I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.
It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.
One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.
I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.
But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.
If they were violating people’s privacy, it would be completely unacceptable to make it opt-out.
But they aren’t. They are doing things that some people believe they’ll want to violate people’s privacy in the future to do in a different way.
I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up. Their description is here:
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
It sounds interesting… It also sounds like it will fail, because Mozilla seems to think that trackers are primarily interested in collecting ad stats, and that targeted advertising is less critical, but I think in reality it’s the other way around, and advertisers won’t accept such a limited solution.
Oh, I wish them the best and hope they succeed.
But I also think they’ll fail. And not even for that one reason, I think there are enough advertisers not interested on tracking to make it succeed. I just think they’ll flounder it. What is too bad, because they are the ones best positioned to make it.
The sanest take yet. If this were reddit and gold meant anything, you’d deserve it
I was an early adopter of Firefox 20+ years ago. It started going downhill more than 15 years ago and I bailed to Chrome when that launched. It really was better than Firefox at the time. Then Chrome got worse and I wound up back on Firefox, not because Firefox had gotten better in that time but because everything else had gotten worse than Firefox in the intervening time. Also, if going from 48% market share in 2009 to a barely relevant <5% in 2024 doesn’t count as a downfall I’m not sure what does.
Also the plugins eventually caught up and made it more usable.
The most fragile thing to me is their funding stream, which may even serve as a source of enshittification demands, implemented as subtly as possible.
I’m just following the warning signs, in the last year:
There’s the news of the opt-out only on tracking as you brought up. Then they fired one of their open source executives because he had the audacity to get cancer. Then they acquired an ad company because “we’re built different and we can fix her and totally not get corrupted by ads in the process”. Then the AI shit oh and ofc the news where they almost sucked Putin’s dick and pulled FF from being accessible in Russia for a day or 2
And a bunch of other stuff that I’m probably forgetting about. And that’s just within the last year.
Google and Chrome were great to! Until they weren’t. FF probably won’t ever actually die, not for a while at least. But the User and Privacy first aspects certainly will. They’ll probably succumb to enshittification and become like any other corporate browser like Chrome or Edge for years to come.
Ah I just searched for Firefox news and the PPA thing was the only one that came up.
As for firing the executive, I can’t find anything about him being specifically relayed to being open-source anything. Steve Teixeira was their Chief Product Office briefly- he only was hired in 2022 and left the company a few months ago, and prior to that he worked for Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. So I don’t think this can really be framed as some attack on open-source or privacy. If the allegations are true that they discriminated against him for having cancer that’s shitty of course, but Mozilla has of course claimed that they did not and it’s going to court. They didn’t fire him either- they asked him to take a demotion to Senior VP of Technology Strategy and he chose to leave instead.
Yes Mozilla bought an ad company. They’re called Anonym and their stated goal is to provide an advertising service that can exist profitably without violating privacy. I hate ads- I block as many as I can and I use a pi-hole. I avoid ad-supported services as much as possible. I’m also privileged enough that I can afford to pay for a subscription to a lot of stuff or just buy physical media to rip and store on my own server. But there was a time when I was a broke college student stuck using campus Internet and playing by their rules, so the safest option I could afford was just to watch ads. Ads can be an ethical business model that helps improve the lives of low-income households. For people with legal or ethical concerns about piracy, or additional restrictions on their Internet, or who just lack the technical skill.
It’s certainly fair to keep an eye on Anonym and Mozilla in this regard, but I haven’t seen anything objectionable there yet.
Similar for the Mozilla AI. It seems it’s still in it’s infancy and I’m not a fan of companies jumping on the air bandwagon in general, but at the very least Mozilla has identified the problems with other AI’s and is looking to create a better alternative. If they get caught stealing training data, releasing tools to allow high schoolers to make deep fake revenge porn, tell people to start putting glue in their pizza cheese, or some other crap like that then they should absolutely be criticized for it. But none of that has happened yet that I’m aware of.
I also can’t find exactly what you’re referring to with Russia. The closest thing is that it looks like there were some extensions that were made to work around Russian state censorship. The Russian government passed a law in March banning such workarounds. In response, Mozilla took down 5 extensions, reviewed them, and then decided to reinstate them in June. Not quite ideal, but still seems like reasonable action to me.
It’s fair and a good thing to criticize Mozilla and Firefox. But it seems like you’re trying to spin every single move they make as a sign the sky is falling.
And I also know that there are both states and corporations paying people to go on the Internet and push propaganda. Firrfox has a lot of enemies. You cant just blindly believe every article saying they are succumbing to enshittification.
Really awesome response, thanks for sharing a different opinion on all the points people have been bringing up in this thread.
Oh so tracking cookies should be the same, find the settings menu to opt out since the majority of the population just clicks to accept everything.
