There's another angle here I think you are missing

> If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel?

It's because it's not enough to be wrong about something (according to certain people), but you must be punished for being wrong. And narcissists can't handle a company not being "100% right" so they punish them by going to their competitors, with no regard if their competitor is objectively worse for their causes. The intent is to cause harm to get your own way.

How about Brave as a Chromium-based alternative to Firefox that isn't worse for the cause?

That would require nuanced discussion. We can't have that! (Kidding aside, I happily use Brave because I find Firefox borderline unusable, but also find Google's tactics unpalatable.)

The larger issue is there shouldn't be a war. There should be as many browsers as people have the hearts desire to create, and it shouldn't matter because they all follow the same standards.

However, in the real world, we've seen the noble goal of open standards get tarnished by the same bullying corporatist tactics. What we need is open and democratic standards, not just a few voices in the room running the show.

But browsers are by nature an engineering project several level divorced from hardware. There is no natural law demanding that they have to be democratic. Ultimately somebody has to foot the bill for their development time. C++ developers are not exactly a scarce commodity yet you don't see any major governments willing to fund browser development despite it being a critical piece of infrastructure. "Professional services" companies like IBM, Deloitte, Oracle, Accenture, get paid hundreds of millions to billions a year to build CRUD software for the public sector. Maybe it is time to redirect some of those funding to more useful purposes.

This post touches on the 'other' issue with Firefox - the various user unfriendly features that cause friction when using it. I want to love Firefox, but my time is valuable and using Brave instead saves time and frustrations, vs Firefox.

I'm pretty sure these subtle but numerous usability issues are on purpose from up high, because the usability could be fixed so easily. Still Google isn't paying 95% of Mozilla's and Moz's executives bills for them to beat Chrome, but rather to provide a lightning rod for monopoly concerns. From Google's point of view it's a bonus that it wastes the time of the market segment that cares about open systems!

Agreed -- Brave takes all those proprietary APIs for things like bookmark synchronization and does them in a distributed way without hitting third party servers. This is the way forward. I have 10 devices on my sync chain and it works great!

Can you install extensions on Brave for Android?

The best I could find is the "false-signaling theory of hypocrisy": social psychology research which demonstrates that "people judge hypocrites negatively-even more negatively than people who directly make false statements about their morality" [1]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28107103/

> So someone who claims strict moral integrity and then falls short of that is seen as less trustworthy than someone who is upfront about being shady and then surprisingly acts less shady than expected.

I don't think this effect exists at all. Google broke "don't be evil" and people still massively choose to use Google services as if nothing ever happened.

I'd say it's more about other groupings we simultaneously apply to members of the browser group.

Mozilla has to live up to ethics norms we assume for nonprofits in the free software domain which might be Apache or FSF? Google has to live up to UX(?) norms for corporate tech giants, maybe MS and Apple?

Interesting take. But then, I'm old enough to remember the times when Google's motto was simply "Don't be evil."

Killing people's browser sync / safe-browsing / search suggestions / spell-checking / etc is pure evil.

Throw the anti-trust book at them. Make them spin-off YouTube and the rest of the alphabet (ha!).

I would think it is an excuse to just use chromium, because this is what the person actually prefers, but his ideology(or peer group) tells him or her to use FF.

Firefox laid off the majority of their security teams last year. I don’t trust Google but I trust Firefox less.

False.

(I am a Mozilla employee)

This is what I know about what happened there:

There were two enterprise IT teams with similar duties but different purviews. When management was deciding on layoffs, they decided to unify those two teams. Unfortunately that meant that there were redundancies.

My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs, and they have every right to be upset.

But the inferences being made as a result of the resulting tweets just weren't true: this notion that all security teams were wiped out is false. And there are now others assigned to threat management.

Furthermore, the security teams that work on Gecko and Firefox were left mostly if not entirely intact.

I work on security hardening for Gecko on Android, and I’m still here. So is our entire hardening/sandboxing team: https://twitter.com/gcpascutto/status/1293519587967983616

TL;DR: Don’t base your understanding of an organization’s capabilities off of one tweet.