewolf

oh well time to get back into the gemini protocol

what about ark browser... are they ok ?
- Art isn't open source, right?
  
  and also based on chromium

I'm using opera (though it's GX to be fair) and it's still great to me. What did they do?
- Since you asked
  It's a proprietary closed source flavor of chrome which supports google's monopoly and does not respect your privacy or freedom.
  Here is some quick info if you're interested: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/opera
  https://digdeeper.club/articles/browsers.xhtml
  https://digdeeper.club/articles/liftingtheveil.xhtml
  If you don't like that I'd suggest looking at librewolf (firefox/gecko based) or ungoogled chromium (chromium based)
- In my opinion, I see it as they making misleading advertising, collexting data and supposedly sending it to the CCP, and having a generaly bloated browser.
- Others said it's spyware, but they are also loan scammers.
  I honestly don't know what data this browser exfiltrates, or what else malicious it might do, but I don't trust anyone this shady to run proprietary code on my devices. Scammers rarely respect any kind of boundaries.
  
  Wow I didn't know about this, very blatant.
- Opera died a long time ago, they no longer use their own browser engine. Nowadays they are just a Chromium skin with Chinese spyware

Look at these numbers and tell me with a straight face that chrome is dead.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/#desktop+mobile+tablet+console_browser-ww-:~:text=See%20the%20latest%20browser%20market%20share%20data%20for%20July%202024-bar
- Meme says it's shitty, not dead
  
  that actually makes more sense, my bad
- Read the meme better
  
  thanks, the however-many comments before you that said the same thing didn't get through to me, but yours totally did!
- Don't think it's talking about "death" just enshitification
  Side note: gotdamn firefox is less than 3.0% According to the same website, Linux is at 4.5% marketshare. It's rarer to use firefox than linux (I'm on iceweasel btw)
  
  we should get a Great Unclean One photoshopped in then
- why did you think anyone would say would chrome is dead... oh youre a troll
  
  no, I'm an idiot with bad eyesight and enough experience to expect that most people are even dumber than I am.
- "It's dead to me" is the meme here like adobe still kicking but it's not very liked after the controversies is it now?
- It's not dead. It's just the default option for boomers.
  It's like Internet Explorer or Netscape. It exists so you csn download something better.
  
  I don't think you fully understand just how much the 'default' is. Between edge and chrome it's the default for everything.
  Introducing children to the Internet? Chrome. Old folks? Chrome. businesses? Chrome (sometimes edge). Personal use for 90% of people? chrome.
  (also edge is used to install something better which again, for 90% of people, is chrome.)