This goes back many years, long before "the need to tighten the belts":

The first "user-enhancing" in-browser ads ("sponsored tiles") were introduced in 2014 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504

Pocket imposition was 2015 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126

Mr Robot stunt was 2017 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...

Cliqz tracking was 2017 https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

booking.com ads was 2018 https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...

It's easy to look at the actions of the last few years as if they are the exception, but this has been going on for a long time and Mozilla was given a slide for "reasons"

Pocket itself is a good thing, I think. As this post ( http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht... ) explains, a browser pretty much needs an external footprint on the Internet and standalone revenue to have good odds of living. Pocket is a step in that direction, if only a small one, and it fits with an overall thing about making it nicer to use the Internet.

That's a hard thing for a lot of Firefox's userbase to swallow, their dream being a pristine FOSS project essentially run as donationware. Nonfree things, monetization etc. just really don't sit well with that lot. I know, I was one of the people whining about Pocket when it was integrated into the browser and didn't see the point of it. Now? If Firefox is to live, more things like Pocket need to happen.

Opt-out keylogging in a privacy browser isn't that, though.

I consider the fact that Firefox hid the "block 3rd party cookies" setting deep in their preferences to be part of this. Acting against user interests in favor of their sugar daddy Google.

I consider all of this a consequence of the Post Eich regime at Mozilla…

Do you believe he'll continue his philosophy at Brave?

So far so good, it seems.

Perhaps (seems like it, esp compared to the abomination that Mozilla has become: a shell of its former self, laundering its previous reputation it had earned for the garbage they try to gaslight it's useds with now [esp after hollowing out servo team]) though one of these days, upstream chromium will put them through a wringer they'll have to bend over backwards for and at that point, I hope they'll move to servo despite the difficulty with the, imo, superficial feature parity of chromium (but I doubt it, because most users of browsers hardly care about how the cake is made… [they just want their usual websites to "just work"] until they do…).

> Mozilla wasn't paid for the "Mr. Robot" tie-in, Kaykas-Wolff said. "We've enjoyed a growing partnership with the show and the show's audience," he said.

TBB looks like Firefox, is that why? Kali makes appearances, too (albeit as an everyday desktop OS).

It was a cross-promotion agreement. That is payment, and it was extremely insulting that they thought users would believe they advertised a TV show in Firefox just for giggles.

> they fired the people working on core parts of the browser (Servo)

Just to clarify, Servo was never a part of Firefox. Maybe that's not what you meant, but I've seen it confused with Gecko before which is the actual browser engine used by Firefox.

And as much as I am puzzled by some of the design choices lately - for the android version of Firefox especially - I think that it would be a loss in more ways than one to lose the last (?) real alternative to the Chromium-based family of browsers.

I might be mistaken, but I thought Stylo (the CSS part of Servo) was shipped as part of Firefox in 2017.

Yes, that's true.

But Servo, to the best of my knowledge, was* an R&D project to develop an new experimental engine. The parts lifted into Firefox are now presumably maintained and developed as a part of Firefox proper.

Don't get me wrong, I was disappointed when i heard that the Servo team was laid off. We are probably missing out on new exciting things that could have come out of it. I just wanted to clarify that cutting Servo did not, as far as I know, mean that any current part of Firefox is now unmaintained or undeveloped.

* Servo is still alive and developed outside of Mozilla, I don't know if's doing well or not.

Several modules from servo have been inserted into firefox proper.

Why not Brave?