Why I moved away from Firefox

Why I moved away from Firefox
A quick rant nobody asked for

2020-09-02

Firefox has been my browser of choice since I remember first trying
out Linux back when I was still an elementary school student, which is
more than 15 years ago by now, given I’m closer to my 30 now than
20... There have been interruptions, e.g. I used xombrero for a year
or something (and I felt nostalgic for it for years after when it
became unusable), and I might have given Chromium a try in its earlier
days as my main browser a couple times (maybe I find a hint of that if
I dive into my HN comment history...) but throughout all those years
I’ve always been a supporter of Firefox and Mozilla, and a user for
the vast majority of that time. Yet I’ve recently decided to stop
using Firefox both on mobile and on desktop in protest of, unlike what
you’d guess from looking at the date of this post above, their
disinterest in their established userbase, liberally and repeatedly
breaking stuff, and a growing sense, a perception if you will of a
lack of sincerity in their rhetoric. Don’t get me wrong, their laying
off of ~250 people is terrible, and I’d be giving them the middle
finger right there and then, if it were not for the fact that they
also completely broke the mobile browser for me some days before that.

I don’t really intend to ramble on and on in this post, but write
everything out in a concise bulleted list format. The paragraph above
and the next one is meant to give a bit of a context. So in this next
paragraph I’ll explain the ‘last straw that broke the back of the
camel’, and then proceed onto writing a list of major problems with
Firefox and Mozilla.

I was a happy user of Firefox for Android. It had some very nifty
features around which I had built a workflow. Tab queues were a
feature where when you shared a webpage or a link to Firefox, instead
of Firefox coming into focus, the links would pile up in a queue, and
when next you opened Firefox all those would open in tabs. The tab
list could be two columns and included previews, so it was denser yet
easy to navigate. The reader mode was/is (IDK if they removed that
one too) very useful for dealing with the bullshit web pages common in
today’s web. The default view, when you went and disabled Pocket
bullshit and configured it a bit, made it very easy to navigate recent
history, bookmarks, and recently closed tabs and synced tabs. And
extensions like LeechBlock and Redirector made it easy to manage how
much time I spent browsing and automate some URL modifications in
order to deal with some censorship (Wikipedia was banned in Turkey,
and i.imgur.com still is) or skip BS like AMP links. And finally
having about:config interface handy meant that I could modify some
behaviour to accomodate my needs. Around this all I had built a
workflow where I’d read my RSS/Atom feeds in Feeder [1], push stuff to
Firefox using tab queues, when done go to Firefox and go through new
tabs, keep what’s interesting, share some stuff to Instapaper, and
make sure every tab was loaded. Having configured Firefox such that
it wouldn’t try reload pages after going to background, through
about:config, I could be sure that when I wanted to read those tabs I
kept when I’m on the subway, they’d be there despite there being no
signal. Apart from news and blogs, as an MA student in Linguistics
who’s looking forward to a career in research, it’s important that I
stay on top of not only what happened in my school (for which I wrote
scrapers that’d convert some announcements pages to RSS feeds... [2])
but also events, journal ToCs and calls for papers, and whatnot in my
field, which result in a crowded bunch of feeds requiring some work to
process. This whole setup enabled, actually, even more than that,
rendered it plausible and convenient to do all that on the go, making
good use of my commute time so that I’d do something more useful than
listening to music and staring at the ceiling for the whole hour my
usual commute to campus took. Now, that’s not really relevant thanks
to the pandemic, but still, even at the comfort of home, just piling
up tabs on my phone and grabbing them on the computer using Firefox
Sync was very convenient.

All that vanished when one morning I woke up and opened Firefox: a
completely different browser greeted me. I had heard some vague news
of some important changes regarding Android, but it was all
development stuff which I didn’t even know would be merged, so I
thought I’d wait until a beta or something announced. But no, it all
happened in the background, my browser, the thing I use everyday for
at times hours, was gone. A new thing was pushed onto me, which
frankly on first impression I found fairly pretty, but one by one I
discovered all the things I wrote about using and relying on above had
disappeared. No more tab queues. New, useless new tab page.
about:config gone. Addons gone (well, except NINE blessed ones put in
there to save face). UI was at beta quality at best. Tab previews
gone. The colourscheme made browser chrome more salient than the page
itself. Every bit of the layout changed. Many config options
removed. My workflow totally broken, without _any_ notice, and any
option to go back. It was the second time Firefox broke the entire
addons ecosystem. There and then I decided, fuck this, I’m not taking
any more of this. I’ve been with Mozilla through privacy blunders,
questionable funding decisions, questionable spending decisions,
stupid side projects, major breakages like the addonocide of FF57. I
wouldn’t take more of their bullshit. So I got rid of Firefox for
Android on my phone, moved my feeds back to Elfeed [3], switched to
Qutebrowser [4] on desktop, and went to r/firefox to rant on how I
lost all my empathy for Mozilla at that point [5].

