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by e2le 944 days ago
>How’s firefox these days?

Surviving but continues to bleed users.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

3 comments

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.
I would use Firefox, if not for Mozilla.
And instead you use what? And why is that better or worse in specific ways?
I just don't like Mozilla, as a company, for many reasons.

The main ones being:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

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.

And:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/

The fact that they're leaning so much into political activism.

On their homepage they're promoting a journalist involved in some misinformation controversy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220928230910/https://www.washi...

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":

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

Not a fan of statements that creep into invasions of privacy from a supposedly privacy focused browser.

So, to sum it up;

Wild executive pay for poor performance and too much political activism (that I tend to not agree with) for a web browser.

Those are all valid reasons for not liking Mozilla. What do you use instead then?
Safari and Brave
Fairly good choices from what I understand (although I'm not sure I would consider Safari is a good alternative for someone with complaints about corporate pay and structure, even if that was a concern of yours I suspect you don't have much of a choice on the device you're using it on).

For me, one of the most important reasons to use Firefox is to support one of the few remaining alternate browser implementations. Sure, Chrome and Safari and Edge have all likely diverged to a degree since their shared ancestry (which really wasn't that long ago), but I suspect they're far more similar underneath than different. I would prefer they not be political (but I can see how they get mixed up, as leaning in heavy on privacy is necessarily political in some ways, such as when it involves opinions of nations that disagree, and then there are probably some at he org that want to push in what they see as a similar direction on other topics), but I don't really care about the pay of the CEO in comparison to the vital importance I think heterogeneity in the actual engines browsers use is for many reasons.

Brave? So the cryptocurrency-laced browser made by the guy who donated $1000 to a Republican candidate who the year before said "our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide" and "homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution"? [0] Huh. Really not seeing how that's somehow preferable over the company that.. checks notes.. demands transparency in funding for advertising, and calls for research into how centralized social platforms and their algorithms work and are affecting people -- none of which have anything to do with invading anyone's privacy.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controver...

How is Mozilla worse than Google?
I don't use Chrome. I just don't agree with the political activism and business decisions of Mozilla.