Mozilla is making it clear that they do not care about users any more.
Firefox is full of ads, with ads being in the homepage shortcuts, the news feed and the omnibox dropdown, as well as various ads for Mozilla services throughout the UI. Their ad network is also marketed to companies as allowing them to reach adblocker users.
Mozilla’s 210M+ global users are typically hard to reach. They’re usually hidden behind ad blockers, nearly half avoid dominant social media, and most say no to default platforms. They’re selective, tech savvy, and paying attention. From: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/
Firefox is also full of tracking, with their mobile app sending data to the tracking company Adjust, and it having options for “personalised extension recommendations” and “Install and run studies”. The latter allows them to install what they want into your browser without your consent out of the box.
Their tracking protection also mostly works only in private / incognito mode by default, with tracking scripts being allowed to run in standard windows with just isolated cookies protecting you, which is not a decision that a company who actually cares about privacy would make.
Mozilla is also partnering with Perplexity, an AI search engine who wants to collect as much data as possible even outside of their app to sell “hyper personalized” ads, which is exactly who you shouldn’t work with if you claim to care about privacy. From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/
I recommend switching to Librewolf as it takes Firefox and removes this bullshit. Some other alternatives like Brave are just as bad.
Using Librewolf isn’t boycotting Firefox. Librewolf is a soft fork and is dependent on Mozilla for updates. You could switch to Ladybird or something more obscure, but I don’t think you’ll achieve much with that either.
Servo already has releases and includes mobile as well.
https://github.com/servo/servo/releases
If anyone deserves support, it’s Servo.
They have a track record for being performance focused (from when it was part of Mozilla) and aren’t right wing assholes.
Wait, what? How is Mozilla right wing? What did I miss?
Not Mozilla, Ladybird is.
Using Librewolf deprives Firefox of sponsor money, so it’s to some extent a boycott. The idea though that we need to switch to a new browser engine because we lost faith in Mozilla is a bit silly, the Gecko engine is open source so it can be stuck with even if Mozilla goes away. Just look at Pale Moon (not great security-wise, but it does exist).
Good luck finding people both capable and willing to maintain it if Mozilla abandons it.
I am saying the opposite. I explicitly said I don’t think that would achieve anything. Just because something constitutes a boycott (i.e. using a different browser engine) doesn’t mean that there’s a point to it.
Unfortunately, they’re aren’t many options in the 2025 internet browser market.
Unless something has changed, the gecko engine Firefox uses is the only distinctly different engine from Chrome, and I don’t think writing a browser engine from scratch is easy. So if the solution is to hard pivot away from Firefox entirely, I don’t know how you don’t end up using some Chrome based browser.
At least Mozilla hasn’t tried to kill adblockers like Google clearly is trying to.
Forking the codebase and stripping out any AI code is much easier than trying to invent another wheel.
I never said otherwise. I simply said that using Librewolf is not boycotting Firefox.
You know, that’s a fair point. But I think it will still be a measurable shift if people start using privacy forks of their codebase.