Sigh. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Mozilla's situation. The "weird license nonsense" you're vaguely gesturing at doesn't even make sense in context. Firefox is open source under MPL 2.0.
Your framing that "the choice is between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla" creates a false equivalence. Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
And "Chrome works marginally better"? By what metric? Firefox has better memory usage, stronger privacy protections, and doesn't exist primarily as a data collection tool for the world's largest advertising company.
The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web. This kind of uninformed take that ignores the nuances of browser economics is exactly why we can't have nice things on the open web.
Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
>This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy.
>It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.
> If only people cared as much about privacy as vegetarians do about not eating meat...
In Germany, a lot of people do (in particular in hacker and IT-affine circles), and I do claim privacy discussions there often do become as heated as discussions with vegans about meat.
This is the reason why in Germany Firefox has a significant market share (according to
Performance, compatibility, security. Chromium runs faster, it works with more websites, it's sandbox is better, particularly on Android. I don't care much about memory usage as I don't need a billion tabs open at once (does anyone). There's options available beyond Chrome that offer most of the same privacy benefits as Firefox does.
I think marginal is an understatement. As for Mozilla's business model, what business model? They're throwing everything at the wall to see if it sticks and virtually nothing has, all the while their browser has languished. Going full cynic, at this point the only reason it is allowed to exist is because Google deem it useful to have it around as a counterpoint to accusations that they have a monopoly.
Fewer than 100 will massively pig out memory, on Android, Linux, and MacOS, for Chrome, IME.
My main FF instance has ~1,500 tabs FWIW, though I'll often bypass those for a given session by running incognito only. Even then I'll easily hit 100+ tabs in only a few minutes.
Ive run chromium and firefox side by side for years to isolate personal from work. The only noticeable difference is Chromium crashes when it uses all the memory.
People's overwhelming fascination with Chrome escapes me. Some subtle detail seems to make it stick out. Everyone remembers that one time ff crashed on 2005, but gives berth to Chrome crashimg every few days and selling their personal data to google.
At the cost of a subpar cache; it's not like Chromium is leaking memory, & its memory pressure effects are both well-studied and well-understood. Yet, Firefox stans keep touting lack of comprehensive caching as some kind of advantage. I'm sorry, this is not 2005. It took Mozilla two years to implement some kind of JIT pipelining, and guess what, Chromium had V8 all along: an engine that can benefit from "open web" cooperation courtesy of Nodejs and the vast ecosystem around it. SpiderMonkey? Please. This is the crux of the issue.
> The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web.
The idea that the web—chaperoned by the likes of Mozilla, can be "open"—is the crazy, unsustainable one. OP is being pragmatic, and considering their privacy carefully. Mozilla's track record is that of a gravely mismanaged, disoriented, and subservient (Google) organisation. Firefox codebase is arcane, was already showing age even ten years ago, & now there's a whole ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers that can benefit from "open web" cooperation.
Firefox has zero moral high-ground, & pretending like it possesses some kind of virtue is a crime against semantics.
Your framing that "the choice is between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla" creates a false equivalence. Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
And "Chrome works marginally better"? By what metric? Firefox has better memory usage, stronger privacy protections, and doesn't exist primarily as a data collection tool for the world's largest advertising company.
The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web. This kind of uninformed take that ignores the nuances of browser economics is exactly why we can't have nice things on the open web.