Counterpoint

ew

these are literally least intrusive ads possible and Firefox gets a few pennies from me leaving it active so that I can enjoy the product for free

mozilla has alienated a large number of its supporters by going all-in on LLM horseshit in their browser and anywhere else (MDN) they can shove it, exploitative crap (especially directed inwards towards its own developers, go find some ex-Mozilla postmorts if you want to see some of the nicest people you know get curbstomped by awful management and then fired), and doing a ton of other semi-to-fully fraudulent nonprofit boondoggle shit. they’ve made it clear they don’t want our donations (and plenty of people were donating more than just a few pennies from ads) and they really don’t deserve your advocacy. all Mozilla as a company cares about is the funding they get from Google. everything else is just layered affinity grifts.

Q&A!

what browser do you recommend then

none. we fucked it. once Mozilla dies, and they will die, none of the Gecko forks are realistically in shape to take on browser development on their own. chromium will be the only game in town, and google will use their dominant position to push through crap like browser attestation to secure their deathgrip on the web. ladybird is unserious fascist shit. chromium forks solve nothing. everything else is targeting an early 2000s version of the web’s features, which is good for them.

the only way I can see out of the above is Servo, the ex-Mozilla browser engine that Mozilla did their best to bury after Firefox Quantum, and they’re starved for cash and developers. I’d love if Servo was a workable browser today, but it just isn’t. it’ll take a lot more than a couple of pennies in some grifter’s pocket and the laziest possible advocacy to get it there.