I’ll repeat my comment from yesterday on another Firefox thread:
In terms of open source there are really only Chromium- and Firefox-derived browsers (I’m disregarding projects like the still pre-alpha Ladybird here). With Chromium browsers, you’re still subject to Google’s whims in the long term, such as removal of V3 extension support. (I.e. a conceivable fork with V3 compatibility will inevitably become too difficult to keep up to date with the mainline.) If Mozilla dies, Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away as well. IMO there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, and also keeping them accountable and criticizing them where criticism is due. They are still roughly the good guys, even if sometimes misguided.
> IMO there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, and also keeping them accountable and criticizing them where criticism is due.
If there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, how do we keep them accountable? If they know that they're the only hope for a cross-platform browser that isn't developed by Google, then they know that any outrage is a bluff that can't have teeth because they're indispensable.
> They are still roughly the good guys, even if sometimes misguided.
There aren't any good guys here, there are just people doing people things.
Mozilla is more than sometimes misguided, they've been essentially permanently distracted from Firefox as the core mission for more than ten years now. Their organization is designed in a way that makes funding Firefox directly impossible, and they haven't made any moves to fix it. Instead they set up failed side project after failed side project and repeatedly alienate their core with ads, while insisting that donations couldn't possibly work in spite of the fact that Thunderbird clearly shows that they can—as long as the project is unshackled from the mess that is Mozilla.
It might well be that the best thing that could happen for Firefox would be for it to get evicted from Mozilla like Thunderbird was.
Do note that Thunderbird can afford to keep a relatively tiny team (compared to Firefox) because it stands on the shoulder of giants (Firefox) for its UI and HTML renderer. That Thunderbird is able to cover its expenses with donations really doesn't prove that Firefox will also be able to do so, but that doesn't excuse Mozilla from not even trying.
> failed side project after failed side project
Rust and MDN have been huge successes. Their mobile OS is still alive and kicking, although other people are making money from that now. They also put in a ton of resources into decreasing FF memory footprint as part of the failed mobile OS effort, which benefits all of us.
> Do note that Thunderbird can afford to keep a relatively tiny team (compared to Firefox) because it stands on the shoulder of giants (Firefox) for its UI and HTML renderer.
Also, and mainly, because that's a lot less of a moving target.
- there's not much that's new to email, there are some recent ideas like jmap but they're not exactly hard requirements
- UI requirements are largely fixed and a pretty minor concern
- and between web clients and completely broken ones (cough cough outlook) email HTML rendering is pretty damn far from any sort of leading edge
The big question is why anything there has to be an income stream.
If there are users, and there is a need, we should directly furnish the project with a bunch of hired employees rather than indirectly pay some manager, rely on charity or ads.
I guess they are talking about KaiOS, which had initial success, shipping on more 100M devices in India. Unfortunately they have been struggling to expand outside of India and even in India these days since their partner (Reliance Jio) is not pushing new devices there so much.
Another major pain point is they lost support from WhatsApp, which is really the king maker in many countries when it comes to mass market adoption of a mobile platform.
> If there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, how do we keep them accountable? If they know that they're the only hope for a cross-platform browser that isn't developed by Google, then they know that any outrage is a bluff that can't have teeth because they're indispensable.
Except they're not indispensable. They're now the fourth place browser in terms of market share on a good day, and dwindling. They need all the good will they can get, and this sort of discussion amongst their most hardcore audience is exactly what keeps them accountable.
Servo as a fully-featured web browser does indeed not seem to exist anymore but some of its components such as Webrender still do and are actively maintained.
servo was never a fully featured web browser and was never proposed to be iirc. It was proposed as experimental from the start. The most we got at the time was browser.html
Back in... 2018? there was a Servo binary you could download that had an address bar and could be used to browse the web. That actually started to get stripped down over time, the later binaries had less and less functionality, until now I don't even think there are any. Servo spearheaded a lot of projects, like bindings to macOS frameworks from Rust, that would have been used to create a more comprehensive browser, but then got torn down once the larger thing was canceled in favor of certain components, like webrender.
I don't know when exactly it was canceled - maybe around the time Firefox Quantum shipped.
Note that I never said it was ever not experimental. Just that it would have been more until it was canceled.
Nothing is wrong with WebKit, but it's not really a separate rendering engine, and the discussion is about separate rendering engines. Chromium's heritage derives from WebKit.
