Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Marketing Head Expresses Concerns Over Google's Apparent 'Only Be On Chrome' Push (medium.com)
Eric Petitt, head up Firefox marketing, writing in a blog: I use Chrome every day. Works fine. Easy to use. There are multiple things that bug me about the Chrome product, for sure, but I'm OK with Chrome. I just don't like only being on Chrome. And that's what Chrome wants. It wants you to only use Chrome. Chrome is not evil, it's just too big for its britches. Its influence on the internet economy and individuals is out of balance. Chrome, with 4 times the market share of its nearest competitor (Firefox), is an eight-lane highway to the largest advertising company in the world. Google built it to maximize revenue from your searches and deliver display ads on millions of websites. To monetize every... single... click. And today, there exists no meaningful safety valve on its market dominance. Beyond Google, the web looks more and more like a feudal system, where the geography of the web has been partitioned off by the Frightful Five. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are our lord and protectors, exacting a royal sum for our online behaviors. We're the serfs and tenants, providing homage inside their walled fortresses. Noble upstarts are erased or subsumed under their existing order. (Footnote: Petitt has made it clear that the aforementioned views are his own, and not those of Mozilla.)
A great option (or at least a GOOD option) IMO is Iridium. It mostly is Chromium recompiled with some privacy defaults (that you could set in Chrome or Chromium in about 5 minutes), but also ALL the google hooks removed.
Brave sounds ok, but given that they have tried offering stuff like "replace your ads with ours" and are busy studying "how to monetize the web" or whatever with an "attention token", I wouldn't feel comfortable going all-in on them.
https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html
When they changed, unnecessarily mind you, the interface to their browser for about the millionth time. Just right when I was completely comfortable with the reload button being in the Nth spot and the Cancel button being in the Nth+1 spot they decided to move it all to the other side or just plain hide it from me.
Which meant I had to one figure out where things went to. Second, had to try to get used to the new button locations.
The Thunderbird project has a very bad habit of doing the same thing as well.
Only use Firefox now for compatibility testing. Otherwise it is just a memory hog that I remember as being run by people who do not have any appreciation for how they really upset people's workflow when they get a wild hair and feel the need to have all of the furniture on the other side of the room.
Caution: Contents under pressure
A bunch of crazy-ass trendy projects that got killed
You should read up on Mozilla's Electrolysis and Quantum projects. Seems like Mozilla's got an "OK, we'll fix that" attitude to me.