More to the point, it takes away individual choice and it’s corrupt beyond belief to be taking money from your competitor to make them the default option. That’s what “antitrust” means, and Mozilla clearly does not understand this.
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Competitor is one way to look at it. To me, this association with Google has been parasitic, even, if I’m allowed to be extreme.
At least after the explosion in LLMs, Moz should have had their own search engine. I mean, equally capable (Mullvad Leta / Brave Search) and underfunded engineering teams (Kagi / Marginalia) have all ventured there, boldly.
That Google money is golden handcuffs. Though, it is undeniable that the current strategy at Moz is dictated by it (as TFA shows).
Like xe3 says, most people working at Moz have their hearts in the right place. I know this is true from my time when I got to work (as an incubatee) with people at Moz.
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It’s a cartel. It’s an illegal commercial collaboration between competitors to consolidate the market and eliminate competition and you won’t get a more straightforward example of one.
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Kagi is a metasearch service, though it has its own small indexes to enrich results. Mullvad Leta is a Google proxy. Marginalia is interesting, but not a great general search engine because of its size and narrow focus.
Brave Search has the best results of any independent index that isn’t GBY[1]; they acquired Cliqz, a search company that originally partnered with Mozilla to build their Tailcat index.
Mozilla had a minority investment in Cliqz and it seems likely they had been trying to build their own independent search engine that could be competitive with Google for a few years; at least until Brave acquired Cliqz after all the privacy controversy surrounding the way they were building the index.
A search engine is one of the few ventures Mozilla has attempted in the last few years that would have had a good chance of being profitable and useful; at least if it were implemented in a similar way to how Brave Search was.
Make of that what you will.
Google, Bing, Yandex. Mojeek is next in line after Brave Search. ↩︎
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My definition of success for Firefox is when people stop using “but using a Chromium based browser contribute to the monopoly” as a reason to use Firefox/a reason to not use a Chromium based browser.
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I use Firefox because it’s a better browser. It has features Chrome doesn’t have that I want.
(I can’t speak for anyone else, of course)
Can you elaborate on what these features are, I’m genuinely curious.
YMMV as this is a very opinionated list, but:
- I can turn history off completely. I can’t figure out a way to turn it off at all in Chromium; even just “Clear all history on exit”, which is not great. I think this is something Brave specifically added? The only option is Incognito mode, which won’t store your cookies - which I do want to keep!
- Bitwarden extension sidebar mode. Makes it much more usable when you can keep it open indefinitely.
- The Reader mode is much, much better. I would say about half my usage of Firefox is Reader mode, which is easy to customize. The Chrome Reader mode is unusable by comparison.
- The Picture-in-Picture mode is much better. I can activate it with a keyboard shortcut and it gives me more useful controls. I use it specifically for content the website has attempted to restrict me from controlling. Vimeo likes to do this, for example; Google Chrome just doesn’t let me use PiP mode for it. Firefox does. Vivaldi has a good explainer though it’s a bit out of date for Firefox (but seemingly not Chrome).
- Have a separate search bar and URL bar if you want. This is really useful for keeping my latest query in the search bar if I want to remember what I searched/search again with a different search engine. Chrome doesn’t give you any control over the toolbar beyond pinning/re-arranging extensions.
- Another feature: make a one-time search with a non-default search engine. Chrome has this too, but you need to remember the shortcut label you chose; Firefox lets you click the favicon to do the same. I use this all the time.
- Full-page screenshot tool. It’s built-in to the browser! I just add the screenshot button to the top bar and click it whenever I want a full-page screenshot. Sooo useful. You need an extension to do this on Chrome.
- I used the Firefox GNOME userChrome theme for a while. It’d be nice to be able to remodel the browser to match my desktop environment. Not something you can do with Chrome. userContent was more useful before I discovered uBlock Origin lets me permanently delete elements for a page. I’ve used it for creating a personal dark mode for a site before…but Reader mode is usually enough these days.
I like the developer tools more too, but that might just be how I use them. Oh, and native vertical tabs are a thing now, I guess. Some people use container tabs? I don’t.
Vivaldi and Brave have some of these features but not all of them. I never feel at home on another browser. This is the way I work every day and I like it.
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I would add:
Local translation instead of Google Translation
Better extension support, including for Ublock Origin
Better sync than Brave, which sync doesn’t work or not well on GOS
Better bookmarks than Brave
Reader view
On Android, extension support and possibility to “Open link in private window”, something Brave doesn’t have.
Better Passkey support. Making Proton Pass passkeys work on Brave is an hassle.
On Android, I can update Ironfox trough F-Droid custom repo, instead of having to use Obtainium or Aurora
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FF is terrible on Android. Bad security and does not even support client certificates nor certificate transparency.
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