You keep them accountable by calling them out in public, as with the recent ToS change, where it made them clarify and improve the new wording. Keep calling them out on stuff that isn’t acceptable.
> and they mostly see Firefox as a monetisation vector.
They could’ve gone the Wikipedia route and heavily asked for donations, but, instead, they’ve chosen to sell user data. That’s why I must leave. At least Google was very obviously reliant on advertising. Mozilla had no excuse other than desperation and pure idiotic evil.
> Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away as well
No, they won't. The community will pick them up and maintain them sensibly because there will be a need. The best thing that could happen to Firefox would be Mozilla dying.
If you disagree, you can look at decades of Linux being successful despite endless bellowing about how it couldn't survive until it did. It did because it fit a sorely needed open source operating system niche. BSD failed to meet that exactly because it was controlled at the time by selfish garbage organizations.
Linux is majorly being developed and maintained by paid company employees. What interest would companies have in maintaining Firefox? They don’t seem to be very interested in contributing to Firefox development today. Another data point is that Microsoft gave up on their original Edge browser engine because using Chromium was ultimately easier than chasing Chrome compatibility. Who will defend Firefox’s interests in WHATWG? In the best case, it would result in something akin to today’s Mozilla Foundation.
A “maintenance and security only” trajectory for Firefox would be most interesting to me. Microsoft couldn’t keep up with Chrome, but that’s because they are a company that needs to be seen doing flashy things.
Firefox developed by the community could reject frivolous new features and move a lot slower than Chrome. The web is heading in a shitty direction anyway, so moving slower is better.
New features are not cost-free. They translate to increased code size, increased browser build time and decreased performance. At some point the maintenance burden becomes too high, even for Google. I don't think they have an interest in endlessly adding new features.
It has stopped everyone except for Google and arguably Apple (I mean Apple is a bit of a weird case because they only have to support their platform really, and everyone kind of expects Safari on iOS to be a little restricted anyway).
Yeah, this is a worry. Google or someone will just come up with some not needed but slightly better (from a mere feature perspective, not from a privacy one) thing, that websites will use. Lets say a new codec or protocol for something like ... VR in the browser! or similar stuff. That thing will be somehow easier to use with Chrome and they will call it a "standard". Then people will try to use those websites using it and ... Oh? You use FF? Too bad! It doesn't work there! But you could use this "modern" and "secure" browser, _made by Google_! (and half-informed people online will claim FF doesn't implement the "standard") ... and tada, the badly informed user switches away. Not to forget, when they install Chrome, they probably are asked to make it their default browser.
It is all quite dystopian and depressing to think about.
It's not only about big thingys. It's any small difference in behavior where some developer tests only on the browser with 90% usage* and ignores the small niche of Firefox users, leaving them accidentally with a broken site. Some CSS property, some JS API whatever.
*) The stats are somewhat wrong, I guess there are more Firefox users with different privacy blockers than Chrome, thus hiding from Google analytics and similar, which people use for stats in higher percentage
> The web is heading in a shitty direction anyway, so moving slower is better.
I completely agree, though what I believe would happen if Firefox went to maintenance mode is that fewer and fewer websites would work on it. It's already the case that I sometimes need to switch to Chromium to do some things because those shitty websites only work on Chromium.
They could partner with Apple. As long as the courts don’t force Apple to allow Chromium on iOS, those shitty web sites will work on safari. Firefox tends to be ahead of safari in new features.
As an iOS user, I am happy that I cannot install alternative browsers. If I could, those shitty websites would force me to install Chrome. I currently have zero google branded apps on my phone. (Some third party apps that I need bundle google tracking crap…)
Edit: I guess I should add that I prefer Firefox to Safari, but I’ve watched devs try to only support Safari and Chrome. Once they do that, they almost always accidentally support Firefox too.
The main problem with Chrome is that anything you do in it goes into Google’s surveillance network (or at least you can’t prove that it doesn’t). If some sites require Chrome, we can use Chrome just for those sites (and vote with our feet, not very many websites are really necessary). A web browser sitting on the disk not running most of the time probably isn’t a huge problem.
A lot of the internet doesn’t even need JavaScript enabled. I think we over-state the compatibility nightmare. I mean it depends on your use patterns of course…
I can live without many of those bad websites (or rather "webapps").
