Skewed priorities like trying to make sure that Firefox continues to exist even with the massive amount of competition in the browser space and everything being taken over by chromium. Yeah. Definitely skewed priorities.
Mozilla laid off the entire Servo team (new browser engine built with rust) in 2020 and shifted more focus to products and services other than Firefox (like their VPN, Pocket, etc.) - this is public knowledge, they literally published the email that was sent to employees that day (blog.mozilla.org/…/Message-to-Employees-Change-in… ).
It’s not like it used to be. Even thunderbird has had tons of great work put into it. If you’re ever sick of using weird stuff like palemoon you should see for yourself. All the extensions I liked are back.
You can easily remove them. Mozilla isn’t a for profit company, but they need to have money to run somehow. Dunno if you’ve seen Chrome lately but it’s 1000x worse.
I have been using this browser primarily or exclusively since before it was called Firefox. I can’t tell you the earliest version I still have an installer for, because neither Wine nor Windows will run it. It remains the best option - by a long shot - but not because it’s getting any better.
It takes nearly as long to decrapify a new Firefox install as it does to compile Librewolf.
Install uBlock.
Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.
Disable “sponsored” stories. AKA, listicles designed to draw in idiots who want to see which 8 child actors from the 90s turned out to be the tallest. Alarmingly close to the tacky crap that you might see on a fresh Windows install.
Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.
Now disable Pocket. Remembering to go into about:config to really disable it
Disable telemetry.
Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.
Remove Amazon, Bing, et al. from the search engine list.
Remove “suggested” and “sponsored” autocomplete.
Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.
Remind yourself that, despite this crap, Firefox is still a better browser than any Chromium knockoff.
Sync between mobile and Firefox is good though. Sadly I use Samsung Internet on Android because I think it’s better, but when I used Firefox on both it was really good. I can still use KDE Connect to send the link to my clipboard, but it doesn’t always connect (after a reboot) automatically.
Samsung internet is chromium and often out of date. On Android, use Fennec or Mull (both firefox based, mull is the best security*/privacy android browser)
What about Palemoon? Or epiphany which is pretty decent if you enable extensions support via gsettings and use /etc/hosts for blocking ads for better performance?
It’s not a bad thing that Firefox is doing little things to attract a broader audience, luckily you don’t set it up very often and sync is there to use.
except it is like making it so things can just download without asking so you can go to a webpage and it just downloads stuff automatically which is really insecure but hey chrome does it that way so mozilla just oh so obviously has to copy them yeah you can fix it but that should in no way be the default
Sometimes this doesn’t work though. I use Firefox at work, but I’m required to use Google Drive, and any pdf from Drive will automatically download to my default download location without prompting me. This may not be Mozilla’s fault, but it’s shitty that any site can just choose to ignore my preferences.
I have a similar problem on Android with forcing pinch to zoom. Sites can and do use code to forcibly resist this accessibility setting. Like, a lot of sites.
They really just can’t get a break. When they take money from Google they get attacked. When they try to create other revenue streams (pocket, vpn, etc.) they get attacked. I don’t think you want the browser to be a paid for subscription product and the donations aren’t enough to reliably cover browser development.
Maintaining and keeping secure a large standards compliant browser is decidedly expensive. And most of the expenses are not one off they are ongoing.
Listen, I love what Mozilla stands for, or at least what they claim to stand for. But every time they’ve been asked to choose between their principles and money, they’ve chosen money. On the one hand, I kind of don’t blame them – after all, if I was a scrappy broke nonprofit singlehandedly maintaining one of the most complex and fast-moving pieces of software mankind has ever devised, I’d probably take money wherever I could get it too – but on the other, paying lip service to caring about your users’ privacy isn’t a good look
I’m mostly thinking of making Google the default search engine and not doing much of anything to stop its data-gathering out of the box (although I will give them credit for the Tracking Protection feature in private windows and not taking active steps to prevent people from protecting their privacy, what the hell Google), integrating the famously-invasive Pocket into the browser with no obvious way to remove it, and creating a new paid-exclusive AI help chatbot for web deevelopers that’s just ChatGPT in a trenchcoat
Admittedly Mozilla’s track record is light years better than any of the other software companies out there, and I won’t begrudge them taking Google money in order to survive, but…
Are you really complaining for the default search engine? Wtf just change it. Mozzilla really needs the money to stay afloat, just don’t use Google if you don’t want to.
Does it? Is this really a selling point? I don’t think any layman needs to worry about documents that long and absolutely no one needs to summarize a web page in normal browsing.
Edit: not that I’m against it or anything, just kinda stumped that this is considered important.
If all the competition has a useful feature and FireFox doesn’t that will only keep users away from FireFox. The unfortunate reality of today’s world is that people have low attention spans and want an AI to spoon feed them whatever garbage they want.
i dont fucking want ANY program “summarizing” for me. if i want to know what it says ill read the damn thing like an adult. this ““ai”” cannot be trusted because its nothing more than a big math equation. its cool tech but has no real intelligence.
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