In ancient Greek mythology, Kassandra, priestess of Apollo and daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo, in return for “favours”. When Kassandra then decided to, well, not grant any “favours”, Apollo showcased that as a good son of Zeus, he did not understand consent either, and cursed her by making sure nobody would believe her prophecies. There’s some variations to the story from one author or source to the next, but the general gist remains the same.
Anyway, I’ve been warning everyone about the fall of Mozilla and Firefox for years now, so here’s another chapter in the slow decline and fall of Mozilla: they’re now just flat-out stating they’re an online advertising company.
As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we need to simultaneously work on public policy, standards, products and infrastructure. Today, I want to take a moment to dive into the details of the “product” and “infrastructure” elements. I will share our emerging thoughts on how this will come to life across our existing products (like Firefox), and across the industry (through the work of our recent acquisition, Anonym, which is building an alternative infrastructure for the advertising industry).
↫ Laura Chambers
Pretty much every one of my predictions regarding the slow downfall of Mozilla are coming true, and we’re just waiting around now for the sword of Damocles to drop: Google ending its funding for Mozilla, which currently makes up about 80% of the former browser maker’s revenue. Once this stream of free money dries up, Mozilla’s decline will only accelerate even more, and this is probably why they are trying to get into the online advertising business in the first place. How else are you going to make money from a browser?
In the meantime, the operating system most reliant on Firefox existing as a privacy-respecting browser, desktop Linux, still seems to be taking no serious steps to prepare for this seeming inevitability. There’s no proper Firefox fork, there’s no Chromium variant with the kind of features desktop users expect (tab sharing, accounts, etc., which are not part of Chromium), nothing. There’s going to be a point where shipping a further enshittified Firefox becomes impossible, or at the least highly contentious, for Linux distributions, and I don’t see any viable alternative anywhere on the horizon.
I’m sure things will turn out just fine.
Ugghh. Yeah this is a death spiral alright. At least LibreWolf is a thing?
For myself, I’ve been making an effort lately to switch to Falkon (since I’m a dedicated KDE user). Some websites still require user agent foolery (looking at you CVS Pharmacy), but overall I’m happy with the functionality, and impressed with the performance vs Firefox or Chromium. It reminds me of old school browsers like K-Meleon or Opera 9, just very slick and unpretentious. And it should have decent sandboxing as well, since QtWebengine is based on Blink, and the Flatpak gets frequent updates.
The thing I’m worried about is if companies start doing Internet Explorer era shit again, blocking browsers or OSes at a more basic level instead of just checking user agent. And at least in the US, the sites most prone to that seem to be very important ones – pharmacies, government sites, insurance companies, hospital networks. Places that aren’t primarily about tech, and have a lot of tech debt, so they’re motivated to cheap out and support the narrowest subset of browsers they can get away with.
Indeed @ rainboxsocks – it appears that more and more sites are restricting access. I have been trialing the beta IRIS browser on the hobby platform RISC OS. It is based on webkit but can not access several sites including MS office 365. Also use Netsurf but that is a limited functionality light weight browser.
I have been using Firefox since it became widely available and was using Netscape and Mosaic before that…
But it looks like it might be time or very soon time to part ways with Firefox and Mozilla.
One issue might be portability of bookmarks – I have over 21,000 of them (no doubt numerous bookmarks are dead now – maybe 25% of them or more).
@ Thom – you are probably far more qualified than me to compare but maybe it is time to evaluate if any of these alternative browsers are suitable to change to at this point in time. Criteria would have to include:
1. privacy respecting
2. reasonable speed
3. ability to access 99% of websites
4. availability for multiple platforms
5. active development
6. ability to import bookmarks and other settings from existing browser
7. likelihood to continue to exist (longevity – ie what is the development model, individual, community, not for profit, for profit, etc)
LibreWolf – is this the best option as it is based directly on Firefox ? Does it bring any of the negative aspects across from mainstream Firefox? (with builds for Windows, various Linux distros, MacOS)
Waterfox (improved DNS queries end of 2023)
Pale Moon – Goanna Based forked from Mozilla Gecko – seems to get regular updates (with builds for for Windows, Linus, Mac OS and FreeBSD) – have found in limited use that it is not 100% compatible
Vivaldi – built using Chromium but supposed to have privacy focus, seems to get fairly regular updates (with builds for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and IOS)
Ladybird (alpha release target not until 2026) – supposed to be a new web engine (no small feat)
Falkon (formerly QupZilla) – Chromium browser based – updates not as regular, only for Linux- is this a lightweight browser?
Flow Browser (SDKs for Android, Linux, IOS, macOS and Windows) – doesn’t seem to mention privacy in its features at all though
etc
For me, the bigger question is the threat of getting more lax about the rules for adddons.mozilla.org.
I rely on a bunch of extensions (stuff like automatic cookie deletion, high-granularity javascript blocking, ad blocking, WebScrapbook, User CSS, TiddlyWiki Classic save-to-disk, “Accept: image/webp” blocking, SponsorBlock, Consent-O-Matic, etc.) and, last I heard, it was at least not uncommon for the same extension to have more “telemetry” in its Chrome/Chromium builds than in its Firefox builds because of AMO rules.