But what's annoying me right now is that it happens more and more that passkeys work with Chromium but not Firefox. And I want passkeys (well, I want to log in with my Yubikeys).
There are Firefox derivatives, listed in the article, whose goals are roughly that. But I don’t think they can be successful long-term, meaning other than for a 0.1% niche, if they don’t keep up with web standards. And currently Mozilla is doing the heavy lifting for that.
If you're fine only being able to browse existing and past websites, sure. Don't forget to donate to the Internet Archive or make your own local copies, though, or that'll become infeasible relatively quickly too.
It isn’t an exact match to what you have claimed, but if it was going to start happening I’d expect it to have started by now. But for example, my favorite sites works fine in Lynx, let alone old versions of Firefox.
I really don’t get it. It isn’t obvious to me if people are really experiencing compatibility issues, or if it is just a boogeyman…
In many cases, you are not experiencing compatibility issues precisely because Firefox is still being actively maintained.
For new web technologies, the consequences of Firefox not supporting them is obvious. But even for existing sites, Mozilla is maintaining a long list of "Web Compatibility" patches that can be updated outside of regular browser updates (which is important for long-term support versions and managed environments): https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/07/firefox-68-bigints-contras...
That's exactly the type of thankless but essential work that I fear people are always underestimating when talking about "just developing a new web engine". It's probably difficult but still feasible to become "standards complete"; becoming and remaining compatible with HTML/JS as it's actually written in the real world seems much harder.
At the time of early Linux, BSD was still a UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group project, though the CSRG would disband after 4.4BSD was released sometime in 1994-1995. BSD had a user base even in the days when using BSD required an AT&T Unix license. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an effort to replace the AT&T bits with open source bits. This reached a breakthrough in 1991 when all that was remaining was six kernel files, which 386BSD was able to fill in that gap. 1991 was the year Linux 0.01 was released.
Unfortunately, BSD’s growth was stunted due to the lawsuit between AT&T (USL) and BSDi, where there were allegations over the open source code:
By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had already captured the attention of those wanting a FOSS Unix-like operating system. However, it’s quite remarkable how FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD found niches in the 1990s and are still around today. They may lack Linux’s market share, and admittedly they don’t have the same levels of driver and application support as Linux, but they are excellent operating systems that serve their niches well.
> The community will pick them up and maintain them sensibly because there will be a need.
The community can't offer the resources and competence necessary for maintaining a Browser on the same high level as Mozilla is doing now. The community would likely also not be able to influence, or even just follow, the workgroups for web-standards. Ultimately, they would be left out and have to play a game of catch.
Of course, how much of that would be necessary is a different question, but long term, in a world without Mozilla, any Firefox-fork would become slowly useless, or even fast if Google decides to abandon the free web and go down a different route. If you want to see how useful this will end, look at all the other browser out there which are not Blink-based, a Firefox-fork or Safari. They do exist, and they all are pretty awful for general usage.
Ladybird is on the trajectory to do this. I agree it's an enormous project and different from a lot of other open-source offerings, but I think there very well could be even corporate offerings support. They'd support it the same way Linux and other big projects (like what Red Hat and Apache do) because there's business needs for browsers that aren't Chrome or Safari.
It's not all, but it doesn't take much imagining some industries want a stable open source browser with, say, security features they can toggle in to their standards. I hear people here all the time who say they would pay for a good browser but won't because Mozilla doesn't spend it on the browser. I can see a productive marriage.
Ladybird has the advantage that they can start with a new architecture, and they seem willing to sacrifice features. But I doubt we will see them become a real competitor for Chrome and Firefox. And we will have to see whether they will at least support DRM-services like Netflix, YouTube, etc. making them a viable alternative for the casual users, giving some foundation for gaining traction in mainstream.
the owners of the original code that BSD is based on. BSD was free, but the code owners thought otherwise, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, which stopped it from filling the needs that linux then ended up filling.
> IMO there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla
If open source is your ride or die, sure. My unfortunate takeaway is non profit, open source and free isn’t a good fit for browser development.
Kagi’s Orion [1] is a solid WebKit browser and to where I’m shifting my support. (I’ve been a medium-sized fundraiser for Mozilla. They’re going to see seven-figure chargebacks from a variety of directions over the coming weeks.)