Did I say I wouldn’t rambe on and on about this? Well, I
failed... sorry. So, if you need even more ranting, [5] is possibly
an interesting read, detailing how I /felt/ regarding Mozilla. Given
the upvotes and many comments, I’m not alone in feeling ‘taken
advantage of’, and being way less inclined to trust Mozilla on
anything. Notice also the couple trollish users in the thread that
have an answer to everything. And notice from the answers that this
is not about technical issues. Usability and usefulness is way more
important than performance or neat code. I’ll take a useful mess that
helps me get things done faster and more conveniently over what’s
ultimately become an HTML viewer with some fancy colours and delusive
calls to action around it.

So below is a list of some major problems with Mozilla and Firefox, in
no particular order.

* Mozilla has a top down structure.

Unlike what its front page or other promotional material might say,
Mozilla creates software in house and releases it. They may accept
and act on recommendations or criticism, but that’s occasional, not
the normal. It’s more cathedral than a bazaar, if I’m using that
reference correctly.

* Mozilla has a bureaucracy of C*Os and marketers &c that make the
decisions.

Somewhat similar to above, but different: decisions in Mozilla are
made by a usual corporate bureaucracy, not by the technical staff.
I’m not sure they have much leverage in the organisation TBH.

* Mozilla’s funding model is not much different from a venture backed
startup.

Mozilla lives on what Google, and to a lesser extent Yandex &c
pledges them. This essentially means that these companies, Google
especially, can discipline Mozilla however they like, and push them
around, which was made clear and proved by the recent layoffs and
deprioritisations.

* Mozilla is more interested in new users than it is in long time
loyal users.

There is a strong anti-power-user vibe in Mozilla and Firefox
communities, and with every release more stuff is locked down. The
most recent and biggest example being the slashing of addons and
especiall about:config in Firefox for Android. Mozilla seems to be
ready and willing to sacrifice its established, loyal userbase on
the altar of Chrome users. We’re seen as a nuisance [7].

* Mozilla’s actions are incompatible with their mottos and promises.

I mean their homepage title is ‘Internet for people, not profit’,
but in their last move they explicitly said they’ll focus on profit
instead. But not just that. They say Firefox is built by
community, but in fact they try to minimise community involvement.
They talk about privacy, but their products are infested with
telemetry and tracking, and they’ve had many privacy ‘blunders’
which don’t seem like totally innocent mistakes. They have flipping
Google Analytics and AdMob in the new Fenix mobile browser in
Android [8]. Not speaking of all the experiments and studies, and
all that bullshit.

* Firefox often breaks things.

The UI changes all the time. Stuff you disabled gets re-enabled
after upgrades. They broke addons once with Quantum, and showed how
they didn’t learn from their mistakes by breaking them again with
Fenix.

But not only. E.g. privacy.ResistFingerprinting breaks addons, and
nothing’s done about it. They seem to not care one bit about
breaking anything, and count on the trust of the community and lack
of alternatives in shoving it down our throats.

* User profiles are locked in to latest version.

This could be included in the above, but it’s so terrible and user
hostile that I’ll give it it’s own point. If you use Firefox 79,
and just upgraded to 80, after you run Firefox, you can’t open your
profile with Firefox 79 anymore. At least in a straightforward,
orthodox, safe way. There’s no reason for this and no reason I’ll
be naive enough to assume that this is because new stuff is
introduced and can’t be made backwards compatible, and instead
assume that this is a shitty move to force people to stay on the
newest version even if they didn’t like it.

When you have many addons and bookmarks and configs, it’s
non-trivial to just migrate to a new profile.

* Moves like acquiring Pocket and forcing it onto people alienates users.

This is both unnecessary expenses for a supposed non-profit, a bad
move ethically (a platform also owning a vendor, that’s what
monopolies made of, and it looks bad when you tout that you’re
fighting against monopoly). Also, disallowing users from removing
it from their browsers without a custom build is a dick move.

* Mozilla has made some very bad spending decisions.

The above is a special case of this, but Mozilla is squandering
money away with many useless expenses, like having a CEO or a
marketing department, getting involved in useless projects like
Firefox Hello, Firefox Send, Firefox OS, Rust, or acquiring Pocket.

