>>> Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive.
Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.
It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.
Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.
By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.