> One alternative recommended by the present article, Brave, is dabbling in ads as well
> You donated a seven-figure sum to Mozilla that you are going to chargeback?
I helped with fundraisers. The pitch was privacy. I and the others who donated feel we were mislead. (I was never a major donor. But at least one who charged six figures on his Amex has initiated a chargeback.)
Is there a way to litigate Firefox, to pay back the money, based on the false premise they gave? And that the damages extend well beyond a few individuals?
Say, the threat of an actual litigation, would help hold them accountable in the future?
Litigate yes, win, probably not. If the goal is to bleed Mozilla dry, the correct angle is antitrust action against their contract with Google.
It’s a non-profit and those were donations. Those who made the donations on a card whom I know are charging it back, that’s the closest to donor accountability we’ll come to.
No, the idea isn't to bleed them dry, but to disincentivize decisions in direct opposition to what they promised to donors, and make them legally hard to do or with actual consequences.
It would be a guide rail for people at the top to align themselves with people at the bottom. To be aligned with the promises they use in fundraising from donors (of both time and money).
I'm torn with the "just don't give them money then" which a sibling commenter said, it might work short term, but what about everything people have poured into this throughout the decades? I think all that work deserves to be safeguarded, it would show that whatever resources, be it money or time, cannot just be turned on itself by a passing leadership, and that there would be a safeguard against "flushing everything down" as the only choice.
Furthermore, I just don't see a promise/company statement as being enough, after everything that has happened. There needs to be legal accountability and safeguards for not sinking a multi-generational ship.
If you disagree with either Mozilla's mission statement or their execution, just don't donate any money, and if you must, campaign and try to convince other people to not do so either.
But lawsuits... I'd be seriously pissed to see donations go towards lawyers instead of browser development or other open web advocacy. (And yes, I'm aware Mozilla has been pretty controversially/poorly managed for a long time now, but I really don't think the right way to turn that ship around is external litigation.)
See my answer to the sibling comment, it's not meant as an ill'will comment, otherwise I would add, if people completely abandoned Firefox due to a lack of safeguards and trust, then yes, that would be even worse than establishing said safeguards.
I agree, and Mozilla (like all nonprofits) definitely benefits from accountability.
But I would hope that a lack of future donations, combined with (former) donors voicing their specific concerns, can achieve more direct outcomes than litigation. I'd hate to see their already limited funding go towards legal fees.
Have you considered outright donating to Apple instead? Seems like a more direct way to put your money and support behind Kagi's upstream rendering engine developers.
And seriously, threatening chargebacks, which can and often do cost the recipient money beyond just the loss of an original payment/donation, against a nonprofit over an (all things considered) minor change in direction is pretty despicable.
I could get behind it if this was actual non-profit fraud, but none of these points of criticisms against Mozilla seem new. You knew what you were donating to.
> Have you considered outright donating to Apple instead?
No. I buy their products. As I said, I’m no longer of the opinion that a free / donation-based browser works as a model.
> threatening chargebacks, which can and often do cost the recipient money beyond just the loss of an original payment/donation, against a nonprofit over an (all things considered) minor change in direction is pretty despicable
Not a threat. I wrote a cheque, unfortunately, but others didn’t and Amex has begun processing them. If Mozilla litigates I said I’d indemnify them up to a sizeable amount.
> As I said, I’m no longer of the opinion that a free / donation-based browser works as a model. [...] If Mozilla litigates I said I’d indemnify them up to a sizeable amount.
Obviously your decision, but even given that, do you think it'll do the state of the open web much good to litigate against Mozilla?
> do you think it'll do the state of the open web much good to litigate against Mozilla?
I’m not litigating. I am saying if Mozilla decides to litigate I’ll help my friends fight back and frankly ensure the court battle costs Mozilla more than anything they recover. The extent of my actions are to withdraw to the ability I can the prior support I gave them.
On the open web, I don’t see Mozilla as a good actor. And they’re not going anywhere over a few chargebacks. So not particularly concerned about their costs or frankly going concern.
> I’ll help my friends fight back and frankly ensure the court battle costs Mozilla more than anything they recover.
Again, you're of course allowed to be as spiteful as you wish within the limits of the law, but I sincerely hope that your money never touches any open source project I care about if it comes with such strings attached as a substitute for prior due diligence.
