It is an indictment on the state of the web that regardless of Mozilla's missteps, Firefox remains the best choice for a secure, open-source web browser that isn't another chromium reskin.
I don't get the public "step down" that people are taking from using Firefox. How many users are actually switching? I doubt it's much. Many are audible about it, though.
Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers
I switched on mobile and on MacOS. I intend to switch on Linux soon.
> Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...
No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better software, I’d spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with advertising.
I don’t mind crash reporting.
I don’t mind opt-in telemetry for QA.
There is no justification for telemetry by default, not informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and selling your data as payment for use of software.
Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue beats subscription money will always compromise their customers.
I don’t want that. And Firefox is now in the category of software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a fork steps up.
In the meantime, I’m using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-WebKit alternative.
I switched. I have been on the fence for some time now, what with the pocket nagware and the various 'sponsored' features showing up in FF. Very easy for me to start using librewolf. It even seems to be faster.
That's not the problem people have with Firefox. One of the issues right now is that there are people who have intentionally opted-in to sharing "technical data" to Mozilla for the sole purpose of improving the browser, when in fact, it's not just for that but also for improving ad-tech which was never an intent those power users had in mind: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/03/12/mozilla-has-been-s...
I also switched from Firefox to LibreWolf, both on Linux and on macOS. I'll likely use the latest Chrome just for banking and other high security tasks, but for my normal browsing LibreWolf seems to work fine.
You can’t get an OSS team to fix vulns in a meaningful amount of time, let alone research them. Waterfox/Palemoon stay months behind the official branch and are always vulnerable.
Perhaps more an indictment of failed regulators who have allowed these mega corporations to entrench a single browser engine, steer web standards, and consolidate so many of the social destinations on the web.
Big corporations on the w3c board, and their control of the largest platforms, have contributed to the enshitification of the web by making web standards move just as fast as Windows APIs or Office formats. Making it much harder for open source volunteer driven projects to keep up.
I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.
And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new standards that they launch on their platforms and become ubiquitous to end users.
We need a safe harbor outside of the WWW for things that actually need nothing more than HTML 1.0. And be prepared to do without the wonderful services and contents that are "offered" by big corps "for free".
Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers