> For anyone out there who values the swiftly fading open-ness of the Internet, Firefox or other smaller FLOSS browsers are the right tools of choice.
Mozilla had their chance at this decades ago and Firefox was the dominant browser against IE, 16 years ago, until they did a deal with Google, fell asleep at the wheel and allowed them to overtake and get sabotaged via Chrome's dominance. The same Mozilla CEO at the time believed they could live without Google's money [0] and now 16 years later, they are still heavily reliant on Google and at this point are on life-support.
Mozilla already gave Google what they wanted and forfeited their so-called 'privacy-focused browser mission' over giving the CEO a decades streak of multi-million dollar pay days, whilst the 'Mozillians' only got layoffs and all left with little to nothing.
Mozilla is now a joke to the 'open-ness of the web'. They have nothing to fight with and lost as soon as the took Google's money.
The problem IMO is that Mozilla became a corporation for Firefox. Their goals are now aligned with the parties they're supposed to fight against. Obviously that doesn't work.
Chrome became popular by being bundled as shovelware with Flash and being marketed on google.com. There is literally no way for an open source browser to compete against that.
Mozilla has a lot of mismanagement but that's more of a symptom of Firefox being out-marketed in a way that was impossible to fight against.
Mozilla had their chance at this decades ago and Firefox was the dominant browser against IE, 16 years ago, until they did a deal with Google, fell asleep at the wheel and allowed them to overtake and get sabotaged via Chrome's dominance. The same Mozilla CEO at the time believed they could live without Google's money [0] and now 16 years later, they are still heavily reliant on Google and at this point are on life-support.
Mozilla already gave Google what they wanted and forfeited their so-called 'privacy-focused browser mission' over giving the CEO a decades streak of multi-million dollar pay days, whilst the 'Mozillians' only got layoffs and all left with little to nothing.
Mozilla is now a joke to the 'open-ness of the web'. They have nothing to fight with and lost as soon as the took Google's money.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...