Mozilla is making it clear that they do not care about users any more.
Firefox is full of ads, with ads being in the homepage shortcuts, the news feed and the omnibox dropdown, as well as various ads for Mozilla services throughout the UI. Their ad network is also marketed to companies as allowing them to reach adblocker users.
Mozilla’s 210M+ global users are typically hard to reach. They’re usually hidden behind ad blockers, nearly half avoid dominant social media, and most say no to default platforms. They’re selective, tech savvy, and paying attention. From: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/
Firefox is also full of tracking, with their mobile app sending data to the tracking company Adjust, and it having options for “personalised extension recommendations” and “Install and run studies”. The latter allows them to install what they want into your browser without your consent out of the box.
Their tracking protection also mostly works only in private / incognito mode by default, with tracking scripts being allowed to run in standard windows with just isolated cookies protecting you, which is not a decision that a company who actually cares about privacy would make.
Mozilla is also partnering with Perplexity, an AI search engine who wants to collect as much data as possible even outside of their app to sell “hyper personalized” ads, which is exactly who you shouldn’t work with if you claim to care about privacy. From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/
I recommend switching to Librewolf as it takes Firefox and removes this bullshit. Some other alternatives like Brave are just as bad.
We need to fork Firefox and fund enough developers to make it viable as a standalone project that’s not just a laggy, disenshittified version of Firefox. It has been done with LibreOffice and CoMaps, so theoretically it is possible.
A browser is a while different beast. Firefox has half as many lines of code as the Linux kernel, just for comparison. Security must be topnotch since the that model is to treat the website as if it is already malicious. Even with all of Firefox’s developers, it lags behind Chromium in sandboxing/isolation and exploit mitigations.
Ultimately any realistic Firefox fork needs to at least halve the size of the codebase so that it’s maintainable. Or move the unmaintainable code into a “use at your own risk, only on trusted sites” box.