Why Mozilla's layoffs and Google deal made me rethink my browser of choice

techrepublic.com

20 points·URfejk··6 comments

The author swapped from a not-so-independent engine to one entirely google-carried. I'm not sure why that merits enough pride to write a whole article about it.

Yeah. This is something I have been seeing a lot and if you want to switch browsers, go right ahead, no one stopping you. But if you were using Firefox to avoid the browser mono-culture, Vivaldi is not helping you there.

This makes no sense. His reason for abandoning Firefox mostly boils down to, "I don't know what Mozilla will do next, and Firefox used to be slow."

It's bizarre to quit the best open-source browser (and, in my opinion, the best browser in general) because you fear... something. He's fulfilling his own prophecy.

Is slow*

Very painfully so. I also have 5 pinned tabs on a windows computer with 4GB ram,no other apps running. It comes tona crawl and needs to be rebooted every few days. Don't get me started on work related apps, try opening up half a dozen kibana searches or something similar over time.

People take existential threats seriously, but the alternative here of being beholden to Google's browser engine is just not one I want to take.

I'm sticking with Firefox until I see concretely that things are going downhill. It's unlikely that there will be an alternative at that point that's not strongly Google influenced. That's a pity.

The timing of the Google Deal and the Layoffs has me very concerned.

Adding to that concern is the fact they seemed to have laid off all the teams that were working on Advanced Browser Technologies that could lead to taking away from Chrome's market share, and signaled a shift of Mozilla OUT of the browser development market...

Leads me to wonder what the terms of the Google Deal really was...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com