It will be difficult because I have been using Firefox for years and tried to avoid anything Chrome-based and I am not very happy with Google's Manifest v3 approach, but Mozilla just crossed a red line for me.
Did it really cross a red line for you? I feel like Firefox is judged much more harshly than Chrome and it's unfair.
Mozilla the company has made some terrible decisions that I strongly disagree with (update page featuring a movie ad, pocket integration, removing a search engine from the defaults, nerfing android addons for no reason)
But compared to every other browser, I don't understand how people think it's even a comparison. Chrome (user history tracking, targeted advertising, FLOC, manifest v3, strong-arming due to market share, etc etc), Edge (same as chrome but replace G with M), and Brave (referral link injection, cryptocoin adware).
To me, no single thing on FF's list is worse than any single thing in the other list. And together it's out of the question which is better.
I don't think it's useful to tell regular people not to use Firefox either unless you tell them they really shouldn't be using the other three (which I doubt many are doing). Am I missing something? Honest question - do you really think the negatives of having someone use not-firefox outweigh the negatives of Firefox?
> I feel like Firefox is judged much more harshly than Chrome and it's unfair.
Mozilla claimed that their mission was to empower users. Some people are more upset by hypocrisy than the actual actions. If they want to change https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ from "More power to you." to, say, "More power to us." then I'd personally be a lot less irritated at them.
(This isn't specifically a comment on the current subject, BTW; I've been increasingly irritated by Mozilla's hypocrisy for years now.)
I do understand the frustration with things like that but I just think people forget the big picture. Totaling all annoyances and negatives about Mozilla (which are a lot) against the competition makes me seriously glad I don't use them.
This hypocracy+everything I listed about FF+everything else Mozilla has done is a drop in the bucket compared to the user-hostile world that is Edge/Brave/Chrome.
To be clear: I agree with you. I harden Firefox because their defaults do not make me happy. But it's going to take a whole lot more bad decisions before they're worse than their competition.
I think we agree, then; I'm writing this from Firefox:) It's just that being the least-bad option seems a more hollow victory with every incident, and if a genuinely good option ever showed up I'd jump happily.
Not OP (and not yet uninstalling firefox, but it feels ever closer), but it feels like mozilla have done something sneaky and questionable every quarter now for the past 2 years. For OP, this is possibly the straw that broke the camel's back
As far as I know, Firefox is the easiest browser to add this back in. Right click on basically any search box and Add A Search Shortcut and you can bind it to "ya" or something.
Similar to duck duck go bangs but it has to be a prefix and ! Isn't required. w => wipedia, y => youtube
I feel like this is a weird attitude to have toward an open-source software project. "Sure, developers added 900 performance improvements / new features / bug fixes this quarter to a browser I get to use for free, but they also did 2 non-critical things I don't really care for so now I oppose this software."
I do think it would have been _better_ if Firefox made the set of included-by-default search providers something that gets merged into your profile, so that future removals only affect new installations / new profiles (and existing users who happen to use that engine don't have to go out of their way to re-add them after an update). I don't really care _which_ search engine definitions come with a browser out-of-the-box, as long as they're easy to customize.
I fancy myself a fairly technically aware person, and I have no idea what improvements, features or bug fixes Firefox added this quarter that would outweigh all the little and big bad things. In terms of performance, a recent patch made Electrolysis or what it is they called their per-domain process thing the default, immediately making CPU and especially RAM usage shoot up massively (as well as introducing some new bugs pertaining to dead IPC pipes). I tried to put up with it for maybe a week and then switched it off by an about:config switch, which I'm entirely sure they will remove in another 10 versions at the latest. The only way in which I see them adding features takes the form of supporting the latest of the stream of under-the-hood changes that keep coming out of Google's web standard printer, which generally seem to add no user-visible functionality or benefits but are inevitably relied on by some random subset of important websites resulting in the internet gradually breaking if I don't want to update my browser.
I would much rather they use their dwindling influence on standards bodies to block and sabotage the changes that necessitate the constant updating (and attendant maintenance burden which takes smaller browser projects out of the running) at every turn; and if it so happens that this results in their influence disappearing even faster and/or them getting booted, then at least this may pave the way for the long-overdue antitrust suit against Google that many have been saying Mozilla's existence serves to prevent.
(It's not like Firefox is developed by unpaid volunteers. Am I using the browser "for free" if Google sees it as advantageous to pay them money for, among others, my continued existence as a user of the browser?)
I agree with the grandparent comment. And it is because of separation of concerns. You can put it in the same basket as freedom of speech, but it's a bit different.
A browser is a browser. It does not have to promote a moral view. In fact it has to provide ways to find information. Not to limit purposefully ways to find information.
It sounds like your issue is not that the browser is promoting a moral view but rather that it’s promoting one in conflict with the moral view you think it should be promoting.
Because I do not condone that move.
It will be difficult because I have been using Firefox for years and tried to avoid anything Chrome-based and I am not very happy with Google's Manifest v3 approach, but Mozilla just crossed a red line for me.