[neilv]

One way Mozilla could still differentiate is by doing privacy&security all-out.

It currently seems that Firefox is only a little more privacy-respecting than the browser of one of the most invasive surveillance dotcoms.

It's been that way for years, and every year is lost ground.

I suspect that Mozilla's need for funding, and the sources of funding for so long, are what have them looking so similar to a dotcom.

When users won't pay money, Mozilla has seemed to focus on ways to sell its users to big companies.

Maybe there's a viable combination of expense reductions, refined focus, and switching to solely charitable (hands-off) donations? (Maybe we'd see little sponsor logos for most of the FAANGs, for various motivations. And for some other Fortune 500s, for good PR. And for public-interest organizations and government units/programs.)

[Sylos]

It's definitely true that Mozilla needs funding beyond what users are willing to donate. Especially with other 'free' browsers available. But all scandals that I'm aware of were nonsense that journalists wanted to believe, in order to land the next big "the good guys are actually evil"-story.

A more privacy-friendly default search engine is clearly the elephant in the room, but their other financing strategies have been done to try to supersede that and to my knowledge did never infringe on privacy. If you feel different about one of them, please read up on it. There's been a lot of misinformation out there.

Mozilla would make themselves liable to prosecution, if they were to simply violate privacy without a very good reason, as privacy is an explicit goal of their legally-binding non-profit mission statement.

Having said that, there is a good reason why Mozilla has to compromise in terms of privacy. And that is webpage owners' interests.

Webpage owners want to track you. And they can opt to not support Firefox, if they can't track you. Which is kind of bad for Firefox and ultimately for Mozilla's mission, which is making the web a healthier place, for which they need Firefox even just as a second implementation of the web standards.

So, yes, they do have to balance out webpage owners' interests and yours. And yes, they cannot give you as privacy-friendly defaults as some of the browsers that don't have to care about webpage owners' interests. If you're a tiny Chromium fork, no one's going to block you, because mother Chrome is absolutely lovely to webpage owners.

But you should notice that Mozilla gives you the tools to fix the defaults and goes to great lengths to be privacy-friendly when webpage owners are not involved.

[neilv]

Every year is lost ground:

1. Your conception of a modern browser is what surveillance&brochure dotcoms want it to be. "Tools to fix the defaults" doesn't fix this.

2. The anti-user facilities in your browser that are now expected are what dotcoms wanted. Taking them away will be harder than saying they couldn't have them in the first place.

3. The now-massive complexity of browsers (to provide features and directions that the dotcoms want) is also a barrier to engineering and improvement, and also keeps out upstarts.

4. Dotcoms couldn't always afford to block Firefox.

With the now small market share, Mozilla might be a charity case, or it might be an antitrust buffer case. I'd favor Mozilla adopting a public interest charity model, and taking PR money from big corps (among other sources) in exchange for a sponsor logo, but not selling its users in any way.