I really wonder what it is about Mozilla that makes them subject to significantly more vicious rhetoric on this site than their for-profit competitors... Personally I'm also conflicted and as a result I'm not donating to them, but this is a completely different level.
I’ll help my friends fight back and frankly ensure the court battle costs Mozilla more than anything they recover. The extent of my actions are to withdraw to the ability I can the prior support I gave them.
If you do so, I'll forward Mozilla's legal team, and the court, a copy of your comments from this thread.
You've admitted that the chargebacks were not justified, and that your sole reason for fighting any litigation resulting from the chargebacks is to inflict financial harm on the opposing party.
The law offers a remedy to deal with situations like this: they can make you pay Mozilla's court costs, meaning that they get the chargebacks back, and all of their legal fees covered. And there is a better than 50/50 chance the judge imposes sanctions on you for wasting the resources of the court (though based on your profile this may not be a meaningful sum to you).
Seriously, talk to a lawyer before you comment any further.
> In terms of open source there are really only Chromium- and Firefox-derived browsers (I’m disregarding projects like the still pre-alpha Ladybird here).
Kagi’s browser is based on WebKit, but currently macOS only and non-opensource. I’m perfectly willing to pay for a browser but not sure if closed source is viable no matter how much you trust the company today.
This is also a great way to test out a page during web-development in a pinch[when you are on Linux]. Chrome and Firefox are obviously available, and GNOME-Web is useful-enough to fill the gap[of Safari]. I'd always run a real cross-browser test before a proper release. Thankfully the cross-platform issues are dwindling by the day.
There are several, just none that are still maintained. But webkit is still open source and there's no reason someone could not fork or start up a new browser project with 90% of the work already done by webkit, you just need a GUI.
I don't understand articles discussing “trust” and throwing in Brave. Are you unclear what trust means?
A proper trustworthy Chromium-based alternative would be Vivaldi. Even more, as a company based mainly in the EU, they've managed to create a fantastic browser while also following all consumer protection mechanisms typical for the region.
In the latest Ladybird update the graphs show servo is quite a bit behind Flow and Ladybird itself.
Right now ladybird is the closest to getting past the mark and has the most momentum by a long shot.
As great as having another option would be, Servo is not a browser, if people were going to build a browser on a different engine then webkit is perfectly viable right now, but people don't.
Ladybird is not closer than Servo from achieving anything, because the wpt tests scores are not that relevant sinc they are not weighted by any usefulness factor.
The Ladybird team are very good at marketing themselves but their technical choices are questionable. Who can think that it's a good idea to start a new web runtime in C++? They said they would switch to Swift but that doesn't seem to happen if you look at the recent commit history.
I mentioned momentum for a reason, servo doesn't have any. Ladybird however is extremely actively developed.
> Who can think that it's a good idea to start a new web runtime in C++?
Swift wasn't ready and clearly they dont like rust for this application, swift might still not be ready on non-apple platforms although it does look very promising.
Go look at the ladybird source, it's not the C++ you and everyone who shouts "unsafe" thinks it is.
And I took all of a day and less than a thousand lines to find UB in safe rust, so don't even bring up the UB argument. In case you are wondering, a str with invalid UTF-8 may cause UB, it's not unsafe to handle a str and they sure aren't going to put checks everywhere for it so they just hope that whoever handed you that str didn't encoded it some other way.
Now at least the only safe ways to parse a str actually involves checking but that means I need to now trust every single library that passes me a str to make sure they didn't parse it in an unsafe manner, and UB that I cannot be aware of might exist in my code, sound familiar?
> a str with invalid UTF-8 may cause UB, it's not unsafe to handle a str and they sure aren't going to put checks everywhere for it
Any way I know of for making a str from bytes is checked or unsafe, even slices (by byte indexes) are checked (panic). Is there a current example that hasn't been fixed at the language level where this invariant can be broken without unsafe?
It's not about me parsing or creating a str. It's about the 100 dependencies every rust project has which might hand me a str that wasn't parsed safely.
I can avoid UB in my own C++ code too, the fact that the language has UB is a reason I even look at other options from time to time. To find UB in such a fundamental part of safe Rust was truly a surpise to me.
It feels like they could have very easily just made it a byte slice and said it's up yo you to validate, instead they decided it has to be valid UTF-8 or it's UB.
