this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Capitalism and enshittification
Yep, it's not that Firefox is bad. It's that the people currently in charge of it are trying to be greedy assholes and operate like the greedy assholes that run other companies.
Get rid of those people or otherwise stop them from their greedy assholery and The Firefox hate would stop.
What if we tried paying them even more, instead, first...just to be sure we tried everything?
I want to believe it's possible for a viable browser to be built purely out of altruism. Such an endeavor would require, ironically, a steady stream of income to ensure that the developers are well compensated and are not burdened by, you know, hunger and lack of shelter.
Firefox has had a good run but it's clear that they are chasing cash at the cost of alienating their most dedicated users. The sad thing is that I suspect they've done the math and predict they will gain more users than lose them.
The harsh reality is that browsers are expensive to build. They are the literal portals to our digital lives and it's becoming harder to isolate and anonymize our online lives.
Hell, I'd love to see a Linux distro take this on. Can you imagine if a heavyweight like CentOS or Linux Mint took on the project to build a browser from the ground up?
Linux Mint lists 11 people in their GitHub org. There's likely additional outside contributors, but that's the core team. In the Cinnamon repo, only 5 people have changed more than 1000 lines of code in the last two years.
I expect CentOS to have even less contributors, as they largely just repackage what Fedora does.
Mozilla has around 750 employees, most of which are fulltime devs.
Like, man, I don't want to kill your optimism, but we're talking an order of magnitude difference at least.
Or in short, capienshit.