So, this is a somewhat sad moment, as FireFox used to be the one browser that was not actively trying to sell you out and that used to be all about free speech. Now that is no longer the case, and it’s time to see FireFox out as my browser.

Some context: While FireFox is an open source browser, it is being developed by full time paid developers. And this kind of development costs money, so some kind of revenue has to be generated to cover the costs. It started with the Google search deal, but over the years, FireFox has added a lot of services not core to the browser to add to that revenue stream. And now that Google will likely be ordered to end the search deal, that has gotten more urgent. Unfortunately the extra services added to FireFox have never been very successful, so the search deal was always the main source of income for Mozilla. So then Mozilla turned to the one thing which it shouldn’t have, and that is turning FireFox into an advertising platform. And that is where Mozilla began with going down the path of selling out its users. And, as we all know, ad companies are about selling user data, no exceptions. So it came as little surprise then that eventually, Mozilla would start selling you data outright. And that is where we have come to now.

But there is another thing which Mozilla poured a lot of money into, and that was their efforts to spread woke ideology. Mozilla has been very vocal about all kinds of things not related to freedom of speech in its advocacy. Much of this can be categorised as the extreme-left woke ideology, covering matters like gender equality, racism, pay gap discrimination and the like. Nothing of this relates to free speech. Over time this has even started to eat up a lot of money. It ate up as much, if not more than, the budget allocated to the development of FireFox!

Recently Mozilla changed the ToS, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They forbade users to do things which conflicted with their woke ideology and they included a claim to rights in regard to all the data processed through FireFox. They tried to weasel out of it by gaslighting the people who objected. Of course, that is a huge red flag. And thus there is no other choice than to part ways. FireFox is now officially an evil company.

So, what now? For now I’ll use LibreWolf, a privacy focused fork of FireFox. My hope is that Ladybird is all that it is touted to be and will be privacy friendly, but that remains to be seen.