It doesn’t help if a browser is the most privacy-preserving thing in the world if the only way to get the functionality I need reverses all that.
I think we’re all just waiting for Ladybird at this point. Given the timelines its alpha release will probably roughly coincide with Mozilla sinking to the level of Brave. Andreas Kling, his contributors, and their sponsors are determined to make something both worthwhile and nigh-incorruptible. His background as both a hobbyist OS developer and a WebKit engineer has attracted tons of confidence and a lot of contributions—hundreds of different people chipped in during September.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aXSBCtELZ4
Since it’s being built whole-cloth rather than incrementally, there are some weird rough edges in terms of responsiveness and stability—but the quality, expertise and dedication on display are nevertheless staggering. We should regard the whole endeavour as nothing short of a messianic deliverance from the Browser Wars.
The codebase is BSD-licensed, but unlike other engines, Ladybird’s lead sponsor, FUTO, is devoted to “almost-open-source” in the most principled way possible: they believe in licenses that require corporations to help fund development. They also have a ton of other sponsors which will work wonders to prevent any one of them from holding too much sway, (or being too important to risk offending) as Google has over Mozilla.
Part of me wonders why Firefox didn’t try a similar approach. Perhaps 30 years of the same codebase, and a sense that the project will never pose a serious threat to the Chromium oligopoly, has just made everyone weary of the project. Or perhaps it’s because a lot of the sponsors for Ladybird have been compensated by extra effort put in to make their pages render correctly—I doubt Mozilla could shake down anyone with the equivalent. “Pay up or we’ll break your website (even more) for a stagnant 3% of the Internet, all of whom have adblock!”
As somebody that has used Firefox as my primary browser since the Phoenix / Firebird days, I have also been increasingly disappointed in Mozilla as a company over the past couple of years. I agree, it pretty much has to get worse. You can attribute this to corporate greed and not be wrong. Remember though that Firefox now has many employees. It has become dependent on a certain level of revenue to feed itself but that includes its many dependents. They will simply have to find new sources of revenue and it is hard to imagine them doing that without betraying the altruism central to their core mission.
Firefox is and continues to be Open Source. Even now, there is no reason to be beholden to Mozilla as there are many alternatives both based of Firefox code and not. Lately, I have been using Zen quite a lot: https://zen-browser.app/.
Would Zen or Floorp or one of the others step up to do more of the core development if something happened to Firefox? I am not sure. I would hope so. If not though, there are other WebKit, Chromium, and non-Chromium Blink options. It seems unlikely that Linux would be left without a modern browser if Mozilla the Open Source company disappeared.
For me, the issue is relying on for profit companies to build our web browsers. I very much hope that we get a non-corporate alternative. In my view, Thom is simply pointing out here is that Mozilla may turn out to be no better than Google in the end. So, there is nothing to predict and be right about. Mozilla operates as a corporation. The worst has already happened.
I am very much hoping that Ladybird will be a truly independent browser. We will see. Regardless of the project structure, once you have people depending on payroll, independence gets a lot harder.
https://ladybird.org/
Maybe it will be somebody else. Servo is alive again and coming along.
What I do not understand at all though is why Thom always presents this as a “Linux” issue.
The problem with Mozilla becoming a poor steward of Firefox is a threat to the Open Web. That is a huge deal for everyone. How does it matter what operating system I am using? I use both Windows and macOS sometimes. The web is not less important to me when I do. Or are we trying to say that Firefox is the only option for Linux users? Because that is not true either.
My Linux machines are work machines too and I am not always a free software purist while I work. I use Microsoft Edge on Linux quite a lot ( Teams, Outlook, Zoom, and a few other apps mostly ). I could use Chrome. Instead of Zen, I could use Brave, Vivaldi, Thorium, Floorp, Falkon, GNOME Web, or many others. My browser options on Linux seem very similar to on Windows.
The problem is that we allowed all our browser engines to become financially dependent on Google. Let’s not do that again.
>”In the meantime, the operating system most reliant on Firefox existing as a privacy-respecting browser, desktop Linux, still seems to be taking no serious steps to prepare for this seeming inevitability. There’s no proper Firefox fork, there’s no Chromium variant with the kind of features desktop users expect (tab sharing, accounts, etc., which are not part of Chromium), nothing.”
Yes, Thom, because no browser besides Firefox could possibly work on a desktop distro.
Oh wait no – they all work just fine and there’s an overwhelming amount of choice, too much really. Imagine that. Everyone wants to get their product into the hands of the desktop GNU/Linux users for some strange reason. Call me crazy, but maybe that’s because in some large markets like India, desktop distro usage is trending above 10% market share and software makers can no longer ignore it like they did in the late noughties and in the early aughts.
The problem is, that for the vast majority of those alternatives the design decisions for underlying browser engine are going to be made either at mozilla or over at google. Both primarily ad companies, so there’s “conflict of interest” in big cow sized letters written all over it.
However, this is not a threat exclusive to linux, but to the entire internet ecosystem. Personally, I am actually least worried about the consequences for linux – when things get too bad, a proper firefox fork *will* rise to the challenge and distro’s *will* move en masse, as they amply demonstrated back when openoffice ceased to be relevant.