I have considered the owners and maintainers of Firefox to be malicious to the project for quite some time now. This finally cements that theory beyond any reasonable doubt.
What should we do about it?
What should we do about it?
Fork it.
But I'm not sure I agree this is malicious. Perhaps annoying and even poorly thought out, but malicious implies they are actively trying to undermine the project, rather than trying to find ways to break the project's dependence on Google but missing the mark.
I wish they'd stop wasting money on dumb projects like a VPN and instead just focus on making a fast, modern browser that respects my privacy and doesn't fucking show me ads.
I think VPN would be/hopefully will be a great escape rope for Firefox, as it fits well with their privacy orientedness, and does pay somewhat for the development costs.
They're trying to tackle the revenue issue on multiple fronts, including Mozilla VPN, a subscription "privacy pack" (that includes Mozilla VPN and upgraded versions of Firefox Relay and Firefox Monitor) and this.
Mozilla doesn't want the future of their entire organization to rest in the hands of Google, whose decisions they don't have control over (and who is also their main competitor).
and not something like their mobile OS or their social missions (like 3D VR chat and other assorted crap)
The advertising industry, which generally means the corporate owned, mass surveillance apparatus that is every authoritarians wet dream is malicious.
I have a fundamental right to see not see the content I do not want to see. I have a fundamental right to not be advertised to. Firefox has violated this right.
Firefox is a non-profit, but it needs revenue to provide that browser to users. Right now most of that revenue comes from Google (and its search suggestions, also enabled by default, I think). I'm not sure how you expect it to do its job for free, and it seems to get nothing but pushback whenever it tries to become more independent. I do not agree with all of Firefox's decisions, but to say they have "utterly failed" feels overstated.
Every decision they have made in recent memory has been in the pursuit of getting rid of user customization. Something which Firefox was originally built on. This is the reason they are hemorrhaging users.
And that's not even touching on the entire surveillance infrastructure that has been constructed in the name of advertising, which we can similarly classify as malicious.