I can't think of better words to describe my feeling as a Firefox holdout. It's still my default browser, and the one I use for 97% of my work. Mozilla is breaking my heart with their floundering. Like a fantasy author who keeps getting mired in side quests and can never get back to the main plot.

Stop with the goofy marketing tie ins, the hostile telemetry choices, the side products like Pocket and VPN, and just make a fucking browser that doesn't attempt to hide complexity from the user. Focus on that, do yearly fundraising like Wikipedia does, and be content.

Also, Firefox is the only browser I know that has end to end encrypted sync. Google and Microsoft enjoy snooping around in your bookmarks (great to determine marketing interests) too much to ever offer this. You can even self host it.

Also it still has a few power user features left over like container tabs. Though they've relegated it to a plug-in now.

Or maybe I should find a better example. But one thing about Wikipedia is that it appears to be much the same as it was 10 years ago and more. Wikipedia hasn't started introducing Wiki VPN, nor has it partnered with Mr. Robot to temporarily insert marketing stuff into articles.

To the extent that Wikimedia has graft and vanity projects, they're not ruining the core "product".

So... I guess yeah, just like Wikipedia, as in "Look, even with donations you can spend a crapton of money. Maybe not $500mm a year, but still enough to support development of an open source software product."

Privacy could be a differentiation if Mozilla did not show again and again that they don't actually care about your privacy. It might not be enough, but currently they don't even have that.