It’s been going for years now. We just don’t want to move away because, frankly, there’s little viable alternatives.
Some people are working on ladybird atleast. And gnome web preforms decent
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i think that the first sign of enshitification is its leaders and it seems like it’s already here.
i’m wondering what browser to switch to next.
Ladybird! Though it’s not slated to be fully ready till 2026
I like how whoever made this didn’t bother to put IE on the first door.
This is a 100% handmade meme by me lol
I actually did consider putting IE, but then I realized IE never went through enshittification it was just always shit lmao so it didn’t fit
IE used to be great. But that was when the animals still spoke.
Wuh oh, I’m OOTL here, what’s happening to Firefox?
They’ve been making announcements indicating that they’re going to start focusing on chatbot/AI/LLM bullshit instead of what they should be doing, which is maintaining their web browser.
Welp
There’s also the news of them forcing opt-out only on tracking today or yesterday
Then there was the news that they fired one of their open source executives because he had the audacity to get cancer
Then the news that they (Mozilla) acquired an ad company because “we’re built different and we can fix her and totally not get corrupted by ads in the process”
Also the AI shit as commented
Oh and then the news where they almost sucked Putins dick and pulled FF from being accessible in Russia for a day or 2
And a bunch of other stuff that I’m probably forgetting about. And that’s just within the last year
Well I guess I need to start looking for another non-chromium-based browser soon…
🤮
Nothing. People have been memeing about it’s death for 10 years.
I had another reply that gave a decent reason to support the meme :)
Noooooo.
I like my Extensions.
The internet isn’t worth having without Ublock, Ghostery, Scriptmonkey, etc.
Think this is from bribes paid by Google?
You mean 500 million a year ?
Hey! Why not add an AI assistant that summarizes each page I visit! It would be awesome 😎. But only if the computation is done off-site. I don’t want to bother my computer cpu too much…this page depicts 7 consenting adults engaging in what would otherwise be described as an Australian cum slut gangbang clusterfuck with a 3 finger twist and large bottle of rum up the asshole…
Joe! Joe! Come here quick! Remember the dude from yesterday? Yeah, cum slut cluster fuck? Exactly! Look he’s asking for it again! I think he likes it. Why don’t we send his information to the appropriate authorities?
…ring ring! Yes? Is this the guy who really likes Australia cluster fuck videos? Ehhh, why would you ask such a thing?..well I am the authority on this topic! I wrote the book, see?..and another page …and another page… Yeah, it’s mostly photos of me and my 6 male friends. Oh! Ah!.. Can I help you? Well I didn’t bring my 6 friends with me but do you have sex guy friends? Oh I said sex, didn’t I. Yeah I do have sex friends! Wait a minute, did Mozilla Firefox sent you after they shared my most intimate searches thru the NSA AI servers? Gosh darn it! Well it doesn’t matter, what’s done is done. I guess I’ll just take my pants off, go ahead and get more comfortable too. You want anything to eat while we wait here for my six friends? One of them is really fat, is that okay? I mean he’s really, like you know, morbidly obese sort of fat. I hope you are okay with his girth.
And Soo the user had a great time thanks to Mozilla Firefox. The end! She was never found until the x-ray, when her body was found biologically fused and bonded to the user’s friend’s body along with two other doctors from previous visits. It was pretty bad. It was big news in Australia 🦘.
I gotta go sleep 💤😴💤💤.
Firefox users were too cocky and wouldn’t shut up about how amazing it is. The universe took them down a peg.
Do you hear that Linux users?
I’m using opera (though it’s GX to be fair) and it’s still great to me. What did they do?
Time to start using my Mullvad browser sigh.
what about ark browser… are they ok ?
Look at these numbers and tell me with a straight face that chrome is dead.
Meme says it’s shitty, not dead
that actually makes more sense, my bad
Don’t think it’s talking about “death” just enshitification
Side note: gotdamn firefox is less than 3.0% According to the same website, Linux is at 4.5% marketshare. It’s rarer to use firefox than linux (I’m on iceweasel btw)
we should get a Great Unclean One photoshopped in then
Read the meme better
thanks, the however-many comments before you that said the same thing didn’t get through to me, but yours totally did!
It’s not dead. It’s just the default option for boomers.
It’s like Internet Explorer or Netscape. It exists so you csn download something better.
I don’t think you fully understand just how much the ‘default’ is. Between edge and chrome it’s the default for everything.
Introducing children to the Internet? Chrome. Old folks? Chrome. businesses? Chrome (sometimes edge). Personal use for 90% of people? chrome.
(also edge is used to install something better which again, for 90% of people, is chrome.)
“It’s dead to me” is the meme here like adobe still kicking but it’s not very liked after the controversies is it now?
