I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

But the service is free. So I will watch (without ads) until it becomes paid. And then, it depends on whether the value is still there.

> Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement;

Which is why Linux is primarily corporate funded. The corporates want to sell their hardware. To sell their hardware they need to get it running on Linux, so they fund that. As hardware support constitutes most of the code contributions, most of the code that goes into Linux was because corporate actors made a decision to pay for it's development - purely in their own interests.

That's nice - this symbiosis between FOSS and corporates works well for both sides. But it's a stretch to say Linux would not exist today without it. The most you can say for certain is Linux would not have it's great hardware support without it. The BSD's don't get anything like the amount of corporate funding Linux does. They are doing fine, and notably work on common modern hardware. So could Linux even without corporate funding.

In particular, most of the interesting stuff that happens in the kernel, the stuff that determines what the kernel will look like in 10 years time, stuff like adopting Rust, is driven by people scratching itches in the FOSS tradition. Not all of it - pKVM is Google initiative. But eBPF was scratching an itch. Jens Axboe developed io_uring probably as a consequence of wanting storage to run faster at Meta - but it was definitely an itch of his. It's nice that Meta to paid him while he developed it, but saying its creation was "driven by corporate interests at Meta" is a bit of a stretch.

It's not possible to shame a group of people who can't even agree on baseline ethical issues around their profession. For every engineer who refuses to work on guided missiles or the Torment Nexus and would feel shame to do so, there's another engineer who would find it an interesting technical problem.

Safari have only 2 platforms (actually one since they share pretty much the same kernel and much of the user space code) to support vs Firefox needs to support 4 (macOS, Android, Linux and Windows). I would be surprised if Firefox was the most battery efficient browser on macOS.

> Firefox is guilty of every single thing Chrome is accused of

If you misrepresent what Chrome is "accused" of, sure. I have 0 attachment to Firefox as a permanent solution, but it's WAY better than Chrome on every issue, and the only thing Servo has over Firefox is it hasn't existed in a usable form long enough to push the same kind of updates.

If you disabled updating in Firefox today, you would have a more complete version of Servo that is just as private and secure. You may not like Mozilla as a company, but Firefox is the best tech option for open source web browsing and it's not even close. That's why browsers like Librewolf that just barely tweak Firefox are possible.

I have to address these issues, though, because your descriptions of them really bury the lede.

> It includes advertisements in the New Tab page without user consent

> It shared browsing history without user consent

> It enabled a new tracking protocol for advertisers without user consent

While the ad tracking is not great, everything you posted is opt-out. I know you take specific issue with being automatically included as "opt-in" on update, but you don't even have the option to opt-out of everything in Chrome.

> It blocked uBlock Lite from their store without notice

That was a mistake remedied very quickly. Contrast that with Chrome where Ublock is now broken. Raymond Hill is the person speaking in your link, and he still explicitly recommends Firefox in his releases.

> It's ~80% funded by Google

And? That Google has money to throw around (and most privacy zealots specifically won't fund anything) is not a mark against Firefox. There's nothing to indicate Firefox is controlled by Google, and you may be surprised to know a lot of these competitors fund each others OSS because some of the tech is critical infrastructure.

> Their main focus lately has been white-labelling dubious products

I have to ask, are you reading these links or getting them from a friend? This was also opt-out, and as soon as this information was discovered, Mozilla immediately dropped them. You make it sound like they knew about this and powered through. Should they drop their partnership with haveibeenpwned on the off-chance they might secretly own an ad company?

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.62.1b1