I wonder how much of that is user aging out of active usage for one reason or another (retirement, switching to a tablet from a desktop, etc) and how much of it is people switching (and how much of that switching is to something newer and small (e.g. not Safari, Edge, etc).
It is definitely going to go back up in June. I don't use Firefox now, it's now a good experience when compared to Chrome but will definitely switch if that's how I get my clean web browsing back.
The pay wouldn't be so egregious if it wasn't a constant pattern of pay raises, despite by their own stats, losing MAU and revenue. They also laid off 250 people (which is much more than $5MM, any way you cut it) but it seems in bad taste to give the CEO a raise in the same year.
The journalist has blamed all this on "editors" -- so we'll never know _who_ exactly did the stealth edits and lied about contacting for comment. In any case, it is pretty ironic, given the CEO of Mozilla seems to think we need more than de-platforming to combat "misinformation":
It’s been my browser for both web development and personal browsing for more years than I can remember. It is terrific. I don’t even have chrome installed on any of my computers.
If you want to use uBlock Origin on iOS, there's Orion browser. Enabling extensions and installing uBlock Origin on it requires a tedious step and the app is noticeably slower to respond and just overall worse and buggier than Safari, but the ad blocking works.
I can recommend librewolf, firefox with all the mozilla crap stripped out and good default privacy settings. Can tweak the options easily too if there's anything too annoying.
> Binaries are unsigned, third party update service, Google safe browsing disabled unless you build from source, running unusual browser setups can actually make you more distinctive online, unencrypted DNS by default, speed of security patches is slower than base Firefox, etc.
Unsigned binaries is good, update service is good, google safe browsing disabled is mega good, unencrypted dns is comparatively good from what i understand compared to mozilla's imperfect solution. Speed of security patches is not great, but having non-mozilla vetting on security patches is a tradeoff that is worthwhile.
Librewolf is great, but an easy way to lock down regular Firefox is to generate a profile on something like ffprofile.com and replace the default config.
If you're a duel monitor nerd it feels required if you want to do something besides internet surf on one monitor and stream something on other.
I dont have the most powerful computer but if I want to play baldurs gate 3 on one monitor while stream something on the other monitor it has to be in firefox over chrome.
Firefox is my main browser for many years, and it's still good.
(The only main thing I don't use it for is for the DRM that my main streaming service wants right now. I dedicate Chromium to that, to keep the nastiness away from my main browser.)
With Firefox, you probably do want to change a lot of settings from the default, for privacy&security reasons.
Firefox is absolutely not holistically security&privacy-friendly overall -- there's a long history, of often behaving like a for-profit tech company, to grow out of -- but it's the closest I'm aware of that we have right now.
Not helping is that browser standards were captured and turned into both serving the needs of particular kinds of businesses, and as massive market moats for dominant players.
I don't know what to think of all the browser startups and open source forks. I know at least one person at Brave, and that person is a 100% straight-shooter true-believer in privacy&security (and intellectually formidable), but some things leadership has done are too trust-me and bad optics. Regarding the rest of the efforts, there might be gold in there, but we have to skeptical of each one by default, for two reasons: (1) our field is bad at what we do, and that's now reflected deep in our technology stacks, as well as in practices for new development; (2) our field has normalized a lot of sociopathic behavior in the last 25 years, so it's easy for even well-intentioned people to inadvertently do bad things, and there are also a lot people with not as admirable of intentions.
Surviving but continues to bleed users.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity