Time to move on from Firefox?
I've been a Firefox user from the very beginning. I mean that in the literal sense. Firefox was the name they adopted in 2004. Before that, it was Phoenix, and I had already been using Phoenix for some time. I promoted Firefox heavily to the people I knew. I donated money to the NY Times ad.
The reason I've been using Firefox for so long is because I knew the benefits of open source. Licensing issues had, in some cases, crippled my productivity for weeks at a time. In other cases proprietary software couldn't be customized to do what I wanted. I was an advocate for open source because I believed it was better for the user. This became all the more important as data privacy issues and walled gardens started to ruin the internet.
Here are some of the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto:
- The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
- Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
- Free and open source software promotes the development of the internet as a public resource.
Sadly, that Mozilla no longer exists. What we have today is just another corporation. The only way the folks running Mozilla would encounter any of the principles in their manifesto is if they saw a post about it on LinkedIn or Facebook. I'd be very surprised if anyone on their executive team knew about the Mozilla Manifesto, to say nothing of whether they understand or care about anything on it. They're just another corporation at this point.
Here's a (nonexhaustive) list of things they've done in recent years that have caused me, as a long-time advocate of open source, privacy, and an open internet, to walk away in disgust.
- For years, they've been paying a non-technical CEO millions of dollars and getting nothing in return for it. I might be on board if they had a CEO with a technical background leading an organization releasing great software and keeping the internet open and protecting our privacy. Yeah, we don't get any of that.
- When MBA Laura Chambers took over as CEO, Mozilla announced it in a blog post that linked to her LinkedIn profile. The only way to get information about her was to have a LinkedIn account, be logged in, and agree to give them all the data they wanted. For a CEO of other companies, fine, but if you're the CEO of Mozilla and you don't think the open web and data privacy are important, you shouldn't be the CEO of Mozilla. Imagine the new head of AWS having a website only hosted on Azure, and nobody at AWS thinking it was a problem...
- Firefox embedded AI chatbot support in the browser, with no support for local models. Not one person in the organization had the sense to say "We're supposed to pretend to care about privacy, so shouldn't we add support for local models?" Meanwhile, Google is releasing incredible open models, and you can access Gemma 4 from within Chrome.
- Mozilla has no problem posting on every proprietary social media service, but they have abandoned the Fediverse. Firefox just happily started posting again on X (Twitter). One of the most inconceivable things is that they refuse to click the button to federate their Threads account. It's as if they're opposed to the open web.
Will I give up on Firefox and move to something else? I don't know. It depends on whether I have a good enough reason. Firefox on my iPhone is pretty bad, so I'll likely move to Safari. Brave appears to be a better browser on the desktop. If I stay, it won't be for my support of Mozilla, because I do not respect anything about the current version of that organization. They are no better for the internet than Google, Microsoft, or Meta.