Rallying behind an undeserving browser will not save the open web. If Mozilla is our last hope, we are already doomed.
I’ve been a Mozilla/Firefox user since I was around five years old, even before I knew what a “web browser” was. It was the browser whose icon was saved to the desktop of the Gateway 2000 (running Windows 98 SE) I had access to as a child. Since then, I’ve more or less used it as my daily driver.
I don’t want it to come across that I hate Mozilla. I mean, I do, but I haven’t always. As a teenager I donated to them regularly. I even printed out the little PDF they gave you that said “I’m a Mozilla supporter!”
But today’s Mozilla is not the Mozilla that it was twenty years ago. Or maybe it is, and I’m more just more tuned in now, or their actions are more egregious. Either way, they are not going to be the ones to save the open web. Using Firefox is not an act of defiance or a method for maintaining rending engine diversity.
I could spend time listing out Mozilla’s many sins. I could explain to you how they are a hype-driven advertisement company, who would sell out their users for a free Whopper at Burger King. I could bring up the dozens of instances of selling out their users’ privacy to make a quick buck, even while touting privacy as one of their defining values. I could mention the fact that they are a for-profit company pretending to be a nonprofit, or that they have squandered away half a billion dollars yearly with nothing to show for it exact a CEO making a multi-million dollar salary while Firefox withers on the vine.
But I won’t do that. You already know what they’ve done. You might not know every slight or offense, but you know enough to make a determination about them.
This organization is not worth your time.
The inevitable question that then arises, of course, is “which browser should we use?” Chrome is proprietary, and has eaten most of the browser market. Brave is run by a homophobic, right-wing jackass, not to mention how it pushes a cryptocurrency scam on users every chance it gets. Besides, it’s more or less re-skinned Chrome, as are most other browsers you are thinking of: Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, take your pick. I know some folks will be screaming “just use a Firefox fork, like Waterfox!” I hate to break it to you all, but those forks mostly remove features, they don’t add or maintain. If Firefox disappears tomorrow, they’ll disappear the day after.
So what’s the solution? You’re not thinking big enough: the way we get browser diversity and “save the open web” is to actually diversify browsers! You don’t need one browser that runs on every device you use. It’s wild that folks want to use the same browser on Linux that they do on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and everywhere else you can imagine.
What you want is an open source rendering engine (ideally, several of them), and then platform-specific browsers that take advantage of the technologies of each system and lay those on top of a solid foundation.
The best browsing experience on GNOME is GNOME Web (occasional stability issues notwithstanding). The best browsing experience on macOS is Safari. Both of those use Webkit under the hood, but build their interfaces using platform-specific technologies like GTK and Adwaita to provide exceptional experiences (if you haven’t used GNOME Web in a while, try it — the trackpad support is incredible, the tab overviews and bookmarks are brilliant, it’s a great experience). I can imagine a future where there is a browser just for Windows, and one just for Android. Maybe they’ll use Webkit. Maybe Servo, once it’s ready. Or maybe another rendering engine will hit the scene that we’ve not even thought of!
I don’t think the open web is saved by a single browser or company. If it is, we are hopeless. I do believe we can get to a point with more browser diversity, more choices for rendering engines, and a healthier ecosystem overall. That’s (an aspect of) how you save the open web.