Is Firefox OK?

Mozilla’s privacy-heavy browser is flatlining but still crucial to future of the web.

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[WereCatf]

“Once lost, users hardly come back until there's a compelling reason, and what would that compelling reason be?” says Bart Willemsen, a VP analyst focusing on privacy at Gartner. Willemsen says he has been a Firefox user since its earliest days. “I think Firefox really has a challenge to find a unique position—not only in marketing statements, but in their absolute product—and go in one direction,” he says.

Firefox did have a unique position: it was the adored child of power-users. Alas, they decided to dilute that position and push for less functionality, more trendy features, more trendy UI and the lowest common denominator.

I, personally, am especially annoyed by how they've gone so hard on this dumbing-down of Firefox for Android, like e.g. you can no longer access about:support anymore for any of the lower-level settings and you're only allowed to install extensions from their miniscule curated list -- no option, whatsoever, for a power-user to ignore such restrictions and accept the responsibility for any resulting issues. That said, the desktop-version of Firefox isn't safe from this dilution and removal of features, either.

It's still the best browser out there, but that position is degrading at a steady pace.

 

[WereCatf]

From Wikipedia, meanwhile the CEO:

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008"

"By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million."

Meanwhile, I'd happily be Mozilla's CEO for $24K a year.

 

[WereCatf]

Eich also inflicted JavaScript on the world. After that atrocity, he ought to consider himself lucky to be allowed to draw breath.

I do not agree. JavaScript may not be the best language in the world, but it's perfectly useable and allows one to do a lot of extremely nice and useful stuff in the browser. The fact that there are a lot of developers who insist on writing horribly slow, bloated code with it isn't the language's fault: they'd still write slow and bloated code, even if they had to switch to something else.

 

[WereCatf]

People complain incessantly about big corporations - Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Walmart, etc. - and yet continue to support them, all but abandoning smaller and esp. more independent choices.

That the world's biggest market of ~320 million souls cannot support more than a handful of choices within each industry - I think that speaks volumes about the sheep mentality within the collective us?!

Or perhaps it's easy to preach about how people should make different choices and all that, but far harder to actually do that in practice?

I, for example, often cannot afford to choose the more ethical companies/products, even if I did want to. Sometimes one cannot choose the more ethical or otherwise more appealing options because of distance or other sort of access. Then there's also things like product/service quality, level of support, how long the company is likely to even be running in the first place and so on.