Now, Rust people are very sensitive to this comment, and I
understand them. Rust seems to be a nice language, and I’m not
saying that Rust in itself is a bad project. But for a project like
Mozilla to implement a programming language from scratch and attempt
at rewriting their _huge_ codebase in a nascent programming language
is a terrible way to spend your limited resources.

I mean making coffee with freshly ground fresh single origin coffee
beans using a professional grade cold brew dripper or a syphon
brewer at home would be fabulous, but you wouldn’t go that way if
you can barely afford to put dinner on the table and/or have barely
enough time to drink your cup of coffee and relax for a few minutes,
no? I don’t get what’s so hard to understand about this that Rust
people go mad over this. It might be the best language ever, but
still a bad investment on Mozilla’s part.

* Mozilla has lost its focus and overcommitted to futile side projects.

Similarly to above, Mozilla has been draining their limited
developer time in futile side projects that detract them from the
purpose they claim to follow: internet for people. In doing so and
breaking things all the time, they’ve lost more than half of their
userbase, and are continually bleeding users away. Just look at
[9], there are a lot of different numbers, but the common thing is,
_all_ trends are _negative_. And instead of focusing on why that’s
happening and on how to revert that, they’re spending their time on
VPN startups, or rewrites, or inventing programming languages.

* In the name of simplicity or performance, useful, distinguishing
features have been removed.

As releases come and releases go, Firefox loses its unique features
that distinguish it from Chrome or Safari, and becomes more of a
‘just another browser’. Stuff like big addons like Pentadactyl and
Firebug, tab queues, a proper new tab page on mobile, proper and
noncompromising privacy, deep customisability, are big,
distinguishing features of Firefox, but as time goes on more and
more of these are becoming ‘features that were’. And if Firefox is
just another Chrome, how can you convince people to switch, or stay?

* All the above have been repetitive, consistent, despite feedback and
criticism.

Above all, Mozilla is blind and deaf to criticism, and repeats foul
behavious over and over again, and it’s made rather obvious that
many of the mistakes, misjudgements, miscommunications are in fact
intentional behaviour, and Mozilla is indeed just another SV
startup, but one which is eloquently deceptive in coating its
business in a cloud of lies about internet freedom, privacy, and
community involvement. And that business is __AD__ business. They
earn money by putting ads right in your URL bar, setting your search
engine to that of the highest bidder. And because they have a
single customer, they belong to that customer, namely Google, and we
the users are again reduced to the product, like with all the FAANG
profiteers.

I’m willing to accept that not all of this is intentional, and that
I may be exaggerating a bit in this last paragraph, and that most of
the blame is to be put on the corporate bureaucracy of Mozilla.

In this light I think that Mozilla has become an entreprise _no longer
capable_ of representing the user’s interest in the quest to take back
the web from content moguls and the ad tech rackets.

IDK what this means for the future of Firefox and the future of us the
users. I don’t think I’ll use Firefox ever again. But the elephant
in the room is the Chromium monoculture in browser development.
Frankly, with the extent of web platform today, which has surpassed
that of an entire operating system, competition is impossible. And,
competition is not that useful of a balancing tool either [10]. IMHO
one way forward is taking Blink out of the hands of Google and making
it an NGO backed independent project. But IDK how viable or possible
that is.

* * *

[1] Feeder is a FOSS feedreader app for android:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/

[2] https://gitlab.com/cadadr/hacettepe2rss,
https://cadadr.gitlab.io/hacettepe2rss/

[3] https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed, an Emacs feedreader

[4] https://qutebrowser.org/

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/i5y49c/i_feel_taken_advantage_of/,
https://www.removeddit.com/r/firefox/comments/i5y49c/i_feel_taken_advantage_of/

[6] https://www.removeddit.com/r/firefox/comments/i5pdfv/mozilla_closes_request_to_restore_full_urls_on/

[7] There was a quote citing IIRC the CEO saying something like this
explicitly but I don’t seem to be able to find a link...

[8] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12809

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

[10] Richard Wolff has a couple videos explaining how competition
leads to monopolies on his channel Democracy at Work:

- Richard Wolff on How Competition Leads to Monopolies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUo2DpKcIjM

- Wolff Responds: Monopoly is NOT the Problem; Capitalism is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfB4da4Lx8k

- AskProfWolff: Mergers & Monopolies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZX9Lfhidd0

The gist of these is that capitalist competition inevitably leads
to monopolies or oligopolies because those who win out
incorporate the talent and property of those who fail, and
conglomeration of these resources is inevitably cheaper and more
profitable for the shareholders and thus more favourable than
competition.

* * *

$Id: ff-rant.txt,v 1.2 2020/09/02 03:39:08 igk Exp $