> I mentioned momentum for a reason, servo doesn't have any. Ladybird however is extremely actively developed.
Looking at https://github.com/servo/servo it's very actively developed and gaining new contributors. The number of contributors for both projects is very similar. They are both active.
Ladybird is significantly newer, has 10k more total commits and double the commits in the last 24 hours.
I'm not going to actually go and do a study because I actually have better things to do than be right on the internet but you have to provide a stronger argument than that.
Agreed that (a) it’s not a browser and (b) it’s not ready for prime time. In the meantime it’s great that there is a diversity of options. But I am glad there are new engines being worked on in the wings, and I think servo has potential to be a pretty solid one especially with its parallel rendering.
I agree. I would love to see ladybird and servo based browsers, I would even install both just like I currently use Safari and Chromium based and Firefox derived.
FWIW, webkit's github [1] links directly to the "Epiphany Technology Preview" at gnome.org as a supported project. I have no idea if that leads to a full-featured modern browser for Linux, but I'm pretty sure if it doesn't, there should be a fork that does or creating one might be worth considering, and should be even fun and relatively easy to get kicked off. Also, since Webkit is based on KHTML, there might be re-integrations into KDE worth exploring. Ages ago there used to be Safari builds for Windows Apple created to get Safari into the hand of web developers that weren't using Macs, but it doesn't look like there's anything left to pickup.
Epiphany is a webkit browser for linux and due webkit architecture, gtkwebkit uses alot of gnome components such as libsoup and gstreamer. The biggest flaw is the webrtc support is missing so not online meetings.
maybe unpopular opinion, but I would be happy to pay small yearly subscription so they could focus on development instead of harvesting money from my data
That's what most of us want but can't: your only option is to donate to Mozilla, which will then do whatever it wants with your money.
Mozilla could allow for donation/services exclusively bound to develop Firefox, but at this point they have absolutely no incentive to do so and unsurprisingly have always refused to do it.
I believe it was sold to a Chinese company. But they now deal in payday loans. Also any company that advertises as much with online influencers as Opera does is always terrible.
> One alternative recommended by the present article, Brave, is dabbling in ads as well
It blocks ads by default. It also doesn’t indicate it would sell my data. So, I’m using Brave or anything that doesn’t sell my data until Ladybird is available.
"If Mozilla dies, Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away [..]"
There once was a company with the second most popular browser but it could not survive against the monopoly. People got together and their browser rose as open source like phoenix from the ashes.
Initially they even called it Phoenix but switched to Firebird, for reasons I don't remember. Since this was also the name of a database they changed the name again this time to Firefox.
Microsoft was a major contributor to IE's downfall, through their incompetence. Google is doing a much better job of not shooting themselves in the foot with Chrome.
Idk, Netscape Navigator was good, but then nothing usable came afterwards while Microsoft had IE4.
People hate on IE now, but there was a phase when IE was that best free browser and I say this as someone who breathed open source at the time and who was as Anti-Microsoft as you can imagine.
From how I remember it IE's downfall came after Netscape's.
I definitely agree. Much more if you need support for screen readers, then you can't use the slowly emerging alternatives even for a test drive, because either the a1y stack is not a priority, or the supporting libraries are not featureful enough.
- Leaving my smartphone in the car in case I must MFA for work or have for safety... I’d love to use a flip phone or minimal smartphone that only had camera, FaceTime, maps and an authenticator; I could just delete apps, but I don’t want to be able to install anything that wastes my life.
- If others are watching streaming video, could go somewhere else to read.
But, I may not have adequate willpower, and I struggle to read.
In terms of open source there are really only Chromium- and Firefox-derived browsers (I’m disregarding projects like the still pre-alpha Ladybird here). With Chromium browsers, you’re still subject to Google’s whims in the long term, such as removal of V3 extension support. (I.e. a conceivable fork with V3 compatibility will inevitably become too difficult to keep up to date with the mainline.) If Mozilla dies, Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away as well. IMO there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, and also keeping them accountable and criticizing them where criticism is due. They are still roughly the good guys, even if sometimes misguided.
The topic of Firefox and ads is nothing new:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783381
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351322
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-adverti...
One alternative recommended by the present article, Brave, is dabbling in ads as well: https://brave.com/brave-ads/