So long, Firefox
2025年4月7日
What's up?
When Manifest V3 happened, I was hopeful that with this update, some people would consider giving Firefox-based browsers a try, improving their online privacy, and that it would boost its market share a little bit. Why is it important that Firefox gets spotlights? Simple, competition promotes greatness, and when there's no competition, there's no incentive to achieve that greatness. But then, something happened.
On February 26th of this year, Mozilla made a blog post about introducing new Terms of Service to the Firefox browser. Until then, there has never been a ToS in the Firefox history. To the section "You give Mozilla certain rights and permissions," there is a sentence that translates into "You give ownership over your data that you upload through Firefox." This section was later updated due to user backlash. In the "Termination" section they claim they "can suspend/end Firefox's access to anyone at any given time for any reason." Now, while I'm not an expert in software licensing, this probably violates some free software guidelines, and you can expect Debian and Ubuntu derivatives to stop using Firefox as the default web browser.
We all know Mozilla, as a company, hasn't been doing well for a while. They've been making questionable decisions, constantly saying one thing then doing another; redesigns that make accessibility worse; removing features long-time users really liked; and some websites break or don't function at all anymore, and their browser market share used to be 30%, but now it is only 3%. But the most likely reason Mozilla is doing this is because they're gonna lose their main source of income—Google. Due to unfair competition practices, Google might be forced to sell Chrome.
Despite Mozilla's changes, we still got some alternatives to Firefox. I use LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium as daily drivers, and they're good options. I heard Waterfox is a good one too, but I haven't tested this last one. Brave ] is often recommended for blocking ads by default and being open-source. I think it's alright, I guess? I mean surely better than just regular Chrome, but I find it a bit bloated for my taste. Mullvad Browser and Tor are good options as well, but only as a disposable browsing tool, as they will delete your browsing history and cookies after closing it. On the phone we have IronFox and Cromite. I really look forward to LadyBird, which is an independent open-source browser and web engine made from scratch with principles in mind.
Firefox is and will probably still remain a niche software on the web. Unfortunately Mozilla seems so out of touch with their loyal users, and their browser still has ways to go, but at least we still have a few options. Anyways, I hope you found this article useful. Seeya!