I have used firefox for a long time. Their continued insistence on forced automatic updates is quickly becoming a deal a breaker. Even putting aside my philosophical objections to this practice (let me update my software when I want on my own damn machine), it is exceptionally frustrating when those updates with forced restarts perpetually occur in the middle of the workday.

On Linux Firefox gets updated the same way as any other package, which almost always gives you more manual control than this.

I suppose I'm saying this is a complaint about macOS and/or Windows, rather than about Firefox as such ;)

You can disable app updates and avoid the update notification by using enterprice policies (sounds complicated but is just a policies.json file).

Even more so when you know that Edge uses Chromium under the hood, which would defeat the purpose of this exercise.

I don't think Microsoft left any Google tracking, and Chromium is an open source project

The problem I have is not the tracking, but Google’s dominance of the browser market. They can (and do) push through efforts that mostly benefit Google, and their ability to keep everyone inside the Google ecosystem.

In other words, tracking is not the only evil thing they’re doing.

I suggest using brave instead others because it doesn’t advertise and blocks a lot of trackers and ads !

because the impending layoffs that mozilla is incurring in light of covid means it's very bad for development and bug tracking. i've been using firefox for several years and that part is kinda worrying.